November 24, 1997

Nations Struggle With How to Control Hate on the Web

By ELIZABETH G. OLSON

ENEVA — The World Wide Web site of a group called the Charlemagne Hammerskins opens with an image of a man in a ski mask, carrying a gun and standing by a swastika.

The Charlemagne Hammerskins's site.

A click on a button below labeled, in French, "Access for sub-humans" yields a picture of what appears to be a concentration camp, accompanied by a not-so-veiled threat: "Be assured, we still have many one-way tickets for Auschwitz."

The site — one of a number created by groups with similar names and agendas — was carried by America Online's French service until this month, when it was closed by administrators who decided its content was offensive, said Michelle Gilbert, a spokesman for the online service.

"Putting a Nazi site online is illegal in France," she noted, because the country's laws prohibit material that incites racial hatred. The site, however, soon reappeared on an Internet server in Canada.

The skinhead site is hardly the only one vilifying various ethnic groups — most often, but not exclusively, blacks and Jews. One site, based on a computer in Sweden and purporting to belong to a group called Radio Islam, is devoted to questions about the reality of the Holocaust and features caricatures of evil-looking figures with black beards and exaggerated noses, wearing Stars of David.

The hatred that drips from these and other such Web sites, of course, exists independent of any technology and occurs in all media. Indeed, the photographs, monographs and cartoons on many sites are taken from other media, mostly print.

But for a group of conferees meeting in Geneva earlier in November under the sponsorship of the U.N. Human Rights Center, the question was how to apply European countries' legal prohibitions against hate speech to this new medium.

Michael Schneider, head of the Electronic Commerce Forum in Bonn, which represents German Internet service providers, said there had been several cases in which German authorities had demanded that providers eliminate sites or face prosecution. But he argued that Internet Service providers cannot control content, saying, "They are nothing more than carriers."

Still, Debra Guzman, director of an American organization, the Human Rights Information Network, called the Internet "a utopia for all kinds of hate groups, from neo-Nazis to anarchists" who are "targeting teen-age males with this propaganda."

Agha Shahi of Pakistan, the meeting's chairman, said sites that promote racism violate a global treaty against racial discrimination. The 148 countries that signed the pact "are under obligation to enact measures to eliminate it," he said.

The United States has signed the document, but has said it will not pass laws infringing free speech.

Conference members seemed at a loss as to how to balance what one speaker called "the two most powerful revolutions of the 20th century, those of human rights and information technology."

Opponents of regulation answered pleas for controls with descriptions of the practical, technological and legal difficulties of regulation.

The Internet "enables the instant marketing of hate and mayhem," said Marc Knobel, a Paris-based researcher who monitors Web sites for the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. The number of hate sites has nearly doubled to 600 in the last year, he said; he has catalogued 300.

It is often impossible to determine who is responsible for hate sites, most of which are based on computer servers in the United States.

There are at least 94 sites promoting a racial hierarchy that would classify Europeans by skin color, religion, ethnicity and even preferred language, he said. He counts 87 neo-Nazi sites, 35 white supremacist sites and 51 sites espousing terrorism.

It is often impossible to determine who is responsible for hate sites, most of which are based on computer servers in the United States. Among the sites is the White Aryan Resistance Hate Page. It caricatures a black youth, with a greatly distended mouth and protruding teeth.

The divergent histories of the United States, with its tradition of free-speech guarantees, and of Europe, with its World War II legacy of genocide and its recent history of ethnic strife in the Balkans, were evident at the conference. U.S. representatives argued that the Internet cannot be regulated; others sought ways to ban offensive sites and punish their sponsors.

A Web page, "even one advocating the supposed benefits of achieving racial purity, lacks the potential for imminent incitement" to violence, Philip Reitinger, a U.S. Justice Department attorney, said at the conference, adding that it is "not through government censorship that equality is well served; that principle — one which accords freedom of expression the highest respect — applies with equal force to the Internet."

With European laws varying country to country, border-jumping is one way to avoid accountability for hate messages. Hate site sponsors also can change service providers or take other routes to reopen their sites.

That appears to have happened with Robert Faurisson of Vichy, France. Knobel said that Faurisson was behind a Holocaust revisionist site that was shut down earlier this year. It then popped up on the Radio Islam site.

Faurisson, 68, denies having a Web site. Fined $20,000 in October by a French court for printed statements denying the Holocaust, Faurisson now denies his denial; in sarcastic tones, he said in a telephone interview, "I do believe in the gas chambers that I used to call magic."

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