Elizabeth G Olson
The World Wide Web site of a group called the Charlemagne Hammerskins opens with an image of an armed, masked man beside a swastika. A click on a button below labelled “Access for sub-humans” yields a picture of an apparent concentration camp, captioned: “Be assured, we still have many one-way tickets for Auschwitz.”
The site – one of a number – was carried by America Online’s French service until this month, when it was closed by administrators who decided its content was offensive. But the site soon reappeared on a server in Canada.
The skinhead site is hardly the only one vilifying various ethnic groups – most often, but not exclusively, blacks and Jews. The hatred exists independent of any technology and occurs in all media. Indeed, the pictorial material is drawn mainly from the print media
But a November conference in Geneva, sponsored by the United Nations Human Rights Centre, wrestled with how to apply European hate-speech laws to this new medium.
Michael Schneider, head of a body representing German Internet service providers, argued that Internet Service providers could not control content – “They are nothing more than carriers.” However Debra Guzman, director of the American Human Rights Information Network, called the Internet “a utopia for all kinds of hate groups … targeting teenage males”.
Agha Shahi of Pakistan, the meeting’s chair, said sites promoting racism violated a global treaty signed by 148 countries . The United States is a signatory, but has said it will not pass laws infringing free speech.
Conference members worried how to balance human rights and information technology. The divergent histories of the United States, with its tradition of free-speech guarantees, and of Europe, made wary by World War II genocide and recent Balkan ethnic strife, were evident in the debate.
Marc Knobel, a Paris-based researcher who monitors Web sites for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, estimates that the number of hate sites has nearly doubled to 600 in the last year; he has catalogued 300. He counts 87 neo-Nazi sites, 35 white supremacist and 51 espousing terrorism.
It is often impossible to determine who is responsible for hate sites. Border-jumping and changing service providers allow the hate surfers to evade responsibility and keep reopening their sites. – New York Times