The slippery problem of policing hate on the internet

Who gets to decide what constitutes hate?

Policing the internet.
(Image credit: Maksim Kabakou / Alamy Stock Photo)

When my septuagenarian father first started to use the internet a decade ago, he was amazed at the wealth of content, the sheer endlessness of it — until he read the comments. "Anyone can just say anything they want to?" he asked me incredulously after scrolling underneath a YouTube video. I explained to him that this was both the up- and downside of the new medium: In reducing the barriers to having a platform, inevitably, things both brilliant and awful would make their way there. He understood, but remained disheartened.

For a time, the giants that began to dominate digital — the Googles, Facebooks, and Twitters of the world — allowed and even encouraged this neutral approach to content. But no longer, it seems. This week, after the horrific events in Charlottesville in which a counter-protester was killed by someone with white nationalist links, tech companies began cutting off their services to some racist web sites. Now, we are deeper into the murky waters of having corporations policing speech — and with it, it seems likely we will have to confront the specter of regulating the internet.

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Navneet Alang

Navneet Alang is a technology and culture writer based out of Toronto. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, New Republic, Globe and Mail, and Hazlitt.