key: cord-0060057-3dwvgz6o
authors: Veale, Kevin
title: Conclusion: The Christchurch Call to Action Summit and What Follows
date: 2020-11-13
journal: Gaming the Dynamics of Online Harassment
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-60410-3_7
sha: 9b3d29bab2e8e7a1203e7b7ec6a39f5dbe4caf64
doc_id: 60057
cord_uid: 3dwvgz6o

In May 2019, a coalition of countries and technology companies met in Paris to discuss ways that the internet and social media have been used to coordinate, inspire and organise terrorist attacks, such as the white-supremacist terror attack on a Christchurch mosque and Islamic centre in Aotearoa-New Zealand. This chapter explores the summit, the ways that it shows promise and the ways that it does not go far—or specifically—enough into what will happen next. It then considers the regulatory landscape these discussions are unfolding within and some concrete ways that citizens of the world can have an impact locally. It finishes by arguing that we have to respond to cultures of harassment and abuse more broadly than those unfolding in online spaces.

Terraforming social networks and the networked publics they mediate to be more hospitable to online citizens than they are for organised harassment campaigns weaponising them means we can protect the ability of people-particularly marginalised people-to exist online.

However, a fundamental problem that will need to be overcome is that existing social networks and online spaces are either indifferent to, or profit from, abuse committed via their networks. Alongside the algorithmic accountability suggested by Nicholas Diakopoulos, there is an equal need for affordance accountability that assesses how the affordances of online spaces impact the networked publics that they mediate (Diakopoulos 2015) . This would help highlight where social networks are abandoning their responsibilities, and either inspire better design of new, safer online spaces or encourage existing online spaces to change.

Given that, observably, the free market has not provided a solution for online harassment despite the fact that alternatives exist, we are left with the problem of how to make change happen. The status quo is intolerable, so what next?

The Christchurch Call to Action Summit is an attempt to change the global conversations around the status quo and one which makes some concrete positive contributions alongside some troubling elements and areas that introduce more problems than they solve.

In direct response to the white-supremacist terrorist attacks against the Christchurch Al-Noor Mosque and Linwood Avenue Islamic Centre in Aotearoa-New Zealand in March 2019, the government of Aotearoa announced the Christchurch Call to Action Summit (The Call) on the 24th of April that year (Ardern 2019a). Spearheaded by Aotearoa's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister of France, the summit occurred in Paris on 15 May 2019. The purpose of the summit was to begin a global discussion regarding ways to combat the proliferation of violent extremist content online (Ardern 2019b), and brought together a coalition of nations 1 and large corporations. 2 The pledge document that signatories nominally agree to is non-binding, is three-pages long and contains provisions under three broad umbrellas, all of which were published publicly online ('Christchurch Call' 2019) .

The Christchurch Call deserves recognition as a concrete, substantial achievement in several key areas. Firstly, as Peter Thompson argues, getting a coalition of state-actors and massive multinational corporations to publicly agree to basic principles on a subject as important and divisive as this one potentially matters more than the non-binding agreement in itself (Thompson 2019, 90) and is almost unprecedented. The Christchurch Call offers a platform that can be built upon and has laid the groundwork for future discussions. Secondly, it achieved this through massive international public pressure in the wake of the Christchurch attacks that meant both governments and corporations felt vulnerable. The fact that it avoided typical pitfalls of responses to crises, where the affected industry announces initiatives internal to itself or where governments try to respond in isolation, is also notable. As a structural response to a very complex problem, the Call shows significant promise. Having a diverse plurality of global nation-states responding to international citizen-led pressure trying to solve a problem together is more likely 3 to reach robust solutions than alternative approaches centred on one country. Better still, the groups involved were powerful enough that technology companies who have historically refused to participate in these forms of discussions felt compelled to become involved. Perhaps most importantly, the Call is evidence that both governments and large corporations actually responded to sufficient levels of public pressure, suggesting that it is a method that can potentially achieve traction going forward.

