The freedom of each of us ends where the rights of another individual start

The owners/editors of information portals should make bigger efforts to moderate the users’ comments and follow the ethical rules, recommends the Monitoring Report “Assessing the hate speech in the online media”, conducted by the CIJ in 2015. This study reveals that it is not an appropriate solution to totally close the space for comments, because, without the possibility to express their views, users might be discouraged to keep using the portal as a source of information. Under such circumstances, the owners/editors of information portals should find solutions for handling the comments to avoid the proliferation of the hate speech. In turn, the media users should be more responsible and report the cases of incitement to hatred.

Dumitru Ciorici, cofounder of the portal agora.md says that, at global level, there is a dilemma whether the Internet should be regulated or not. In his opinion, regulation is a means of controlling the media and would minimize the effect of the journalistic message.
As a media manager, Dumitru Ciorici declared that he faced the need to moderate the comments six years ago for the first time. “It was in 2009, during the protests in the center of the capital city. The only way to follow what was happening in the country was the online media and suddenly, unimedia.md, from 7000 viewers that it normally had reached 30000 viewers. The number of people who started getting information on the Internet increased by two, three times and all these people felt the need to channel their thoughts online, so a lot of comments appeared”.

Dumitru Ciorici also says that the institution he runs developed a regulation according to which the journalists were supposed to moderate the comments that discriminated on the basis of nationality, race, ethnic background, sexual orientation, that incited to violence or attacked the person, comments containing spam (messages that had no connection with the addressed subject) and the messages sent multiple times, because they transformed the forum in a monologue or a dialogue.

The manager of the portal moldova.org, Oxana Greadcenco says that most often these comments refer to journalistic materials on nationality and ethnic background. “It is more frequent that such comments appear on social networks where we distribute our articles, especially, on Odnoklassniki”. Although, the portal where she works does not have a regulation on moderating the comments, Oxana Greadcenco says that the journalists from moldova.org monitor them. “When there are comments that raise suspicions, we discuss and remove them, if necessary”. As for the methods of fighting hate speech in the online media, Oxana Greadcenco declares that “the only solution is to block the user/IP that generates the comments and to have somebody in charge for monitoring the comments”.

Since 2009, the Republic of Moldova has had a Press Council, which is independent from the public administration, political and business environment and contributes to increasing the accountability of the press. This institution is notified by the media users when they identify messages and journalistic materials that contain hate speech. Georgeta Stepanov, member of the Press Council and dean of the Journalism and Communication Science Faculty of the State University of Moldova believes that people have become more active in this regard. “People are getting used to the idea that they have the right to protect themselves from the media”. According to Georgeta Stepanov, the number of applications received by the Press Council is constantly increasing – from 10 applications in the first year of activity, to 42 applications at present. The media legislation expert, Ion Bambuleac says that there are a number of national and international provisions on fighting the hate speech. As for the limit between the freedom of expression and the hate speech, Ion Bambuleac reminds us that art. 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights stipulates the freedom of expression, while art. 17 of this convention prohibits the abuse of law and imposes the obligation to maintain a specific limit.

According to the expert, the Ministry of Youth and Sports created a national board for the campaign against the hate speech, “No hate speech Moldova”, which tries to prevent this phenomenon through prevention activities, flashmobs and seminars. The cases of incitement to hate can also be communicated to the Non-Discrimination Council and the Non-Discrimination Hotline. In his view, both the journalists and media users are accountable for the hate speech. They must understand that the “The freedom of each of us ends where the rights of another individual start”.
At the same time, the CIJ experts who produced the report on monitoring the hate speech in the online media, recommend that every editorial office has the key resources – the Journalist’s Ethical Code and the “Style Guide with Ethical Rules”, in the electronic format or on hard copy so that journalists and people in charge for the content of websites can check the accuracy of what they write and the ethics of the comments when they have doubts. It is also necessary to regularly train journalists to help them detect messages and expressions that incite to hatred in the users’ comments.
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This material was produced within the “Fighting hate speech in the online media and on social networks”, implemented by the CIJ with financial support of the partner organization Civil Rights Defenders from Sweden. The content of the report does not necessarily reflect the funder’s position.