Yair Cohen speaks to BBC on increase of online homophobic attacks

US law changes necessary as well as social media platform responsibility to counter extremism

Yair Cohen talked with Al Jazeera earlier this month about the connection between online gaming message boards and terrorism, following the aftermath of the El Paso shooting. 

The terrorist posted a white nationalist manifesto on 8chan (shut down, for now) before sharing the post on social media platforms and then proceeded to kill 20 plus people in a supermarket. 

There is a strong connection between the gaming community and extremists and social media platforms need to do a better job of policing since their sites promote the amplification of the hate speech. 

Should sites like this even exist? Al Jazeera asked Yair Cohen

Yair: Whether sites like this should exist, depends very much on how far we are willing to stretch the right to free speech. Each society and country places its own limits and carries out its own balancing act. The US has The Communications Decency Act which provides discussion forum operators such as 8chan (and now there are others replacing 8chan, using the same format), immunity from prosecution in relation to third party posts.
The reality is that the immunity exists, regardless of the question whether the website is being monitored or not. To remove these sorts of websites from the internet, there will need to be a change in the law in the US.

Al Jazeera: How can they be better policed and should they be shut down? 

Yair Cohen: The US government has found a creative way of policing websites such as 8chan (and Discord). They started to put pressure on public companies such as Google and Bing to completely delist links to those sites from mainstream search results. However, internet users have found ways around this ban on Google by using images which are much more difficult to identify as harmful. They post these images, with content from 8chan on social media networks, such as Twitter, Instagram and Google Image libraries.

Al Jazeera: Do they play a significant role in instigating hate and causing scenarios such as mass shootings?

Yair Cohen: Yes. There is evidence that websites such as 8chan did are used as breeding grounds for young extremists. Ironically, because those websites have been effectively outlawed by the mainstream search engines, they become increasingly attractive to teenagers and to anyone else who feel the need to rebel. Previous mass shooters have acquired a status of heroes amongst some extremists, who follow the murderers’ vision and mode of operation.

On the day of the mass shooting, 8chan users were commentating about the massacre and calling the terrorist 'our guy' as well as congratulating him on the amount of people that he had killed. 

Al Jazeera: Does the overall acceptance of online shooting games also "normalise" shootings?

Yair Cohen: Indeed. There is clear evidence that in some instances, online gaming channels normalise extremist websites like 8chan did and now there are others. This is where gamers can move on particularly violent and offending conversations whilst avoiding the risk of being banned from certain gaming platforms.

Al Jazeera: What can be done about that?

Yair Cohen: Tighter control over social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, to be able to identify mass sharing of offending images. At the same time, there are increasing calls in the US for change in the law, which could find operators of discussion forums liable to posts by their users under certain circumstances. The US government are currently citing 'Freedom of Speech' issues as justification to refrain from joining an international initiative in reigning in extremist content on social media but Freedom of Speech does not exist if marginalised groups are being threatened, attacked and killed digitally and physically. 

Yair Cohen, Social Media Expert and Internet Law Lawyer, founder of Cohen Davis, is also the author of The Net is Closing: Birth of the e-police. It is a powerful debate about the future policing of the internet and is a fascinating insight into the internet and our society.

Yair Cohen BBC interview on new investigatory powers in the UK

Last year Security Services in the United States told Yahoo
it had to create and install a backdoor system to its email operations system
so that it will be made easier for the state to spy on users’ data when spying becomes a necessity. 

Both the US government and Yahoo were criticised at the time but a
year on, the UK government is about to pass a law which will require all telecommunication to build into any service they develop, a backdoor entry for the government.  

This sounds bad but it might, after all, not be such a bad idea because at least, when data spying is being governed by law, this allows to create checks and balances on a far more transparent basis than currently exists.

Legal action against facebook by 14 year old girl over publication of naked images.

Yair Cohen, social medial lawyer  speaks to LBC Nick Ferarri about the recent case where Facebook has been accused of 'child abuse' by lawyer for a 14-year-old girl at a court hearing in Belfast. A high court judge refused Facebook’s application to have the claim by the girl struck out. Is Facebook liable for images posted on its social media site?

Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Media Websites

Corporate social responsibility might no longer be a term mainly associated with saving the rain forest or with giving a fair deal to coffee farmers. This well chewed term could soon have a different meaning altogether.
If you want,  social media users are similar to coffee farmers. But only in the sense that they work hard for very little. Social media users work for their masters by producing tones of internet content and false relationships and by perform acts of indiscretion and public exposure. Social media sites will be made redundant without hard working users in the same way that coffee chains will struggle to survive without an army of coffee farmers. In fact, social media users are more like cyber-slaves than coffee farmers. Read the full article: Social Media Websites and Corporate Social Responsibility
By: Yair Cohen
Social Media lawyer

Internet Law Expert Tip of the Day

There is an old saying that “the first step to getting out of a hole is to stop digging”.

If you discover that your online reputation has been tarnished on a rough website and that bad results are appearing against your name upon every Google search, do yourself a favour and overcome the natural tendency of constantly clicking on the link to the bad result. A defamatory remark on the internet is similar to a toothache – we feel almost a compulsive need to touch and feel the pain – in case it has already gone without us noticing it.

Sadly, with defamatory remarks on the internet, the more you click the more powerful they become. Google gives priority to popularity. So every click makes the bad comment more dominant and in Google’s view also more important, which means that the defamatory remark will constantly be climbing up the search engine ladder with more people seeing it.

 When people see a link to a defamatory page against them, they tend to tell friends and family about it with the result that the link to the bad comment becomes very popular. The more people click on the link to see what is being said about their friend/family, the more likely it is that the link will remain at the top of the search engine.

So remember that the first step to getting out of a hole is to stop digging.

An internet law expert will use special tools to examine the link and the defamatory page regularly without actually adding to its popularity. So if you are unfortunate enough to have enemies who have taken upon themselves to defame your character online – make sure you don’t tell the world about it and take legal advice from an internet law expert as soon as possible.

Author: Yair Cohen

Social media lawyer