Thirdly, the Call helped change the conversations unfolding regarding the role of social media in hate, harassment and terrorism. Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of Aotearoa, has been publicly explicit in arguing that the Christchurch attack was 'shocking in its use of social media as a tool in the act of terror' (Ardern 2019a). Additionally, the Call makes specific mention of the algorithmic dimensions to online hate, requiring that Online Service Providers review the operation of algorithms and other processes that may drive users towards and/or amplify terrorist and violent extremist content to better understand possible intervention points and to implement changes where this occurs. This may include using algorithms and other processes to redirect users from such content or the promotion of credible, positive alternatives or counter-narratives. This may include building appropriate mechanisms for reporting, designed in a multi-stakeholder process and without compromising trade secrets or the effectiveness of service providers' practices through unnecessary disclosure. ('Christchurch Call' 2019) Business models are also obliquely discussed in the section regarding responsibilities jointly held by both governments and Online Service Providers:

Respect, and for Governments protect, human rights, including by avoiding directly or indirectly contributing to adverse human rights impacts through business activities and addressing such impacts where they occur. ('Christchurch Call' 2019) Prior to the Christchurch Call, it was unthinkable that major technology companies could publicly acknowledge the possibility that their algorithms and fundamental business models might amplify terrorist content or not respect human rights. The Call explicitly makes them part of the conversation going forward (Cheng 2019a (Cheng , 2019b .

However, there are also areas where the Christchurch Call significantly undermines its own stated aims.

The Christchurch Call conceptualises the dynamics of online harassment in narrow ways. The understanding that the Call presents of the 2019 attacks in Christchurch is that they were 'normal' terrorist violence unfolding in a country that does not normally experience them and that they were broadcast online. As such, the key focus is on preventing such broadcasts in future, since the understanding is that social media simply provided tools for magnifying the impact and reach of an act of terrorist violence that would have happened anyway. However, this understanding completely ignores the social dynamics which produced the Christchurch attack, of which the attack itself was merely the most visible dimension. The attacker wrote, 'Well lads, it's time to stop shitposting and time to make a real-life effort post' (Macklin 2019; Rowe 2019) as part of their manifesto: they explicitly address a broader online community in the attack and are courting social capital within it through the attack.

The Call shows no awareness of how Christy Dena's concepts of tiers 4 function within the context of harassment communities. As a result, it misses the dynamics by which the members of the primary, most active tier are encouraged and supported by the membership of less active tiers and compete with other members of the primary tier for visibility. It also misses that the fact the terror attack was live-streamed was itself designed to encourage people to join similar white-supremacist communities online. This recruitment would then expand the size of the tiers and thus the odds that others will be willing, able and motivated to enact further terror attacks. Instead, it seems to believe that the Christchurch terrorist attack came from an isolated group who happened to use social media as a tool.

Additionally, although the Call makes specific mention of the algorithmic dimensions to the amplification of extremist content online, the focus appears to be on stopping its distribution rather than, again, the dynamics which fuel it. There appears to be little focus on the ways that YouTube's algorithms are manipulated by, motivate and produce profit for networks of white-supremacists and other extremists (Lewis 2018) . There is also no direct engagement with the fact social media companies currently profit directly from harassment.

The Christchurch Call's focus on terrorism also seems very literal: it focuses on what can easily be labelled as acts of political violence in the eyes of the public, but would seem completely blind to something like Kiwi Farms' organised attempts to drive marginalised people to suicide. It is also unclear as to whether Elliot Rodger's murderous misogynist rampage would be on the Call's radar either, despite the fact it and his incel manifesto have inspired other killings.

Beyond these conceptual issues, there are also practical concerns. The Christchurch Call is non-binding, but even so there is a complete lack of either a timeframe by which improvements might be assessed or information about who would be positioned to audit any claims for progress that are made.

In addition to areas where the Call's specific policy frameworks undercut its stated aims, there are areas which either risk worsening the existing status quo or otherwise add new problems to the conversation.

