Facebook Group Sparks Uproar

Facebook profiles have long been a medium of self-expression for the site’s users. But what happens when self-expression crosses into the realm of hate speech?

Created by a user named “Variable Variable,” a Facebook group using an obscenity to denounce Islam in its title had attracted nearly 850 members as of 6 p.m. yesterday. The group’s description begins by stating that “The Quran contains many lies and threats. Islam is false, no god exists, and someone should say that loud and clear.” The description later extends its antipathy to religion to Christianity and Judaism as well.

A slew of Facebook groups have sprung up against this anti-Islam group, some threatening to quit Facebook altogether if the group is not removed.

According to John G. Palfrey Jr. ’94, the executive director of Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, while the laws for free speech are the same in cyberspace as in other contexts, hate speech on the internet poses a greater problem than in other media.

“More people might see the harmful speech, it may last for longer online, and it may be repeated more extensively online than in real space,” Palfrey wrote in an e-mail.

“Intermediaries generally don’t have any liability for the harmful speech of their users,” he added.

The challenge Facebook now confronts is how to maintain freedom of speech without making the site a haven for hate speech.

“Facebook will have to decide whether they want to go further than the law would require them to go in this context,” Palfrey said. “As Facebook continues to succeed in its effort to become the operating system for the social web, these types of policy problems are going to compound.”

In an e-mail to The Crimson, a Facebook representative did not comment on the anti-Islam group, but provided a link to the site’s “Terms of Use” page, which forbids users from posting “any content that we deem to be harmful, threatening, unlawful, defamatory, infringing, abusive, inflammatory, harassing, vulgar, obscene, fraudulent, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable.”

Ola Aljawhary ’09, the Islamic knowlege officer of the Harvard Islamic Society, said she believes that the attention paid to the anti-Islam Facebook group only exacerbates the problem.

“These groups are crying for attention, and by creating a whole group trying to combat that group, you’re giving them the attention they crave,” Aljawhary said. “You should ignore them, because it’s not worth the time or effort to combat them—and then they get a Crimson article written on them.”

—Staff writer Margot E. Edelman can be reached at medelman@fas.harvard.edu.