The future really can be explained

Is the end of free speech a natural solution to the hatred shared online?

Is the end of free speech a natural solution to the hatred shared online?

In March 2019, a shooter entered a New Zealand mosque and murdered 51 people as they began afternoon prayers.

A month later, seven assailants bombed churches and luxury hotels in Sri Lanka, resulting in the deaths of 257.

Though they happened for very different reasons, the attacks shared the common goal of spreading terror. Their ideologies may not have been born on the internet but they were amplified by it.

The Christchurch attacker made use of far-right in-jokes and memes that feature heavily on online image boards like 4chan. Isis, which claimed responsibility for the Sri Lanka attacks, recruit the majority of their followers online with content designed to look good on social media.




That’s not to mention countless other transgressions that have been uniquely internet – YouTube-radicalisation, Facebook-facilitated genocide, hateful DMs on Twitter, Gamergate, Pizzagate, QAnon. And that’s just scratching the surface.

The internet has a problem with hate speech. So wouldn’t it be easier to just turn it all off? Would limiting what people can say really stop the hate?

Time to shut it all off?

In the days following the attack, the Sri Lankan government tried.

They shut down social media – Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Viber – for eight days. But wholesale shutdowns have unintended consequences.

‘You don’t just end up scooping up the violent communications, but also essential public interest information that individuals might need to know,’ says Jodie Ginsberg, CEO of Index On Censorship.

‘It’s a very blunt tool response that often ends up potentially causing more harm than it does good.’

Sri Lanka isn’t the first, or even the worst, offender when it comes to internet shutdowns.

In India in 2018, authorities shutdown the internet more than 100 times, according to human rights non-profit Freedom House.

‘It frequently happens around times of elections or major public events and it’s certainly on the increase,’ Ginsberg says.

‘During the recent riots, for example, in the protests in Zimbabwe. We’ve seen it used in South America and across Africa, and I think it will only rise.’

Even in the UK, where there is relatively little overt censorship, internet shutdown isn’t unheard of – TfL turned off all underground WiFi when Extinction Rebellion protesters planned to disrupt services last month.

British Transport Police said it was done ‘in the interests of safety and to prevent and deter serious disruption to the London Underground network’.

So how much free speech do we really have and how is it protected?

Censorship closer to home

It’s not a new idea. George Orwell warned against it in 1984 half a century ago after Hitler and Stalin’s regimes during World War II.

A year before Orwell published his book, and again in response to the war, 48 countries voted to pass the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

It’s there, in Article 19, that ‘the right to freedom of opinion and expression’ is supposedly protected.

This inspired legislature across the world, including Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which is similarly supposed to protect freedom of expression in the UK – with exceptions.



‘There is not just one hate speech, there are different types,’ Barbora Bukovská, director of law and policy at free speech charity Article 19, says.

‘There’s incitement to violence, violent discrimination, incitement to genocide.

‘Under international law this is perfectly legitimate and actually obligatory on the government to restrict but then there is a lot of legalised speech which is problematic for social cohesion.’

It’s this technically legal speech that has seen the fiercest debate and greatest social discord.

From Tommy Robinson defenders to Julian Assange supporters, anti-racism activists to university safe space campaigners, the ability to say what you want has never been under such criticism.

The symbol of tape over the mouth has been used by Tommy Robinson to say he is being silenced. Unrelated, tape over the mouth was also used in a Nazi propaganda post in 1928, though people have made comparisons.

Here’s a Nazi propaganda poster of Hitler complaining he does not have free speech from 1928. Next to him is Tommy Robinson in 2018. pic.twitter.com/6zpFA2KfHG — Hasan Patel 🌹 (@CorbynistaTeen) August 4, 2018

But harmful content online often has real world consequences offline.

In 2017, Molly Russell, a 14-year-old girl, died by suicide.

Investigators found that she had viewed extensive self-harm content on Instagram.

It’s these real world consequences – hate crimes, election interference, genocides, self-harm – that led to the government finally sitting up and taking notice.

Can legislation change things?

