No Hate Speech Movement

The Council of Europe is an international organisation in Strasbourg which comprises 47 countries of Europe. It was set up to promote democracy and protect human rights and the rule of law in Europe.

"Young People Combating Hate Speech Online is a project being run by the Council of Europe’s youth sector between 2012 and 2014. It aims to combat racism and discrimination, as expressed online as hate speech, by mobilizing young people and youth organisations to recognize and act against such human rights violations. The project is a tribute to youth participation and co-management. It was initiated by the youth representatives in the Joint Council on Youth, the committee which brings together youth leaders belonging of the Advisory Council on Youth and the governmental youth representatives of the European Steering Committee on Youth. The project is therefore being carried out by young people with the support of governmental youth institutions.

The campaign is not designed to limit freedom of expression online. Neither is it about everyone being nice to each other online. It is against hate speech online in all its forms, including those that most affect young people, such as cyber-bullying and cyber-hate. The campaign focuses on human rights education, youth participation and media literacy.

The goals of the campaign are:

• To raise awareness about hate speech online and the risks it poses for democracy and individual young people.

• To promote media and Internet literacy.

• To support young people in standing up for human rights, online and offline.

• To reduce the levels of acceptance of online hate speech.

• To mobilise, train and create a network of online youth activists to defend human rights.

• To map hate speech online and develop tools to combat it.

• To support and show solidarity to people and groups targeted by hate speech online.

• To advocate the development of and consensus on European policy instruments combating hate speech.

• To develop youth participation and citizenship online."

Read more about this campaign: http://www.nohatespeechmovement.org/

Tipped by the blog Vanadis ser på saken

Is Facebook Homophobic?

Facebook, also lovingly known as F*c*book or FuckFace, is a social networking site located in the U.S.A. with 1.28 billion monthly active users worldwide (March 2014).

I have been using FuckFace on and off, both in my first and second lives, for the last four years or so. I have left Facebook voluntarily twice and I have had my account deactivated or disabled six-seven times (I lost count). Twice Facebook has given me a reason for deactivating/disabling my account ("reason to believe that I was not using real name"), but mostly it has been done without any justification given for their action.

During my time on FuckFace I have experienced several pogroms from the company directed against my LGBT friends, but no such actions have ever - to my knowledge - occurred against any of my straight friends. Neither have I ever heard or read of such concerted actions directed against straight SecondLife avatars on the site (with two individual exceptions, Barcelonamaria and Pieni).

If anyone of you reading this have such information, please do enlighten me as I realize that my knowledge is only empirical, limited and may be slanted ("With eyes sensitive to green", as a line in a Swedish song goes, ones perception of the color green is enhanced but other colors may be obscured.)

However, based on my experience, I am prepared to make the charge that FuckFace is homophobic - or at the very least - applying it's rules in a homophobic way. So my answer to the question I posed in the title of this post is: "Fuck yes, definitely!"

Moving on to another of my pet peeves concerning FuckFace, there is the issue of "real identities". The company seems to completely ignore that there many times are valid reasons for someone not to use the name on their drivers licences. These reasons can range from being a victim in an abusive relationship to actually being better known in different times or circles under a "nom de plume" (pen name), alias or artistic name.

During my online existence over the last twenty years I have, besides Bock McMillan, during periods been best known as Markus Bock, LundaMats, WWW, Lunds nästkåtaste karl or 70244 (among others).

I am Bock McMillan and Bock McMillan is I. We are one and inseparable, the only difference is that one is better known in one of my lives, while the other is better know in the other life. It should be my decision which of my names I use and when, not FuckFaces.

Rejoice

I am back on the Internet again! I hope you only missed me half as much as I missed ya'll, particularly one of you...

I lost connection with Tomais, the Internet and the World Wide Web late on Sunday evening (local time) when my modem completely died on me when I was restarting it. After reporting the failure to my ISP on Monday morning it took them until today to ship me the replacement modem.

I am going to tell Comhem (my ISP) what I think of this. I was almost close to dying from abstinence. Surely they should be able to speed up this process of replacing modems by letting its customers go and pick up a new modem at any of the very many home-electronic stores.