One such example is that the summit began with the statement that the white-supremacist terrorist attack in Christchurch was 'unprecedented' ('Christchurch Call' 2019), but such a claim ignores a significant amount of history and context. The terrorism in Christchurch was not the first time that social media platforms have been implicated in terrorism: this is the first time that a terrorist attack in a 'western' country was broadcast via the internet, but Facebook has been a significant factor in the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, for example, as covered in the Frontline documentary The Facebook Dilemma (Jacoby 2018 Taub and Fisher 2018) . Social media has been connected to acts of terrorism and broader social abuses for a long time. Explicit acts of terrorism are merely the tip of an iceberg produced by a vastly more substantial broad base of problem content and communities-and this base is ignored by the current framing of the Christchurch Call. To claim that the attack is 'unprecedented' muddies important waters and endorses the idea that social media companies are blameless in both past events and the status quo. This is far from a neutral angle to be taking, particularly at a summit which is foundationally about preventing future terrorist attacks tied to social media.

Another area in which the Christchurch Call is in danger of simply adopting the terms preferred by the major social media platforms and big tech companies is around the positioning of how terrorism on social media is framed. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg made a public statement about the Christchurch Call and said, There was not one country represented in that room that had not been touched by terrorism and violent extremism. And the terrorist's goals are very clear: they aim to silence, they aim to stand against the values that we hold so dear, they aim to have people live in fear. And our goals are exactly the opposite-we want people to have voice, we want people to live with humanity and dignity. We want people to speak for tolerance and against hatred. (Cheng 2019c) Sandberg positions Facebook as 'one of us' via a claim of shared values which stand against terrorism and the ideals of individual terrorists. Coincidentally, this positioning erases Facebook's extremely public controversies, many of which tie to its spread of intolerance and hatred and suggest that Facebook's pursuit of giving people 'voice' is a neutral good rather than their pragmatic business model. As such, Sandberg's comments try to reframe the Christchurch Call as a rallying cry for the status quo and frame Facebook's business models as a brave defiance of a decontextualised terrorism.

Additionally, one of the risks presented by turning 'terrorist' into an empty-signifier is that recent history and the 'War on Terror' associates it disproportionately with Muslim communities. As a result, decontextualised use of the phrase to signify 'an enemy' runs the risk of reinforcing the racist and Islamophobic assumptions which motivated the attacks in Christchurch. Doing so would place the Christchurch Call on the side of the attacker rather than the communities which have been terrorised.

Since the Christchurch Call was announced, companies like Facebook have announced policy changes which would appear to contravene the agreements made in the Call-and these have gone unchallenged. For example, despite the driving force of the Call being to stop the spread of extremist content online, Facebook announced a revised 'newsworthiness' policy framing anything a politician says to be publishable, regardless of its content, in September 2019:

Today, I announced that from now on we will treat speech from politicians as newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard. However, in keeping with the principle that we apply different standards to content for which we receive payment, this will not apply to ads-if someone chooses to post an ad on Facebook, they must still fall within our Community Standards and our advertising policies.

When we make a determination as to newsworthiness, we evaluate the public interest value of the piece of speech against the risk of harm. When balancing these interests, we take a number of factors into consideration, including country-specific circumstances, like whether there is an election underway or the country is at war; the nature of the speech, including whether it relates to governance or politics; and the political structure of the country, including whether the country has a free press. In evaluating the risk of harm, we will consider the severity of the harm. Content that has the potential to incite violence, for example, may pose a safety risk that outweighs the public interest value. Each of these evaluations will be holistic and comprehensive in nature, and will account for international human rights standards. (Clegg 2019) Despite the extensive reassurances of the consideration Facebook makes in deciding what is and is not 'newsworthy' under this policy, it is unclear what the threshold is for action. For example, the Christchurch Call makes specific mention that Online Service Providers need to act to 'prevent the dissemination' of 'violent extremist content.' However, there have been no attempts to limit the dissemination of President Trump's statements on the platform which blame COVID-19 on China and Asian peoples, which have been connected to increases in xenophobic violence in an election year (Yam 2020) . 5 If Facebook will not honour the Christchurch Call under the precise circumstances its own policy says that they will, it is unclear when they ever would.

