Facebook funds initiative against hate speech online

Facebook is financing a new campaign to analyse and tackle a drastic rise in uninhibited hate speech on the social network and the wider internet amid Europe’s growing migration crisis.

With 27 million German users in Berlin, Facebook has agreed to fund 200 network monitors in Berlin to identify, analyse and, if necessary, delete posts to the network of a radical, racist or xenophobic nature.

The new Berlin operation takes over from a small team in Dublin that, critics say, was overwhelmed by daily demands to examine and act on thousands of posts flagged by European Facebook users as problematic.

In addition Facebook has announced a €1 million fund for an “Online Civil Courage Initiative”, to develop new ways to interact with people online and offer “counter speech” to online hate speech.

“With this new initiative, we can better understand and respond to the challenges of extremist speech on the internet,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, in Berlin.

Growing criticism

The partnership with non-governmental organisations is Facebook’s answer to growing criticism, including from Germany’s federal justice ministry, that the company was not doing enough to counteract extremist rhetoric and xenophobia.

At a Berlin press conference Ms Sandberg insisted that Facebook was not a place for the dissemination of hate speech or incitement to violence. However, she insisted that mass deletion of problematic posts tackled the symptom but not the cause of online hate speech.

Thus it is bankrolling the Online Civil Courage Initiative, to be operated by three institutions, including Berlin’s high-profile Amadeu Antonio Foundation.

Foundation head Anetta Kahane welcomed the initiative as an overdue attempt to tackle a phenomenon that is as familiar as it is under-researched.

“First we have to understand this, then come up with clever, original and funny ways of tackling it,” she said. “Deleting and lecturing won’t work, nor can you fight hate with hate.”

Ms Kahane hopes to work with Berlin’s thriving hacker scene, engineering new ways of targeting extremist groups – and their Facebook followers – with challenging messages and information.

Net against Nazis

Two years ago Germany’s “Net against Nazis” initiative flooded the Facebook page of the neo-Nazi NPD with photos and messages.

There is a growing urgency in Germany to tackle the flood of online hate speech, in particular directed at the 1.1 million people who arrived last year in Germany seeking asylum.

Facebook has become the platform of choice for incitement by neo-Nazi groups and is a crucial organisational tool of the Islamophobic group Pegida. The social network was a crucial channel for spreading news of the New Year’s Eve attacks in Cologne, but also of unconfirmed and often untrue reports about asylum seekers.

The new initiative wants to develop the idea of "counter speech", and Facebook has created a platform – facebook.com/onlinecivilcourage and #civilcourage – to collect ideas of using online networks intelligently against hate speech. "The initiative for civil courage will be up and running in six months," said Mr Peter Neumann of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, and leader of the initiative.