By Adam Hollingworth
Internet safety watchdog Netsafe says it's disturbed by the growing number of racist hate speech pages turning up on social networking sites like Facebook.
The race relations conciliator says Facebook has been slow to respond to complaints, and when one site is taken down another will rear up in its place.
A friend of actor Ian Hughes alerted him to a Facebook page with 9000 followers about things Maori supposedly never say.
The comments, which 3 News has chosen not to show, denigrate Maori education standards, honesty and even cleanliness. Mr Hughes was disgusted.
“It was obviously racist, it was just a site full of all of the sort of nasty preconceptions and all of the worst stuff that's doing nobody any favours.”
Mr Hughes asked Facebook to pull the site, but he, and others, received a standard reply.
“They said: ‘We're looking at it further but we can't take it down.'”
Eventually a Taranaki school forced the students behind the page to withdraw it, only for another page to rear up about things Maori supposedly always say.
Netsafe executive director Martin Cocker says these pages just keep coming back.
“[It’s a] bit like the game whack-a-mole or something, you're just constantly hitting a panel and knocking pages down and they keep popping up.”
The internet safety group is receiving three or four such complaints a day.
“It's certainly got worse recently,” says Mr Cocker.
Race relations conciliator Joris de Bres says he too is getting more complaints, but social websites are slow to respond.
“They do have, or attempt to have, standards or codes of ethics on Facebook, Twitter YouTube, all of those have them,” he says. “I think the real problem is that they don't enforce them very much.”
Neither Facebook nor those behind the latest racist page responded to 3 News.
The Government is writing legislation to tackle online hate speech but that won't be heard until next year. Mr De Bres' message until then is, if you're offended, complain and the message will eventually get through.
3 News