Cyber hate, in other words hate speech that is being spread online, is intimately linked to propaganda and fake news. Far-right parties and extremists love attacking minority communities by using doctored pictures, spun stories, half-truths and bold-faced lies to gain voters and power. These all count as cyber hate and most of it constitute illegal hate speech. That is why both the EU and most member states have laws against hate speech (at least offline hate speech) and that is why multiple steps have been taken by the EU and some member states in the past couple of years to tackle these two interlinked issues.
INACH has already written a paper in 2017 on the policies of the EU and some of its members that try to tackle online hate speech. Its contents will be summarised in the first part of this paper. Not much has changed since, legally. However, some of the laws and legal suggestions that we examined in our previous paper were fairly new back then, thus there had not been enough time for them to have a substantial impact on these phenomena. Hence, in this paper, we will be looking at the same pieces of legislation, legal documents and policy suggestions as in our previous paper and see what impact they have made in the past two years. And just like in our previous paper, we will provide policy recommendations based on our findings, whilst examining how many of our previous recommendations became actual policy since 2017.
Published on 19-11-2019
