The minute Alison Saunders announced the Crown Prosecution Service’s crackdown on hate crime online, a torrent of loathing spewed forth on Twitter. There were the hordes complaining that they could no longer tell the “truth” about “paedo gangs” or call for the Qur’an to be banned. Calling something a hate crime is apparently a way of oppressing white people. Some asked why everyone couldn’t just have “broader shoulders”.
The pervading sense has been that what people say online is consequence-free. Perhaps because it is largely true. While many people live in self-selected worlds where discourse is civil, for others the online world is a place of anger and abuse. It affects their lives and sometimes silences them.
This is particularly true for women, ethnic minorities and LGBT or disabled people, even more so for those with a public profile. The abuse heaped on Diane Abbott, Rupa Huq, Gina Miller and Luciana Berger that has recently been made public is racist, sexist and chilling. Miller now has to have 24-hour security. The idea that what happens online is somehow not real is no longer viable. This is why the CPS is trying to ensure that prosecutions for online hate crime are taken seriously and that the penalties are stiffer, though of course the online world is no respecter of national law.
This is not only about persecuted individuals. Belatedly, I fear, we are seeing how online hate spreads through politics. Just last year many spoke about the “alt-right” as largely an online movement, as if this were not something to worry about. Charlottesville surely changes that. We know that extremists of all kinds are radicalised online, but how we might link what Saunders calls “low-level” offending to serious danger is murky territory.
Unless you have had direct experience of it, the impact of online abuse is hard to understand. Those people that dismiss it as “only tweets” fail to grasp that some women are being sent a graphic death threat every minute, from multiple accounts.
The new guidelines seek to press home that hate crime is about being targeted because of one’s faith, race, disability or sexuality. The policy documents classify homophobic, transphobic and biphobic hate crime. Something odd is happening when misogyny itself is not a hate crime, but legally that’s still the case – and there are calls for the law to change.
Overall there is no question that something has to be done. The police are concerned about the spike in hate crime that followed the Brexit vote. The toxic and depressing bile online is part of this. The anonymity of the digital world has been liberating in radical ways, but it has liberated some of the worst impulses. Everything can be said. Everything is permitted. And we have got to this situation because the social media platforms take such little responsibility for their content. Facebook and Twitter may be taking the problem more seriously lately, but they have had a laissez-faire attitude to abuse. We have now got to the point where if all hate crime was prosecuted, it’s hard to know what time the police would have for anything else. But does this mean we do nothing?
Surely the myth of the dysfunctional troll needs to be challenged too. There are people who make others’ lives miserable by spreading hate and are publicly rewarded for it. None of this exists in a vacuum. These purveyors of “free speech” legitimise racism.
For perpetrators hate is indeed a bottomless cup with few consequences. Victims know only too well, though, that online hatred transmutes into actual violence. They live in the real world too.