thank you thanks for having me so a few years ago I signed up on Twitter because I thought this would be a great platform to write about daily things and to voice my political opinion so from day to day I would write about politics about society and was just another time when I went on Twitter to write about rape culture and sexism in our society tweeting business is usual at least that's what I thought because when I opened up my notifications they kind of exploded one man used racial slurs to insult me another one fantasized
about locking me up in a basement and I should get eaten other people fantasize about me getting raped and some person even told me that I should go and kill myself rape culture rape fantasies and racial slurs this is what i got when i voiced my opinion about sexism in our society i didn't really go online for a couple days because I felt mentally and physically exhausted by these attacks it was the first time and it certainly wasn't the last time that I was confronted with hate speech and this case really wasn't a single case
it happens to everybody who speaks out for just society here now today and every day my name is Neely I'm a journalist I work in political education with a focus on anti-racism and feminism I've write and i do media research I look at hateful phenomena from an academic perspective but also because I've been the victim myself and today I want to talk about hate speech and why it's not an online phenomenon but that it's made from society so usually if I would talk about hate speech people would just say yeah I mean that's just the
nature of the Internet right the myth goes that people just like to hide behind their anonymous avatars behind their usernames all that haters are just like lonely losers they'd like to hide in their basements with nothing better to do and today with this talk I want to dismantle all these assumptions I want to show you why hate speech is actually a phenomenon from society and not from the internet because if we look at it like this it would make the internet and like isolated entity which it actually isn't and at the beginning I think it's
important to define what hate speech actually means because this term gets thrown around whenever we want to discuss about the current online debate climate and hate speech kind of became an internet buzz word such as like Bitcoin or fake news or BOTS all of this and I would say that whenever we want to engage in a discussion the only proper way is constructive criticism because it's too respectful and you can imagine that like this it's pretty much of a scale and the further it goes the worse it gets at the beginning that's still functional then
it becomes dysfunctional in the end it becomes totally toxic and yeah like I said constructive criticism is the only proper way to discuss and everything after this gets worse and then there comes after constructive criticism and constructive criticism and the difference between those two is that constructive criticism is at least still respectful so somebody would write a constructive comment it would say well I guess this video was ok but in my opinion a few points were missing and then there's unconstructive criticism on constructive comments that will just say yeah this video was completely stupid something
like this after that there comes trolling and I really want to distinguish hate speech and trolling because those two get mixed up a lot like usually it's just one big first but we have to make clear I have to be clear at this point that trolls are there to disrupt they want to make a fuss they want to make trouble but they usually don't really use discriminatory language if they use discriminatory language it actually becomes hate speech so let's define hate speech now hate speech always has a political dimension and it can include racism sexism
homophobia basically any form of discrimination it aims at attacking social groups like minorities and the human dignity and online it aims at attacking those people so that they would delete their accounts drowning out their voices and in the end making them invisible so actually it's no coincidence that women black people people of color members of the LGBTQ community get attacked and this is also the link between hate speech and right-wing populists or even far-right ideology because in that worldview those people get deemed less worthy they get vilified and therefore they get attacked I as a
woman of color I know what discrimination meant before I entered the Internet but online it is even more visible it is even louder and at this point I want to tell you that you don't even have to be well-known or even famous to get attack online who you are how you look like and what you stand for all these things can be enough to get attacked and for me all it took was just an opinion on sexism in our society and a Twitter account and I saw myself in the midst of hate storm and at
this point you might be asking yourself what does this have to do with me and my life you might not be a member of minority group and maybe you never wrote a comment on the internet before but first of all even if you're not really affected by discrimination you should still be upset about it and secondly the hate we see expressed online comes from the midst of society just think about brexit the 2016 elections in the u.s.a are also election numbers that are rising for right-wing populist parties here in europe right-wing populism is on a
rise we see an increase in hate crimes we see an increase in discrimination far right and anti-democratic talking points are getting accepted more and more and if we don't act it would mean that a society that is kind of free in self-determine would be under attack and I'd say that we really shouldn't take this Society for granted and at this point I guess nobody here in this audience really asked for this responsibility and I have to say yeah instead of talking about hate speech and why it's a product of a society right now I would
