Should social media ban offensive comments?
British MP Luciana Berger is calling for Twitter Inc. to block anti-Semitic language from the site after she received thousands of hateful messages.
Berger, the shadow Minister for Public Health, has been the target of online abuse for several months after Garron Helm, a 21-year-old internet troll, was jailed for sending her anti-Semitic messages.
Helm tweeted at Berger with messages like “Hitler was right” and called her a “Communist Jewess.”
“At the height of the abuse, the police said I was the subject of 2,500 hate messages in the space of three days using the hashtag ‘filthyjewbitch’,” Berger told The Telegraph. “Online hate needs to be taken as seriously as offline hate – but it isn’t.”
Twitter has recently improved its anti-harrassment tools to allow users to more easily report abuse, and the company promised to provide faster response times in taking action against caustic individuals.
But Berger is unsatisfied with the micro-blog’s solutions, saying that the site took over a week to remove some of the hateful comments. Berger said that even when messages were removed, Twitter’s approach was “sporadic and very haphazard.”
“Twitter’s response isn’t good enough,” Berger said “It has a responsibility to do more to protect its users. The site is letting me and many others down who have been the subject of lots of hate… It could start by proactively banning racist words which aren’t allowed to [be] printed in newspapers or broadcast on TV that could never be used in a positive way – such as kike – a derogative and anti-Semitic term for describing a Jew.”
Illegal abuse or protected free speech?
The United Kingdom has stricter laws regarding online harassment than most U.S. states, with the possibility of jail time for particularly abusive individuals. Several states in the U.S. have made similar efforts to curtail online abuse, especially in regard to cyber bullying against minors, but such laws frequently spur free speech debates.
A recent case heard by the Supreme Court involves a man who was jailed for threatening to harm his wife and others in Facebook posts styled as rap lyrics.
The case has gained widespread attention for calling into question what role the government should play in policing messages sent via social media.
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