Should hate speech and hate sites be banned from the internet - Essay Example

A website that promotes or uses hate speech against race, community, gender, person, religion, nationality etc is called a hate site. The people who are responsible for putting these things on the internet; not only take use text but graphics, sounds and animations are also used to influence their readers more. It might be used to convince people to join a certain group of people who work against some concepts or people, for e.g.; StormFront.org hosts a hate site against Martin Luther King, Jr who was an American activist and a leader.

More House College (2008) states that he is famous for his contributions in the African-American civil right movements. In the above mentioned site, content full of hate is written about the activist and claim that there is a long list of wrong actions done by him. The website terms him “modern day plastic God”. Such offending content about the man is possible due to the much proposed concept of “freedom of speech”. This concept focuses on the freedom of writing or saying anything that an individual feels is correct.

This verbal freedom also gives the writer the freedom of speech without being accountable for doing it. But what these people fail to understand is that with freedom of speech comes gereat responsibility as well. They have a responsibility to only convey the message which would not offend anyone or harm anyone in life. There are approximately 4 billion web pages on the internet therefore it is very difficult to ensure that no hate content is pated on them. There are different ways in which this problem is handled by different countries. For e.g.

Media Awareness Network (2009) states that according to the Canadian Human Rights Act Section 13, any text communicated by any telecommunication means (including internet) that may promote hatred towards a person or any of the following things is prohibited; Akdeniz et