Hate tweeting up before the court

A test case to determine what constitutes hate speech on social media - by both the original author and those reacting to a post - is being brought to court by the SA Human Rights Commission.

The case against Afrikaans musician and self-styled activist Sunette Bridges for racism and hate speech will be heard in the Equality Court in Western Cape today.

The commission's spokesman, Isaac Mangena, said yesterday it had been receiving complaints about the racist content of Bridges' Facebook pages for years.

"There can be no doubt that there was speech that is so racist and so harmful that it is not protected and deserves the censure of the court.

"Racist and hate-filled comments should not be allowed to flourish in the public domain," he said.

Attempts to get comment from Bridges - who describes herself as an Afrikaner, artist, writer and human rights activist - were unsuccessful yesterday.

More than four years ago, she reportedly denied being racist despite posting on her Facebook page: "Of all the instruments one can use to build straight - a spirit level, profiles, measuring tape, fishing line, square - a sjambok is the only one that works for this Greenie of mine!!! Eish!!!!! Sx."

Bridges is part of the Red October movement made famous by controversial singer Steve Hofmeyr and which speaks out against what it refers to as "white genocide" of Afrikaners.

The need for a precedent to regulate comments on social media stems from the perception that racial hate speech is on the rise.

Last week, the Human Rights Commission said that complaints about racist posts now made up 20% of its cases.

Four months ago, students at Pretoria University were expelled from their residence after pictures of them dressed like domestic workers and in blackface appeared online.

Hofmeyr recently lost sponsors after feuding with ventriloquist Conrad Koch's puppet, Chester Missing, in court over his tweet that "blacks were the architects of apartheid. Go figure".

At the weekend, Nelson Mandela's former personal assistant, Zelda la Grange, set off a Twitter storm after bemoaning President Jacob Zuma's "constant go at whites" and telling investors to stay away from South Africa.

Penguin Book Group, the publishers of La Grange's Good Morning, Mr Mandela memoir, refused to comment on her tweets yesterday, but ANC secretary-general Gwede Mantashe called her a "spoilt white person". He was quoted in Beeld newspaper as saying, "She preaches non-racialism to protect white people. Now she's sowing racial division."

Haley McEwen, a researcher at the Wits University Centre for Diversity Studies, said social media was alerting the country to "the fact that racism is alive and well in South Africa, and that we are nowhere near ready to claim 'post-racialism'.

"So, in some sense, we can be grateful that these platforms allow us all to hear these views and alert us to the work that remains to be done in terms of transformation," she said.

McEwen said if true racial transformation was to be achieved, diversity needed to be embraced rather than presented as a challenge to overcome.

The frontman for music trio MiCasa, J'Something (real name Joao da Fonseca), yesterday blogged that he wanted to start a movement "where we stand up and declare we are not black nor are we white but we are human". Though commenting that healing and reform were needed, he wished that he would not have "this cloud over my head" that compartmentalised him with "people that took our country from us".

He received both backing (including from DJ Lulo Cafe, actress Zenande Mfenyana and radio and TV personality Sizwe Dhlomo) and criticism.

Zororo Mavindidze, a researcher at the Freedom of Expression Institute, cautioned that the perceived spike in racial incidents on social media was due to recent "high-profile incidents locally and not necessarily a substantive increase in such instances".

He warned that the same protections and limitations that applied to free expression on any platform should be respected.

"This should be the only reference guiding public engagement and not any form of imposed regulatory mechanisms that impede on the right to free expression," he said.