The government’s Online Harms white paper seeks to crack down on both illegal and harmful legal content by strong-arming internet companies into self-policing.

‘Online hate and abuse can stop people from expressing themselves freely,’ Margot James, minister for digital and creative industries, says.

‘A safer online environment will help protect free speech, by renewing public confidence and trust in online companies and services.’


While the government have acknowledged their Online Harms proposal is not yet final, many are skeptical at their claim it will not lead to an over-removal of lawful speech or limit participation in public debate.

‘One of the major challenges is around the way that harms are defined,’ said Ginsberg.

‘[The government] haven’t been able to come up with a definition of harm sufficiently narrow that it wouldn’t end up threatening legal speech.’

For many, the freedom of expression versus hate speech debate can feel at once too big and too personal – not to mention exhausting.

How could people take matters into their own hands?

‘One thing people can do is to challenge the platforms and appeal against the removal of content,’ said Amy Shepherd, policy officer at Open Rights Group, a digital rights NGO.

‘[They can] push the platforms into improving their processes, by showing that people want them and are individually affected by the decisions being made.’

Though they now face government pressure, big tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter have been looking for their own solutions to harmful content.

A technological solution?

With 300 million photos being uploaded to Facebook each day, employing enough human moderators is a near-impossible task.

In attempting to solve their problems, Facebook and other tech platforms have turned to artificial intelligence. But success has been mixed.

While small, specific programs have worked, like dating app Bumble’s genital detector, larger scale automated moderation has not been as successful, such as the Christchurch attacker’s livestream circulating widely for hours after the attack on both YouTube and Facebook, despite the networks’ best efforts.


Facebook promised to explore restrictions on live-streaming in the wake of the attack. YouTube said it took a number of steps to make sure any footage of the violence was ‘automatically rejected’.

And AI is supposed to act as a first defence against harmful content, sifting through content quickly before it can be harmful.

‘AI can’t be used perfectly,’ says Shepherd.

‘It can’t distinguish parody or sarcasm, bits of nuance and humanity – it just is not capable of deciding between content.’

Even aside from its problems with nuance, critics argue there are more fundamental problems with AI.

‘It’s rarely the case that simply by censoring people from saying those things, you actually tackle the underlying ideologies,’ says Jodie Ginsberg.

The big picture

Freedom of speech and censorship have been debated endlessly in courts of law for decades. While there may be room for improvement in restricting what people can say, margins are increasingly small.

‘What we don’t want to lose, because we are so desperate to find a solution quickly and urgently to deal with unpleasant speech online, is the ability to hold politicians and others to account online,’ says Ginsberg.

‘That’s a key part of our democratic process.’

So if free speech can’t be lost but hate speech has to be moderated, what’s the compromise? For many experts, the power now lies in the hands of the platforms.

‘It’s always a very tricky situation,’ says Amy Shepherd of Open Rights Group (ORG).

‘This is where [ORG] would call for increased efforts of platforms in terms of content moderation. It’s a part of the process for platforms to deal with hate speech online where it passes a threshold of illegality.’

If that’s the case, then it’s the big social platforms, not the police, who hold the power in what is and what isn’t free speech.

But could what we do and don’t say online actually sort itself out over time?

‘The idea that we can broadcast every thought and action to the entire world is a relatively new concept, and we are adjusting to that’ says Ginsberg.

‘We will start to make societal adjustments for how we use social media, what we communicate and how we communicate.

‘We won’t choose to broadcast out every thought and feeling all the time and will be less tolerant of the people that do.’

The Future Of Everything This piece is part of Metro.co.uk's series The Future Of Everything. From OBEs to CEOs, professors to futurologists, economists to social theorists, politicians to multi-award winning academics, we think we had the future covered, away from the doom-mongering or easy Minority Report references. Every week, we explained what's likely (or not likely) to happen. Talk to us using the hashtag #futureofeverything. Though the series is no longer weekly, if you think we might have missed something vital to the future, get in touch: hey@metro.co.uk or Alex.Hudson@metro.co.uk Read every Future Of Everything story