Policing the Internet

Editorial

The Canadian Human Rights Commission handed to Parliament last week an unusual special report expressing its intent to continue policing hate on the Internet.

The issue at hand is Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA), which "prohibits the repeated electronic transmission of messages that are likely to expose an individual or a group of individuals to hatred or contempt based on a prohibited ground of discrimination."

This section of the act has been controversial for a number of reasons, but it has been the subject of particular consideration since 2001, when it was explicitly expanded to include hate on the Internet.

A country's laws are statements of a society's values and objectives. The promotion of tolerance is a laudable objective, and criminalizing or otherwise stigmatizing anti-social expressions and actions is the only way society has of expressing its values. But if laws expressing social values at the same time actually make it more difficult to ensure the safety of targeted individuals or groups, the law is in contradiction of its own stated purpose. We think that is the case here.

The special report to Parliament summarized its purpose simply: "What is the most effective way to prevent the harm caused by hate messages on the Internet, while respecting freedom of expression?"

If the objective of the CHRA is merely to protect people from the harm of hearing nasty things said about them, then Section 13 should stand. If, instead, the act is intended to prevent actual harm from being perpetrated – to prevent security guards at museums from being shot, schools from being firebombed, synagogues from being attacked – then the prohibition of the free expression of hatred is almost certainly a hindrance to this objective.

There is, on the one hand, the practical reality that the Internet is effectively unpoliceable, unless we take drastic steps like the governments of China and Iran. Because of this, any attempts at controlling what is said in this medium is probably a waste of resources, a thumb in a dike. On the other hand, there is the pragmatic reality that silencing voices of hatred will drive them underground, making it more difficult for law enforcement and targeted groups to see where threats exist.

There was a tragic object lesson, of sorts, last week. The white supremacist who faces murder charges for the shooting of Stephen Johns, a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., was well known for his racist, anti-Semitic and extremist views. More than this, James Von Brunn had a lengthy record of anti-government activities, including a 1983 conviction for attempting to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve Bank, for which he served more than six years in prison.

The lesson here may be difficult to discern. It may seem like a self-defeating argument to suggest that knowledge of Von Brunn's anti-social views could have allowed authorities to prevent him acting out in the way he did at the Holocaust museum because, clearly, it did not. But to use a fraught analogy, it is impossible to know how many terrorist attacks have been thwarted through early intervention such as weapons seizures, mischief charges and the surveillance made easier by the public nature of hatred thanks to the Internet. Knowledge of Von Brunn's disordered thinking did not prevent Johns' murder, but knowledge of the hateful ideas of other individuals and groups, garnered easily through the Internet, has certainly permitted early intervention that has probably prevented the murder of others, the desecration of religious facilities and other acts of hate-motivated violence.

At its most fundamental, we need to go back and define the potential "harm" identified in the report to Parliament as the object of such legal prohibitions. Is the harm caused by hate speech the pain inflicted on targeted groups when they hear horrible things said about them? Or is the harm actual harm – the targeting of property, the acts of violence and the murders perpetrated by those actually following through on the rhetoric they spread around the Internet?

If it is the former, then our government can continue to throw good money at policing a medium that is chaotic and uncontrollable, erasing traces of hatred here and there in the universe of unmediated expressions that defines the Internet. But if preventing the harm caused by actual acts of violence is the goal, the Internet is the authorities' first and best resource in finding out what society's most dangerous minds are planning. In which case, censoring it would probably cause more harm than it prevents.

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