#4 The Christchurch Call – guest: Dr. David Bromell

On 15 March 2019, a right-wing terrorist shot and killed 51 people in an attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. The assassin streamed his heinous act live via Facebook, the 17-minute live stream being viewed around 4,000 times before it was removed from the platform. Two months later, on 15 May 2019, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron convened the Christchurch Call summit, bringing together governments and technology companies. The goal: a voluntary commitment to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content on the Internet.

But when is it justified for the state to intervene in specific Internet content? How do we deal with the tension between protecting civil society and freedom of expression online? And how do global measures of regulation differ from one state to another? Dr. David Bromell is a Senior Associate of the Institute for Governance and Policy Studies (IGPS) at the Wellington School of Business and Government at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he conducts research on the regulation of online social media, Internet censorship and filtering, and other topics. His project as a CAIS Fellow looked in detail at the implications and successes of the Christchurch Call. In CAISzeit, Silke Offergeld (State Chancellery of North Rhine-Westphalia) and Dr. Matthias Begenat from the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) talk to him about extremist content and its regulation, about the role of platforms and politics in the fight against hate speech, and about pluralistic societies and freedom of expression online.

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Link list

Read the results of Dr. David Bromell’s research:

• https://www.cais.nrw/fellow_bromell_2020/
• Bromell, D. (2021). After Christchurch: Hate, harm and the limits of censorship. Series of 7 working papers, IGPS/CAIS. https://www.wgtn.ac.nz/igps/publications/working-papers

Tips for further reading:

• Emcke, C. (2016). Gegen den Hass. Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer Verlag.
• Miller-Idriss, C. (2020). Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
• Strossen, N. (2018). HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Waldron, J. (2012). The Harm in Hate Speech. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press.

Photo: CAIS, Begenat

#3 AI – Cliché and Evidence – guest: Prof. Dr. Laurenz Wiskott

There is a lot of discussion about artificial intelligence, and especially about what such systems should perhaps not be able to do and decide. But what can AI really do today? How does it work? And what should we all know about it in order to be able to join in the discussion?

Photo: Lisa Volkamer