Amid anger over Wiley’s sectarian diatribe, let’s not let the newspapers that have been promoting prejudice for years.
Kano: an apology. This article mistakenly wore a photograph of Kano when it was first published. The Guardian unreservedly apologizes to Kano and our readers for the bug, which has now been corrected. We would also like to explain that Owen Jones is not concerned about this error
Twitter is several things: a way to raise ignored voices in a different way, a platform to facilitate debate, a portal to access a mind-blowing variety of data, and a haven of hate.
This weekend, the dirty Wiley, with his share a million fans, presented a diatribe of undiluted anti-Semitism on the site for two days, leading some to practice a 48-hour boycott of the social media platform to protest Twitter’s slowness. Act. But this has not been indisputable; some users have noticed that the online page has long housed shameless neo-Nazis like white American supremacist Richard Spencer, so why wait for a black celebrity to make anti-Semitic comments to take such action? Twitter took years to remove incendiary figures from the right like Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins. With a number of Jewish organizations calling for boycotts and anti-Semitic hate crimes at a record level, I am one of those who has answered the call, respecting the prospects of others who say this is not an effective way to challenge racism. .
There is no doubt that Twitter wants to take additional action. Every day, the site vibrates with Islamophobia, anti-negrity, anti-Semitism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and all other bureaucracies of intolerance, aimed directly at people. As Alex Hern, editor of the Guardian’s generation, points out, Twitter’s policy in this area has gradually evolved from a commitment to the fundamentalism of free speech, which saw racism as a bad opinion to challenge, to a commitment to protect the rights of minorities in the face. of illegitimate hatred. Speaks.
But it’s a generation company that’s “fundamentally underfunded in terms of Silicon Valley,” Hern says, and it’s slow to expand new ideas, let alone suppress hate speech. That doesn’t mean Twitter shouldn’t invest in more moderators and act faster, especially in a case like this, which is so appalling because of the length of Wiley’s platform combined with the intensity and duration of its racist diatribe.
However, there is something deeply uncomfortable about this debate. Twitter reflects the hatred that is rooted in the social fabric of the country as much as it incubates it. Racism and other red tape of sectarianism remain the organizational principles of British society. As researcher Alana Lentin says, racism is a “moral challenge of” bad “individuals,” as the existing debate on Twitter toxicity leads us to believe, but a ” systemic challenge “rooted in European colonialism, when the subjugation of Africans and indigenous peoples was justified in treating them as biologically inferior.
Similarly, anti-Semitism is made up of deadly and centuries-old conspiracy theories rooted in European culture that painting Jews as tortuous puppeteers is an injustice “which in turn was encouraged through anti-Semitic Christian themes,” as Professor David Feldman points out.
Systems of racism and other fanatics, rather than racists and individual fanatics, deserve to be our starting point. Blacks are discriminated against through the formula of justice and are likely to be condemned to reduce wages and unemployment; while patriarchy leaves women objective and subjected to the misogyny of the regime, and LGBTQ to others treated as gender traitors who deserve verbal or physical blows. An online platform open to all will inevitably assign these broader phenomena; No robust Twitter moderation policy can adequately combat formulaic sectarianism in our societies.
Unfortunately, our public discourse prefers theatrical debates about whether a user is or is “racist” or “non-racist” to a fair assessment of the functioning of race as a formula of power. And power, in turn, is a component of what is missing from a verbal exchange of racism in public life that focuses on tweets rather than tough establishments that set the tone in any national community. Hopkins, who was expelled from Twitter this year, was not a monster created through social media. He was a columnist for The Sun, where he compared migrants to cockroaches, prompting condemnation from the United Nations. She continued to fall, rewarded with a column in Mail Online and a chathow at LBC. It was the old media that built it, generously adding to their Twitter followers in the process: a loop of positive hateful comments.
This week, a Times leader issued a pious judgment on “social media and hate speech: posting and being convicted.” It is the newspaper that forced a correction after a series of misleading articles that began with the splashing of the first page “A Christian child forced to live in a Muslim host family”.
This week, when the Twitter boycott began, a Times columnist published an article titled “Let’s Not Be Afraid to Challenge Traveller Culture.” When this official newspaper publishes articles with titles such as “Islamophobia is a fiction to close the debate,” written through Melanie Phillips, whose paintings were quoted with approval by the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik, his intolerance is significantly more damaging than Slough’s. barry48593 on Twitter. Its scope is much greater and confers respectability and permissibility on racism and intolerance.
In 2016, the Sun and the Daily Mail were known to the European Commission to oppose racism and intolerance by fueling sectarianism opposed to minorities. Unsurprisingly, the former has already released a cover in which he states that one in five Syrian extremist British Muslims, such as the Islamic State, forces an overdue correction. A 2019 study found that 59% of UK reports presenting Muslims had negative issues, with Mail on Sunday being the worst offender.
Online hatred is an urgent and developing problem, but its severity does not come down to the observation that hard-right newspapers are the main platform for sectarianism in this country. Do generation corporations want to do more? Yes, absolutely. But the lack of coherence in this debate is a danger like hypocrisy.
When we ask who has contributed to doubling hate crimes in five years, our review will not be limited to computer-based babe fanatics, but will also have to come with those who have much more strength and influence. Everything else loses its meaning.
Owen Jones is a columnist for The Guardian