rather discuss why I'm so disappointed by the current season of Game of Thrones oh I don't know how to make the perfect vegan burger something like this I guess we can all think of way better things to do but here now our society really consists of hateful voices and if we don't act they will so this hate we see expressed online it translates from society into the internet because well the internet is not a digital vacuum it's actually yeah like a sphere of life and I want you to remember whenever we talk about online hate
speech now that you know this is a product of a society that's becoming more toxic and not of the big evil internet but of course we have to remember that people can also radicalize through the internet this is the thing too but I say that we must strengthen civic society and every part of our life to fight this ongoing political backlash and here today I'm on this stage because I want to give you some advice on what you can do against hate speech so the first thing I'd say is click that reporting button because as
I told you hate speech usually has a discriminatory element so that's why it shouldn't really remain online and that's why platforms should take the responsibility to delete hate speech but they usually just don't that means the hate speech remains online and that's why we all here have to step in and I want to give you some tips on what you can do show solidarity this is very important because if you see that there are some hate comments targeted at one person directly just reach out and ask how this person feels just write a write positive
comments and write a private message ask how the person feels I got everything if everything's okay you can bark you can report write other more positive comments then and also you could maybe take some screenshots in case the person wants to take legal actions talk back encounter this is probably the most important thing I want to tell you here today I would say that it's really difficult to reach out to discuss with people that are so far drenched in their hate already it's really difficult to reach them it's really difficult to discuss because they usually
don't want to like exchange thoughts their hateful already and at this point you might ask myself yeah but why should I write comments if I'm not discussing with the person then well at this point I would like to ask a question so who here frequently reads the comment sections just give me a short sign ok like some people alright and who frequently writes comments yeah almost nobody and this is what I wanted to show you with that because we need to talk back and counter to activate the quiet bystanders you just saw there were a
handful of people saying yeah I don't read the comments and other people like I think it was two of you said that they that you're writing comments that means that we read it we're quiet we're the bystanders and those people have to be activated if we write positive comments we're aiming to reach out to those people because maybe they really didn't decide yet what to think and that's why we have to engage in counter speech and also because uncommon hate online it just looks like one opinion within a political spectrum although it really isn't so
that's why we have to do counter speech another tip is don't tackle hate with hate we're on line to bring some balance into this comment sections and it doesn't really make sense to be hateful against hateful people and also you really shouldn't repeat those claims because this would just help spreading them that's why it's not the best idea to do that point out the hate I think that's important because again for the quiet bystanders for the readers they might just go through it and if there's somebody saying well actually this comment is pretty racist this
would help to activate other people just to make clear this is not a normal comment it's not an opinion it's actually hate speech don't tolerate zero tolerance that is a piece of advice that I want to give you so you can just say I'm not okay with this kind of language I'm not okay with this discriminatory language and you can also write something like I'm sure I'm not the only one that thinks that this little comment is not okay and this would aim at activating the other speakers the other readers to be smarty pants this
comment just means that you should always have some good arguments some sources too because I know it can be so so difficult to stay rational within an emotional discussion but it is important that you can just write some comments and are positive and some facts that you have some facts to against those like Falls and hateful statements and then my last tip is you should like and post memes and gifts because I know it can be very difficult to get online and write some positive comments I think nobody's like yeah I'm gonna write those comments
and maybe I will get into a hateful storm - yay nobody really wants this I get it but if you're if you don't want to write anything you can at least like the already exist an existing positive comments you can post some nice memes you can post some nice gifts just like this one I really like - yeah and I think and I hope that at this point you might realize why it is important to counter speech because if you ignore hate speech online it just means that you're ignoring hateful movements within our society right
now and I can imagine that all of these things would just feel like fighting some symptoms but we actually have to start somewhere and I think that we're far away from a society that is free from discrimination and where we can be who we are without any fear but that doesn't really mean that we should give up on fighting for society that we want to live in and by that I would say stand up speak up for the society you want to see and by that I don't only mean the ones that are affected by
discrimination I mean everybody who thinks that well fundamental human rights and respect shouldn't really be up for debate thanks for listening to this TEDx talk [Applause]
