Social media platforms should not be used as a scapegoat for the rise in hate speech online because they only mirror what society already feels, a Facebook representative said on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Blaming social media platforms for this would be unfair, as their main purpose was to encourage freedom of expression, director of public policy for Facebook\u2019s Africa division Ebele Okobi said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are mirrors of what society actually is. And as everyone knows, if you walk up to a mirror and you don\u2019t like what you see, you can walk away from it. You can break the mirror but it doesn\u2019t change the fact of what remains,\u201d Okobi said.<\/p>\n
She was addressing a hearing into racism and social media, hosted by the SA Human Rights Commission in Johannesburg on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The hearing, which continues on Thursday, is gathering submissions from policy makers, regulatory bodies, civil society organisations, academics, and researchers.<\/p>\n
It is not aimed at investigating particular cases, but intended to arrive at a better understanding what constitutes online hate speech.<\/p>\n
The SAHRC wants the public, government and companies such as Facebook to take some responsibility for their roles and come up with solutions on how to deal with hate speech.<\/p>\n
SAHRC chairperson advocate Bongani Majola, commissioner Angie Makwetla and former Constitutional Court judge Albie Sachs, asked Okobi whether Facebook could regulate some of the content on its platform, such as use of the word \u201ck****r\u201d before it is published.<\/p>\n
They asked if the platform\u2019s administrators could help track down a person who had posted something hateful online using a bogus account.<\/p>\n
Okobi said it would be difficult to track what all 1.8 billion of its users were posting online each day. The way it was created did not allow for users\u2019 information to go through a checking or editing process before being published.<\/p>\n
The only way Facebook staff would know if anything hurtful or offensive was posted would be if another user reported it to the site, she said.<\/p>\n
The site had a set of \u201cglobal community standards\u201d which prohibit threats of violence, harassment, and bullying.<\/p>\n
The positive aspect of not regulating content was that it encouraged people to talk about matters they often felt too uncomfortable to discuss with others face to face, she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou want to make sure that that speech is not speech that makes it an uncomfortable platform to be on, but I think all societies owe it to themselves, owe it to citizens, to look at why that speech is happening.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said Facebook, government and the public could help start an honest conversation about what was happening in the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes that dialogue is going to awaken hurts that people thought were gone, but I think that that type of constructive dialogue is critical in building a society that actually works.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that\u2019s true here in South Africa and it\u2019s also true in other places in the world where we are having some of these conversations,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n