Given that the status quo of the social media landscape is both intolerable and dangerous, and that the Christchurch Call is problematic and underutilised, the question becomes what can be done to change things. Peter Thompson has presented an extensive, nuanced and clear discussion of the tensions surrounding regulation alongside the opportunities raised by the Christchurch Call in 'Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts: Assessing the Regulatory Response to the Christchurch Call' (Thompson 2019) , and I will explore some of his ideas here.

Thompson notes that historically, governments have allowed tech companies and social media platforms to largely regulate themselves due to their size, scope and complexity (Thompson 2019, 84) . As a result, one of the difficulties of creating a more heavily regulated environment is that it is tempting for governments to delegate the specifics to companies who would then create regulation to suit existing market leaders to the detriment of new competition and diffusing their liabilities onto third parties (Thompson 2019, 85) .

The Christchurch Call is highlighted as contributing by bringing diverse stakeholders across nation-states and major corporations to the table, and ensuring that discussions of regulation can no longer be preempted and shot down (Thompson 2019, 84, 99) . As such, Thompson argues that it provides a useful foundation to build forward from, and he provides a specific framework for regulatory measures that would extend the Christchurch Call's strengths while mitigating its weaknesses.

Thompson notes that one of the reasons major technology companies and social media platforms were motivated to participate was in order to avoid having to respond to a patchwork of different regulatory measures in different countries (Thompson 2019, 92) . This means that citizens pushing for more such measures in different jurisdictions become a concrete, decentralised method of bringing further pressure to bear on them. Thompson advocates continued domestic regulatory response on these grounds, alongside the fact that any results from a multilateral forum are currently hypothetical and would need to be implemented domestically in any case (Thompson 2019, 92) .

Another domestic response that will be valuable going forward is to levy taxes on the domestic turnover of global intermediaries. Thompson highlights that this has already happened in Britain and France in initiatives that are important because they 'reclaim online commercial turnover as domestic economic activity' (Thompson 2019, 86-87) . Australia has moved to force Facebook and Google to share advertising revenue with local news media after attempts to collaboratively produce a voluntary code failed in 2019 (Jose and Packham 2020; Thompson 2019, 88) . I argue that one of the problems in dealing with major technology companies from a domestic perspective is that there can be no political will to regulate companies if there is no political will to tax them. Taxing companies helps correct fundamentally extractive business models that treat the activity of a given nations' citizens as valuable but returns none of that value to their nations' economy. In addition, it represents exactly the kind of piecemeal regulatory response that major technology companies and social media platforms would prefer to avoid through engaging in more unified responses, at the same time as being valuable to the individual countries setting the levy.

Thompson's work provides a roadmap for wider regulatory responses than taxation that different territories can follow as well. These include responding to the concentration of content-discovery and e-commerce by 'redesignating digital intermediaries as public utilities with civic obligations beyond private shareholders,' and independent regulator access to algorithms (Thompson 2019, 97-98) . Effectively, this is an area where the citizens of the world have been presented as powerless for decades and instead have some options for local political activism. It is possible to build a sufficient diversity of sticks to wield against big players in social media and technology that the carrot of greater simplicity in cooperating with multilateral regulation becomes more attractive as a result.

Alongside applying regulatory pressure to politicians in our own domestic contexts, we can work against the fact that the ideologies which drive harassment campaigns and crowdsourced terrorism are mainstream. As such, they are invisible problems that are easy to overlook, precisely because they are part of the background-radiation of everyday life.

We can look to the media landscape of Aotearoa-New Zealand for a very specific example of this kind of dynamic. On 28 August 2018, columnist and broadcaster Mike Hosking wrote a column for the New Zealand Herald that argued Chelsea Manning should be barred from entering Aotearoa because it was reprehensible to allow a criminal to profit from criminal behaviour (Hosking 2018) . That column draws an explicit comparison between Chelsea Manning and the white-supremacist duo Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux, who were banned from speaking publicly after an outcry during their visit to Aotearoa (Hatton 2018) . The comparison is brief, serving to set up a binary whereby Manning is only notable due to criminality, while Southern/Molyneux are not criminals and thus should be allowed to speak.

