ODIHR Side Event ? ASIL Annual Meeting
March 25, 2021
3:30 ? 4:30pm EST
While digital technology is a huge opportunity to communicate across countries and cultures, it unfortunately also has the ability to spread disinformation, hatred, and incitement to violence. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen hatred spreading as minority and marginalized communities have found themselves scapegoated and in some cases even become victims of targeted violence. This spread has often been fuelled by digital technologies, which make it easier and faster to disseminate conspiracy theories that have been in circulation for years or even centuries.
Human rights are increasingly used to restrict one another rather than advanced together as part of a comprehensive human rights framework. The lack of an international legal definition of ?hate speech,? the coded and contextual nature of ?hate speech,? and the vast amounts of user-generated content and the diversity of content in terms of form and language greatly complicate the challenge of balancing the right to freedom of expression with the need to protect against the advocacy of hate that amounts to incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence.
This side event will examine how the international regulatory framework around incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence is implemented at the domestic and regional levels in various contexts and to discuss the benefits and detriments of various systems of regulation.
Speakers
Karoline Fernandez de la Hoz Zeitler, National Point of Contact on Hate Crime, Spain
Louisa Klingvall, DG JUST, European Commission
Iain Levine, Senior Human Rights Adviser, Facebook
Emerson J. Sykes, Staff Attorney, Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, ACLU
Moderator: Joanna Szymanska, Article 19