Emmanuel K. Ngwainmbi

1. I propose that we collectively suffer the effects of prejudicial speech as a human family, but we do not deserve it. Instead, we need to make collective efforts to limit it in our communities. Just as Jung (1981) explains that we have the ‘psychological energy’ that pushes us to achieve self-realization, we can consciously utilize this energy to bring common good for everyone.
2. Lawmakers and law enforcement teams adopt and implement strategies globally and simultaneously across all platforms without sharing the sensitive information of individual users or commercial secrets. The United Nations Assembly, which meets annually to promote peace initiatives among nations, can significantly promote racial harmony. Every country hosts people with different racial backgrounds.
3. If the organization has a comprehensive policy signed by member states, they would likely implement it properly.
4. The UN Human Rights Commission should review national customs and study prejudicial speech patterns in each country before producing a comprehensive strategic plan to enable nations that impose restrictions on free expressions with laws tied to national culture and religion.
   However, clinical studies show that prejudicial speech can be prohibited without international policies. Although such prohibitions mean a permissive approach would undermine free speech, complicating a society’s ability to progress on peace terms.
5. What makes abolishing prejudicial speech more complicated is that doing so would curtail civil liberties—deny people their fundamental right to express themselves. However, prejudicial speech can be censored at an institutional or corporate level because those entities have their own rules of engagement. For example, speech would be more limited in the military. The underlying values are hierarchy and authority than at a university where the central importance is expressing ideas.
6. It is necessary to enhance the individual’s perceptions per the American psychologists’ Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham in 1955—the Johari model. They identify four quadrants in each individual’s personality, namely personal information, feelings, and motivations about the person, and show whether the information is known or not known by the person and other people.
   
   a. Institutions’ Responsibilities
   
   
7. Both the hate speaker and victim need to be educated in the early stages of life. To that end, we make the following propositions:
   
   1. Lessons on cultural understanding should be taught from kindergarten to college level
   2. People aged three (cognitive period) should be trained to be critical thinkers, to understand the characteristics of advertisements, government policies, and extremist values stressing factors that have a long term negative impact on the group, community, and nation
   3. Companies should require cultural training for candidates and periodic socio-cultural training for their employees
   4. Intercultural communication courses should be mandatory for middle, high school, and university students.
   5. Federal state governments funds should include profit and non-profit businesses requesting funding should show proof of comprehensive cultural awareness programs
   6. The state governments should work with language experts to create a standard, neutral daily national language that binds all ethnic communities
   7. Universities and colleges should use virtual learning tools such as documentaries to teach anti-racist speech to students. It should be a required course for all undergraduate students.
   8. Persons with a unique intersection of cultural identities are best placed to serve as instructors and advisers to combat prejudicial speech and racism.

b. Limiting global social media communication

George Washington University researchers, in 2019, published a study that showed how prejudicial speech evolves online and how clusters interconnect to spread their narratives and attract and recruit people. US News also published information on this topic produced by social media researchers. Using insights from its online prejudicial speech mapping model, the team developed intervention strategies that social media platforms could implement. According to the researchers, social media companies would need to:

1. Reduce the power and number of large online hate clusters by banning the smaller groups that feed into them.
2. Dismantle online hate groups by randomly banning a small group of individual users so that the global cluster network could fall apart.
3. Set large clusters against one another by supporting anti-hate collections in identifying and directly engaging with hate clusters.
4. Establish large intermediary groups to engage with hate groups to help bring out the differences in ideologies and make them question their stance.

Since anyone, including racist groups, can post data on the internet, recruit and motivate vulnerable and like-minded people to block websites with content designed to foster racist discourses and activities. Countries should consider ways of countering prejudicial speech in the media through ethics and self-regulation. A quick way to achieve this is by educating journalists to understand prejudicial speech in their respective languages of expression and raise awareness at all levels. UNESCO blog writer Poni Alice JameKolok (2019) offers five ways to counter prejudicial speech, including the need for the media to raise awareness of individuals and groups’ political, social, and cultural rights.

If established electronic and non-electronic media reflect the freedoms and roles of journalists in creating and promoting peaceful societies and educate the masses about prejudicial speech accordingly, the volume of prejudicial speech would decrease worldwide.

