Politics, hatspeach and social networks

Recently in Britain, a 43-year-old man was convicted for making racist comments on Facebook about the players of the national team. They gave me 3.5 months of probation, plus I was ordered to undergo some kind of rehabilitation courses for racists, to comply with the curfew for 40 weeks (with electronic surveillance) and to pay a fine compensation of 100 pounds. The insidious criminal justified himself by the fact that he was stoned at the time of the terrible crime, and in general he quickly deleted his comments when he saw a negative reaction. One can imagine how many racist comments are regularly posted online, but for some reason only a few cases make it to court. They might not have paid attention to deleted comments, if not for one "but".

A couple of months ago Boris Johnson, the hope of the New Conservatives and the current Prime Minister, was tearing up about racist insults to football players, online harassment and the like. He suggested tougher punishments for these outrages, but the most important thing is to fine these damn American social networks that allow such outrages. In May of this year, the British government announced that it plans to pass new laws allowing Facebook and other twitters to be fined up to 10% of revenue. And even bring senior management to criminal liability! If they fail to clean up racism, harassment and other "hate crimes".

In general, what I'm leading to. The PR accompaniment of repressive new laws usually involves demonstrating the evil they are meant to combat - and that's where our 43-year-old cannabis lover and black football hater comes in handy. The demonstration of evil, frankly, is so-so, but, apparently, there was no other. This, of course, is not about the fact that all this is fiction and PR accompaniment, but rather that the power bureaucracy is sensitive to the speeches and signals of the authorities: they said to expand and deepen the fight against online racism, so we will do it (in different conditions might not notice).

And the root here, of course, is that American social networks are a bone in the throat not only for the Russian authorities, but for any authorities in principle. Horror stories about "foreign agents" and "election interference" are popular everywhere. And in general: social networks are a huge information space that is outside direct political control (it seems to be under the jurisdiction of American courts, but even there it is guarded by some strange "section 230", behind which these social networks are like behind a bunker). So it's no surprise that the authorities decided to put on shining armor in order to protect three black millionaires from a hatspeech from a cannabis lover from northern England.

Mihail Pojarsky 2021-09-09