Yahoo! racist chatrooms 'untouchable'
Published: 23 May 2001 12:45 BST
Yahoo! US is hosting racist propaganda on its Messenger chatrooms, but British police admit the Internet portal is doing nothing wrong under British law.
Six weeks after Yahoo! UK was compelled to take action against ten paedophiles found by ZDNet News to be abusing its Messenger chat service, rooms that incite racial hatred are proliferating on the same service.
User-created chatrooms entitled "White Pride White Power KKK" and "National White Pride Association" are disseminating racist voice-chat to Internet users -- including those in the UK where incitement of racial hatred is a criminal offence. But the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) admits that under current legislation there is no way of prosecuting a content provider for hosting racially offensive content.
"Racist organisations who you would expect to take to court in the UK know the law and tend to stay within it," said David Kerr, chairman of IWF. "Those organisations who might be at risk in the UK tend to set up their servers in the US and are pretty much untouchable."
The Metropolitan Police's Computer Crimes Unit confirmed that despite the publication of racist material on the Net being technically illegal, there is nothing that can be done under UK law if the company's servers are located in the US. "If the complaint was of a mild nature we would contact the Internet Service Provider (ISP) and ask them to take the offending content down, but all enquiries are otherwise forwarded straight to the US," said a spokesman at the Computer Crimes Unit.
The Public Order Act 1986 is the most relevant piece of legislation that can be applied to racism on the Internet, which makes it a criminal offence to incite any form of racial hatred. To date there have been no successful prosecutions for racial material appearing on the Net, meaning that there is no case law to suggest what is illegal in the UK.
"The present law isn't particularly easy to get a prosecution from -- if the new government and ministers want to do something in this area they need to look at reframing legislation," said Kerr.
Racial hatred on the Internet has taken a back seat to child pornography in the political agenda, with the government showing greater enthusiasm for cracking down on paedophiles abusing Internet chatrooms. Law enforcement authorities agree that in the Internet age, paedophiles have become the acceptable group for regulators to target, whereas there is still a political stigma attached to dealing with racial hatred on the Web.
According to Kerr there has been a tendency for the government and police to treat racism on the Internet as an exclusive Web site issue, as these are more easily traceable and relatively permanent compared to newsgroups and chatrooms. "Newsgroups are more difficult to monitor, as people can post content from anywhere, whilst chatrooms are the most difficult to get a record of real-time transactions from, based on the short amount of time that such material is around."
"There is little point in enforcing action that highlights the existence of these rooms but is unable to close them down," said a spokesperson at the Commission for Racial Equality.
Yahoo! US would make no comment about its racist chatrooms at the time of posting.
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