This is a guest post by Jamie Bartlett, Director, Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, Demos
The manner in which the Internet and social media are stretching laws and regulations written for an offline world is a recurring theme. The latest legal headache is if, and how, to prosecute people who use hateful, racist or abusive language online.
There are in fact two separate pieces of law used here: hate speech legislation which forbids publicly expressing hatred directed against groups that are defined by colour, race, nationality, ethnicity, nationality, and religion, and the 2003 Communications Act which outlaws using a ‘public electronic communications network’ to send messages to that are grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character.
The problems are quite obvious. For the former, there is no clear consensus on whether the Internet should be treated as a public or private domain, which matters because (very broadly speaking) hate speech in public is illegal; in private it is not. As for the 2003 Act, it was passed into law just before social media colonised much of the online world and transformed the nature, visibility, and meaning of messaging.
Forget for a moment the resulting legal quagmire, because there is another side to this, which is often ignored: the responsibility on those who use social media and modern communications. We users are are now, in some sense, published authors. Dashing off a Tweet doesn’t feel like a public act, but it is. The public/private spheres are collapsed, so a mindless, ill-conceived missive could suddenly fall foul of libel & defamation law, copyright law, hate speech legislation, the 2003 Act, and who knows what else.
Other published authors, such as journalists, benefit from training how to navigate the minefield of publishing. They are also protected by (usually) careful editors and lawyers. Lawrence Wright’s New Yorker epic on Scientology had nearly 1,000 fact checks. Many of us, though, have little idea what we are doing.
Educational reform should accompany legal reform. Schools must teach responsible social media use: how to be critical, careful consumers and producers of online material. That does not mean helping closet racists keep it to themselves, but rather that all ‘citizen journalists’ have certain legal and ethical responsibilities, and ought at the very least know what they are. It is a tall order; but it’s the job of schools to keep up with society, not the other way around.
As is stands, the law is an ass – but that doesn’t mean we should respond in kind.
