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Facebook Launches New Initiative Against Online Extremism And Hate Speech

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On Monday evening, Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg announced in Berlin the launch of a new campaign against extremist speech on the Internet, called Online Civil Courage Initiative (OCCI). The initiative is supported by the German Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection, and is a partnership between Facebook, the London-based "think and do tank" Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation, one of Germany's foremost, independent NGOs, and the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence.

"We have repeatedly emphasized that Facebook is no place for the dissemination of xenophobia, hate speech or calls for violence. With this new initiative, we are convinced to better understand and respond to the challenges of extremist speech on the internet," Sandberg said.

The campaign, for which Facebook has pledged more than 1 million euros ($1.09 million), will be based on three main pillars: financial support to NGOs that are already countering online extremism; the development of best practices for use by NGOs, governments and other online services, and academic research initiatives to understand the roots of extremism and hate speech.

Facebook's move comes after the opening by Hamburg's state prosecutors of an investigation, in November, against the social network's managing director for Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, Martin Ott, accused of not doing enough to monitor and stop the spread of hate speech on the network.

Later, in December, Facebook, Google and Twitter agreed to delete hate speech posted to their sites in Germany within 24 hours.

The recent events of New Year's Eve in Cologne, where hundreds of women were sexually assaulted, allegedly by men of North African or Middle Eastern appearance, sparked a new wave of racists and violent posts on social media, and the issue seems bound to grow, as migratory movements bring a larger number of foreign people to Western Europe. Germany alone accepted more than 1 million refugees and migrants, last year.

As tensions grow, monitoring social networks in search of the first signs of trouble, could indeed make sense. On the other hand, the border between expressing 'extreme' ideas and making use of your right to free speech could sometimes be pretty hard to draw.

In France, for instance, the fight against Islamic extremism (and even anti-Israel activism) has inspired a number of emergency measures that, according to some commentators, seem to foster censorship, rather than free speech.

It's a thin, thin line. But, for now, one can only applaud Facebook's effort to make the Internet a more civilized place.