As part of “Media Watch on Hate Speech” project, a panel called “Hate Speech in the New Media” was organized on November 8, 2019 in Havak Hall with the contributions of Friedrich Naumann Foundation.

The panel opened by Orhan Şener’s short introduction. He is a media professional and member of Journalists’ Union of Turkey (TGS) Academy. He underlined that although the internet comes to mean as a democracy machine which encourages the connection of people and enhance freedom of speech especially in the early 2000s, it has turned into something that which also at the same time restrains the individual freedoms today. Talking about the production of hate speech in the new media, Şener underlined that that the internet made possible for the ordinary individuals to produce any content in an easier way, duplicate and disseminate the produced contents quickly.

After Orhan Şener introduced the speakers to the audience, Zeynep Özarslan, who is an academician and a member of the Alternative Informatics Association, gave a speech about the ecology of online hate speech. Özarslan introduced the new media and made a speech on how hate speech/ discriminatory discourse is produced in the new media platforms. She emphasized that the new media caused the emergence of “prosumers” in which the users are not only the consumers but also the producers thanks to the new media. In claiming that the algorithms in the search engines and social media platforms are not free from intervention, she underlined the difference between the conventional and new media through informing the audience about the digitalization of the contents circulated in the internet. Throughout her speech, she also presented the findings of various academic articles written on the ecology of the online world.

The second speaker Nilay Erdem, who is the current director of Facebook’s Content Policy Stakeholder Engagement for Europe, Middle East and Africa department, mentioned about Facebook's content rules and community policies. And she gave information about how Facebook follows a policy on hate speech, how they identify hate speech as a social media platform and which mechanisms they use to combat hate speech in Facebook. She presented Facebook’s definition of hate speech that is a direct attack on individuals because of their protected characteristics. Emphasizing the difficulty in detecting hate speech within the all contents which is produced by 2.4 billion people on Facebook, she underlined that their community policies ban the use of hate speech in the platform. The third speaker was Aras Türay who is a lawyer and also an academician. His speech was on the legal framework in Turkey. In his speech, he gave information about the relationship between hate speech-media-law and especially the regulations of Turkish penal code concerning hate speech and the adequacy/ effectiveness of these regulations.