Coppieters Warns Against Increasing Social Media Hate Speech Against Minorities at UN Forum

We have observed with concern how hate speech through social media has increased in recent years, in turn contributing to the rise of hate crimes against minorities accompanied with a general sentiment of lack of effective protection from administrations at many levels.

Particularly in Europe, we are concerned about how this is affecting the Roma community, who, in addition to  facing intimidation, scapegoating and hate speech on social media, are now also victims of  the rumours created against them in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic. 2 Also preoccupying are the contexts of Poland, Hungary and Spain where hate speech is often promoted by politicians in the mainstream media and on social media, misinforming and misinforming with the aim of spreading racism and intolerance.

Politically motivated hate speech is a menace to democratic values, peace and social stability. Governments must confront it and must halt social media practices used against the most vulnerable communities, specially by far and extreme right groups.

We believe that diversity and pluralism are important values to be preserved in all societies and should be protected. Therefore, we advice Governments and Global institutions to launch high-visibility media and public awareness campaigns to encourage an inclusive society comprised of many different cultures, languages and religions in order to counter hate speech and intolerance against minorities, including negative stereotyping of Roma population and other national minorities.

Public bodies should ensure that the internet, and social media in particular, provide a save platform of opportunities for expression, association, participation and empowerment for members of national, ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities. To this end, we recommend the States to put in place surveillance mechanisms and reenforce and facilitate arbitrary procedures to protect the most vulnerable while ensuring the right of freedom of expression.

. . .

The Coppieters Foundation is financially supported by the European Parliament. The European Parliament is not liable for the content of the conferences, events or opinion pieces published on our website.

. . .

Thank you for following our activities over the past few years. We hope our updates have been useful to you. We would like to keep informing you about upcoming events, new publications, summer schools, and job vacancies. Subscribe to our newsletter to hear from us in your inbox.