Media
outlets' Facebook pages are often dominated by haters, but the German group
#ichbinhier is talking back. It now has tens of thousands of members who are
helping restore civility to social media.
It's Friday
evening, a couple of hours after the truck attack in Stockholm, and the
Facebook page of a major German TV news station is filling up with comments
inveighing against refugees and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It's an all
too familiar scene in an age when anyone can play pundit on social media and
hateful tirades are part of political discourse.
But in this
case, other users suddenly appear on the station's Facebook page to confront
the haters. What evidence is there that the Stockholm attacker was a refugee,
they ask. How do we know he was religiously motivated? What does Merkel have to
do with a one-off event in Sweden? Shouldn't people wait for all the facts?
What might
look like a series of individual responses is actually a loosely coordinated
action by a closed Facebook group called #ichbinhier (the English equivalent is
#iamhere). Yan, an event coordinator from Berlin, is one of those who helped
contain the trolls.
"We
usually go to the big media sites because they're either unmoderated or, if
they are, it's only for 10 or 15 minutes," Yan told Deutsche Welle.
"I can understand that. It's not like we work against the media. And
sometimes we get nice feedback. I recently got an email from an intern at a
major German newspaper who thanked us for helping to deal with hate speech that
came in the middle of the night and overwhelmed him."
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| Yan took to Facebook to counter hate speech about the Stockholm attack |
Feels like
team spirit
Hannes Ley,
a digital communications expert, founded #ichbinhier in late December, basing
it on the Swedish Facebook initiative #jagärhär, which currently has more than
67,000 members. The German version of the initiative has had similar success,
attracting almost 30,000 members in well under four months.
The key,
says Ley, is that people who used to write comments on the internet alone as
individuals now do so as a group. That makes them more confident.
"There's
a sense of being part of a team," Ley told DW. "Users say that they
now feel capable of expressing their opinions again and feel strong."
#ichbinhier
stages three interventions per day. Ley says the group's activities don't just
make haters think twice about spewing bile on Facebook pages, but also raise
general public awareness on issues.
"For
example in Holland, a journalist filmed two male politicians holding hands in
response to an attack on a homosexual couple," Ley recalls. "It
elicited the classic homophobic comments. We called upon the community to do
something. That attracted a lot of attention, and some of our comments had over
500 likes."
 |
| Right-wing extremists use Facebook to advance their agenda |
Calling the
fire department
Traditionally,
providing the public with facts was the job of journalists. But Ley says he
sees a "negative spiral" of distortion in which media outlets, with
their often tight personnel resources, fail to monitor their Facebook
platforms, so that hate speech not only becomes more and more dominant, but
also more and more radical.
Counterspeech
initiatives like #ichbinhier, say experts, are a useful and appropriate tool
for news outlets to prevent trolls from monopolizing the discussion. André
Kroll, a social-media training instructor and a journalist who works for German
public TV, says that there's no shame in calling for emergency help from
outside.
"For
me it's like a kind of volunteer fire department for social media," Kroll
told DW. "If a post - be it about refugees or foreigners or anything else
- has gotten out of control, it's perfectly legitimate to invite others to come
in and join the discussion. #ichbinhier has demonstrated that it can achieve
results."
Perhaps the
clearest mark of #ichbinhier's success is that right-wing extremists themselves
now complain on Facebook that the group is trying to deprive them of their
right to free speech.
A challenge
for Facebook
 |
| Facebook has struggled to control hateful posts |
And what
about Facebook itself? Germany recently introduced legislation requiring social
media platforms to combat hate speech. What does the Californian company think
of initiatives like #ichbinhier? Would it be willing to help them?
In an email
response, a Facebook spokeswoman told DW that Facebook supported a number of
counterspeech initiatives, including the company's own Online Civil Courage Initiative (OCCI), which organizes anti-hate speech seminars for NGOs. Ley took
part in one of those seminars earlier this year but came away unimpressed.
"I
thought it was like a minor advertising campaign for Facebook," Ley said.
"As a response to my criticism about the event, I was given a coupon for
100 euros in ad credits. Honestly, that's laughable."
Ley added
that his initiative could use technical support and help in campaigning from
Facebook.
Toning down
the aggression
 |
| Counterspeech groups are a way of coping with right-wing populism |
Yan says he
signed up after wandering around in a state of "shock" following Donald
Trump's election as US president. The group, he adds, gave him the sense that
he could do something to alter what he felt was the growing irrationality and
hatefulness in the world.
He also
says that engaging with haters in the virtual universe of the internet has
changed the way he behaves and uses language in the real world.
"If
someone calls me a 'gay a**hole' on the street, I no longer turn around and say
'f**k you,'" he told DW. "I'll say something like, 'You seem to know
quite a lot about homosexuals.' I'll say something that's not at the bottommost
level. That's a much better way to react."
#ichbinhier
has not only made people like Yan feel empowered. They say it's taught them
that there are better ways of asserting one's presence than hurling injurious
language at others.
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