The United Nation is trying to crush freedom of speech on the internet, and it s happening on the eve of International Day for Countering Hate Speech. But can someone please tell me what hate speech is? It s a human emotion, and we can all be moved to express it.
00:06:18.000The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa or who are holding unacceptable views that they're expressing do not represent the views of Canadians who have been there for each other.
00:06:39.340Yeah, we were lied to for three years about everything.
00:06:42.100We were harmed economically, socially, even physically.
00:09:30.100From institutionalized racism to genocide, the roots are the same, according to people on the front lines of change who shared their stories with UN News ahead of the International Day for Countering Hate Speech, observed on Sunday.
00:10:40.280From COVID-19 to climate change, hateful exchanges among those with opposing views is a growing concern, said Latifa Ackerback, president of the High Authority of Audiovisual Communication in Morocco.
00:10:55.300So right there, if you disagree with COVID-19 policy, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, travel bans, closed churches, whatever, you're hateful.
00:11:05.780If you disagree with climate action, but of course.
00:11:10.380And who would know better than someone from the high authority of audiovisual communication in Morocco?
00:11:17.340That is such a wonderful job title, isn't it?
00:11:19.280You might think that you are an authority in audiovisual communication.
00:11:22.560I mean, you watch TV and you listen to radio and I bet you surf the internet a lot, including on your phone.
00:11:30.260Do you think that Latifa Ackerback, president of the High Authority of Audiovisual Communication in Morocco, no less, has any special knowledge, let alone moral authority, more than you do?
00:11:41.640When it comes to the internet, what a laugh that title is, but they say it with complete seriousness.
00:11:48.720I've never been there, but I like what I know.
00:11:51.360As dictatorships go, it's probably one of the gentler ones, but it does have a hereditary king who runs the place.
00:11:59.300He is a dictator, maybe a friendly one.
00:12:02.480Freedom House, which ranks the freedom of the world's countries, calls it partly free.
00:12:06.080Here's their summary of their in-detail report on the country.
00:12:11.360Morocco holds regular multi-party elections for parliament, and reforms in 2011 shifted some authority over government from the monarchy to the elected legislature.
00:12:20.120Nevertheless, King Mohammed VI maintains dominance through a combination of substantial formal powers and informal lines of influence in the state and society.
00:12:29.360Many civil liberties are constrained in practice.
00:12:31.360Yeah, so the UN is really picking the right people to tell us how to use our freedom of audiovisual communication.
00:12:43.260The international community's failure in managing and regulating migration fuels the sponsors of hate speech and helps them follow through with their plans, she said,
00:12:54.120calling on governments to adopt fair positions in the face of separation movements, terrorism, and violation of human rights.
00:13:02.620I honestly don't even know what that means.
00:13:22.940Maybe, just maybe, she's part of an unfree dictatorship that's looking for a way to justify cracking down on the freedom tool of the internet that her boss doesn't like.
00:13:34.240Here's someone else the UN wants us to listen to.
00:13:36.960Had social media existed in 1994, the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda would have been much worse, according to survivor Henriette Mutegwaraba, who recalled the hate speech propagated via radio at the time.
00:13:52.240A message that used to take years to spread can now be put out there, and in one second, everybody in the world can see it, she said.
00:13:58.820If there was Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, it would have been much worse.
00:14:02.340The bad people always go to youth whose minds are easy to corrupt.
00:14:34.780Obviously, the same thing in Hitler's Germany.
00:14:37.400You don't need social media for a genocide.
00:14:41.080But the difference between a radio station and a newspaper on the one hand, and I add in TV stations or movies, like, I don't know, Lenny Riefenstahl's famous propaganda movies for Adolf Hitler.
00:14:54.120The difference between TV and movies and newspapers and radio stations, on the one hand, is that those are hard to get and hard to use.
00:15:03.080No ordinary person can just get a radio station or a TV station or a newspaper.
00:15:07.240In Rwanda, in Hitler's Germany, in Soviet Russia, those were owned and controlled by the government and their allies.
00:15:15.380There was no people's press to talk back.
00:15:19.380That's what TikTok and Twitter and Facebook and Instagram are.
00:15:24.280Ordinary people can use them to fight back and can connect instantly with people around the world.
00:15:31.460TikTok wouldn't have caused the Rwandan genocide.
00:15:34.740It was caused by violence from the government.
00:15:38.300But maybe TikTok could have helped ordinary people fight back by giving them a voice, by spreading the word.
00:15:43.160Hate speech laws in Rwanda and hate speech laws in, I don't know, China, the Soviet Union, they wouldn't help you fight against hate or genocide.
00:15:54.880Obviously, they're used against the enemies of the state.
00:16:31.220Mita Hosali, Deputy Director of the U.N. Department of Global Communication, said young people are often seen today as vectors of such toxic trends as online hate speech.
00:16:45.000Increasingly, we are entering this dark age of intolerance fueled by polarization and mis- and disinformation.
00:16:51.980And there are all kinds of facts swirling out there, she cautioned.
00:16:55.220It's like a ladder of incremental extremism, Ms. Hosali said.
00:17:01.000You start at the bottom with a stereotype, move on to emojis and memes that lead to harmful speech.
00:17:16.880So don't worry about Vladimir Putin in Russia or the Ayatollahs of Iran or don't worry about the North Korean dictator or China and the Communist Party.
00:17:27.280Don't worry about Saudi Arabia or Cuba or Venezuela.
00:17:29.440Don't worry about wars or prisons or domestic attacks on civil liberties.
00:19:18.660I tell you, Twitter is free, but it is an amazing, fascinating, and valuable tool, now more than ever, now since it has been turned into a free speech platform by Elon Musk.
00:19:36.300Let me show you an interesting exchange from a few days ago.
00:19:40.160It starts when our Canadian professor and public intellectual Jordan Peterson tweeted this.
00:19:47.540He said, referring to the College of Physicians, College of Psychologists of Ontario, that's having a hearing on his political wrong thing.
00:19:54.980He said, a court in Canada is going to rule on the College of Physicians Ontario decision to sentence me to mandatory re-education.
00:20:03.160Re-education, on June 21st, for my reprehensible political views, the process is called a judicial review.
00:20:11.260And then Elon Musk himself answered, saying, re-education is such an interesting term.
00:20:46.360Millions of urban youths and red guards were sent to the countryside to receive their re-education from poor peasants to be true communists.
00:21:00.840This is the only photo I have of me in the center.
00:21:04.280As a young high school graduate who was exiled to the countryside, my re-education lasted for three years until Mao died.
00:21:11.380In the pics, I was with friends at the damn reservoir we helped to build with our bare hands.
00:21:17.200Never in my wildest dream did I imagine that this term would one day make its way to America.
00:21:22.200Yes, re-education is indoctrination by coercion and force.
00:21:28.120And just one last tweet, because it's so—you've got to follow our guest on Twitter, Sheevan Fleet.
00:21:34.500But just one more tweet, and then we'll get to her straight away.
00:21:38.440She shows an old Maoist propaganda poster and says—old propaganda poster—educated youth should go to the countryside to get their re-education from poor peasants.
00:21:51.660Well, what does that mean, and how is it related to what they're doing to Jordan Peterson and others with wrong think?