If it wasn't for the stealing and leaking of classified paperwork that ran the risk of undermining American security, you would never have heard of her. Far less be in a position to consider buying tickets and lining her, and her promoters', pockets.

Which brings us to free speech-the same free speech we were angsting about a few weeks ago when those Canadian right wingers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux were here. I support free speech, I would have let those two in, not because I have any particular interest in what they have to say, but because they are free to say it. And if we are to choke off all discourse every time it might look like we don't like what is being said, we are on a very slippery slope.

Which is what made Phil Goff's moves so egregious, and every other hand-wringer that lined up behind him. (Hosking 2018) The clear implication is that Southern and Molyneux may have controversial views, but they are not criminals. However, Southern was arrested in 2017 for being part of a group that blocked rescue boats in the Mediterranean that were seeking to save immigrants drowning at sea-an event that she live-streamed (Townsend 2017; Warren 2017) . She and Molyneux are central parts of the alt-right/white-supremacist influencer network identified by Rebecca Lewis (Lewis 2018 ) and promote the 'Great Replacement Theory' that was cited by the Christchurch terrorist as justification for the attacks.

For clarity, I do not argue that Hosking's column contributed to the Christchurch terror attacks, but it highlights the invisibility, insulation and normalisation of white-supremacy and white-nationalism within mainstream culture. Importantly, the issue is not that these problems with Southern and Molyneux were known but ignored. I think it is more likely that everyone involved in producing the column was unaware because Southern and Molyneux blend in so that there was no reason to look deeper, despite the fact their views qualify as hate speech according to experts within Aotearoa (Hatton 2018 ; 'Korero Whakamauahara: Hate Speech-An Overview of the Current Legal Framework' 2019, 4, 7). It is possible to be detained for attempting to disrupt humanitarian search and rescue efforts-an initiative which, if successful, would directly lead to the deaths of people who might otherwise be saved-and not be a 'criminal.' It is possible to publicly argue that indigenous people are the 'lowest rung of civilization' (NZ Media Council 2018) and that non-white cultures and peoples are an existential threat to society that must be violently resisted, and it is just something 'we don't like being said' (Hosking 2018) . Selling tickets to public events where these ideas will be promoted at NZ$99 per ticket is not profiting from criminal enterprise, whereas whistleblowing against government overreach is a bridge too far. It is possible to publish a column in a major national newspaper that uses people promoting hate speech for money as a minor side note to say 'Chelsea Manning isn't like them: she's actually a problem,' and there is no consumer outcry or backlash from advertisers because it is normal. It does not stand out.

Aotearoa-New Zealand makes for a specific example of these dynamics because they are invisible even when violently contrasted with reality. The country was outraged by the Christchurch attacks, insisting that 'this is not us'-a claim vigorously challenged by Maōri alongside Asian and Muslim communities of Aotearoa (Bashir 2019; Han 2019; McLachlan 2019) . As with many Commonwealth countries, Aotearoa-New Zealand was founded as a white-supremacist, colonialist project, and that foundation extends to the present day in most areas of life. It is only recently that te reo Maōri has begun to be taught in schools, despite being listed as one of the 'official' languages of Aotearoa, and mainstream media representations position Maōri as dangerous 'others' who are a threat to 'the nation' (Abel 2013). 6 One of our more influential political parties owes most of its identity and branding to being anti-immigration, with its members of parliament regularly voicing Islamophobic or anti-Asian statements. Aotearoa-New Zealand is far from unique in displaying rich veins of normalised, mainstream racism, because all of the problems discussed here are global.

Hate, discrimination and harassment are fractal, in that the same patterns play out again and again at different scales and in different contexts. In May 2020, NBC revealed that Google had rolled-back diversity initiatives because of pressure from those who argued that employing and supporting people who were not straight, white, cisgender men was 'anti-conservative' (Glaser 2020) . Such a claim explicitly admits that modern conservatism is a sexist, racist, patriarchal social project and one which lines up almost perfectly with the ideologies displayed by online harassment communities-partly because these same people could easily be part of both. As the title of Adrienne Shaw's rich and detailed article says, 'The Internet Is Full of Jerks Because the World Is Full of Jerks' (Shaw 2014) , and once again, the question becomes what to do about it. As this book has repeatedly argued, there is no segregation between online spaces and the 'real world,' which means our responses to cultures of harassment cannot be entirely focused in one area either. Saziah Bashir's recommendations for tackling cultures of racism and inequity after the Christchurch attacks are broadly applicable and seem like an excellent place to start:

As a society, we can choose which voices we empower and nurture at critical junctures that can shift the conversation, and we must be diligent and deliberate in exercising that choice now.