However, I recommend the following preliminary steps:

1. An appointed UN agency should study the causes, spread, and impact of prejudicial speech worldwide and (a.) work with country representatives. It should prepare a feasible global strategy to combat prejudicial speech. (b.) Based on the international plan, it should establish pragmatic universal policies to handle transnational prejudicial speech practices.
2. Countries should shape prejudicial speech laws based on their own cultures and the universal plan and take action on legally defined cases allowed by international law. They should impose fines on violators and use the funds to train at-risk groups and individuals.
3. In conjunction with IT companies, researchers should develop software that could help regulators and enforcement agencies implement new interventions
4. Other countries should replicate best practices and share them on social media platforms. Here are a few examples of best practices in some countries that countries can replicate:
   • The Indian government has new social media rules, including ordering platforms to remove posts within twenty-four hours based on offenses and obtain the user’s identity.
   • In 2018, Germany, in a bid to end the Nazi legacy, made a law requiring large social media platforms to remove posts considered “manifestly illegal” within twenty-four hours. However, as Laub (2019) states, Human Rights Watch raised concerns that the threat of hefty fines would encourage social media platforms to be “overzealous censors.

It might be challenging to block websites, particularly in the US, where free expression is a human right. At the level of professional information and news management, this chapter recommends the following actions:

• Regulating social media flows by enhancing press freedom: Press freedom can be improved through media laws and ethics education.
• Having the newsroom serves as a prejudicial speech police office. The newsroom should have a program to monitor, compile, and evaluate incidents and trends in crimes engendered by prejudicial speech and bring them to the attention of state authorities.
• Encourage conflict-sensitive reporting and multi-cultural awareness campaigns: Conflict-sensitive reporting would help dispel the “us” against “them” fallacy. Journalists should be taught conflict-sensitive reporting skills. Multi-cultural awareness campaigns should emphasize knowledge about and respect for the diversity of cultures and traditions. Journalists must exercise professional standards, write articles, air programs, and even speak with people without taking sides (JameKolok, 2019).
• Responsible reporting of prejudicial speech—Victims and witnesses should be encouraged to report crimes related to prejudicial speech. Most people do not recognize prejudicial speech or take it seriously because most victims do not know where to report the cases. Some victims do not realize that they are victims of prejudicial speech. Thus, each country should have a hotline connected to the police department that victims of prejudicial speech can dial.
• Public institutions, particularly those operating with available funds, should create stringent rules against racial harassment and copiously implement them. Local and state governments should withhold funding for institutions that break the rules. The institutions should be paying fines for breaking the law.
• Non-academic avenues should be encouraged, such as creating opportunities for demonstration projects and discourse and mediation and counseling provisions for all students.
• Minority student organizations should also be strongly supported, multi-cultural events and forums, and workshops to discuss controversial subjects (Bellacossa, 1993).
• The actions in the next segment should be undertaken to end prejudicial speech among Caucasian-Hispanic, based on the findings of a previous study conducted by this author:
  1. Cultural groups from both communities in the US—Caucasian and Hispanic—should organize events and training where knowledge on the socio-cultural values of each group can be shared.
  2. Hispanic and American cultural groups should organize more conferences on myths and stereotypes to allow scholars, program managers, and experts on foreign relations and multi-cultural communication to exchange ideas and develop cultural awareness activities in American suburban communities (Ngwainmbi, 2013, p. 376) where knowledge on Hispanic and American culture is scarce.

c. Responsibilities of social media CEOs

Social media CEOs should collaborate with their respective national governments to monitor prejudicial messages and remove content that threatens to disrupt the lives of vulnerable people in the country and destabilize the political systems of emerging nations. They should work with lawmakers to craft and implement policies using platforms they have created, such as Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Facebook owners in America have been able to weed out threats. We understand that Online platform business models depend on maximizing, reading, or viewing times. Facebook and similar platforms generate financial profit by enabling advertisers to target audiences with extreme precision (Laub, 2019). Thus, it is in their best interest to attract people to online communities to spend the most time. Social media CEOs should use their moral compass to create a policy manual for hate language and post it online to address this. Violators should have their accounts blocked, and perpetrators were given a fine. Repeat offenders should be arrested, tried in court, and pay a hefty fine or serve time in jail.