(…) speak out. Challenge destructive narratives in the media, from your community leaders and politicians, and the people in your life.

Call up and debate with those talkback radio hosts, argue with your racist uncle at that family barbecue, tell those problematic old high school friends exactly why you're blocking and deleting them before you do it, disparage your friends from laughing at that racist joke or using that unacceptable word, ask your employer to account for the efficacy and fairness of their recruitment policies and their commitment to diversity, attend the rallies and sign the petitions.

If someone is not good enough to be your leader, then get them sacked (more effective than egging, though visually less striking).

If that sounds like a lot of work, it is. If you want to be an ally, do the work. People in marginalised communities have been doing it all along for our own people and often everyone else. If you are born into an identity whose intersections suffer little or no disadvantage or discrimination, do more for others with your privilege. (Bashir 2019) Alongside tackling the background-radiation of ubiquitous social sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia, we can push for structural changes in governments and corporations. Connecting back to Golding and Van Deventer's point back from Chap. 1:

Maybe it's most useful not to look at a chronology of abuse to work out what's encouraging such behaviour, but rather to look at the systems surrounding this abuse. What stays the same over the years? The targets change. The harassers change. But the systems that harbour the behaviour of the harassers haven't changed enough. Unless we get real systemic change through strong and assertive leadership in tech companies, not much is going to improve for women and minorities online. (Golding and Van Deventer 2016, 101) This book has explored the ways that the pragmatic structure of social media platforms and online spaces is as relevant to harassment as the social contexts they operate within, and the two are innately linked. Much of the consistent blindness displayed by the technology industries regarding harassment and the way their design decisions can be weaponised by bad actors would be resolved by a greater diversity of people involved in the decision-making.

Pushing for substantive, meaningful changes at these levels will be challenging, particularly in the international political climate of 2020 and the years to come. The rise of interest in unionisation in technology and creative industries is a promising opportunity, although it will be as necessary to hold those unions themselves accountable on issues of diversity and representation as it is for the corporations those unions engage with.

The status quo is untenable and harms people. Nothing about the status quo is a neutral inevitability: it can be changed. However, it is not going to change by itself, people will have to make that happen. Hopefully, this book offers some insights into what that might look like. notes 1. The initial nation-states who signed the Christchurch Call were Aotearoa-New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the European Commission, France, Germany, Indonesia, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Jordan, the Netherlands, Norway, Senegal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. By September 2019, this had expanded to a total of 47 countries. The United States cited support for the summit but claimed to be constrained by the First Amendment-a claim already challenged by Danielle Keats Citron, who argues that preventing hate speech and online harm is thoroughly consistent with the First Amendment (Citron 2014, 190-225 Twitter is not currently a signatory of the non-binding Christchurch Call, but another example of this kind of dynamic is that Twitter has refused to apply the same techniques that remove pro-ISIS accounts from the network to white-supremacists because doing so would also remove Republicans (Cox and Koebler 2019) . Likewise, there is the example where a Twitter account resharing content from Donald Trump with no alterations was suspended after operating for just 68 hours on the grounds it was 'glorifying violence,' while Trump's account itself was defended as 'public interest' (Yeo 2020) . And again, we can interrogate why Twitter removes and filters algorithmically identified white-supremacist and neo-Nazi accounts in France and Germany where required by law, but does not apply the same filter to the network globally. 6. The New Zealand First party and all its members were removed from parliament as a result of a national election in 2020. However, they still exist as a political organization and may contest future elections. 

/release/christchurch-call-eliminate-terrorist-and-violentextremist-online-content-adopted

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