"To be honest, I
do not understand the United States," said New Zealand Prime Minister
Jacinda Ardern
The White House announced
Wednesday it will not join a global initiative, launched in the wake of a
massacre in New Zealand two months ago, to tackle racist and extremist online
content.
"By not standing
alongside other world leaders to fight hate," said the Southern Poverty Law Center in
response, "President Trump has shown once again that he doesn't understand
the importance of white supremacy in fueling terrorism."
The Christchurch Call—which has the backing of 17 countries plus
the European Commission and eight major tech companies including Twitter,
Google, and Facebook—was launched Wednesday by New Zealand Prime Minister
Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron.
The initiative comes
exactly two months after the terrorist attack on worshipers at mosques in
Christchurch, New Zealand, in which a gunman who professed racist hatred
against Muslims and immigrants livestreamed his slaughter of 51 people.
"This attack was part of a horrifying new trend that seems to be spreading around the world," Ardern wrote in an op-ed at the New York Times last week. "It was designed to be broadcast on the internet."
She denounced the
"staggering" scale of the video's reach:
Original footage of
the livestream was viewed some 4,000 times before being removed from Facebook.
Within the first 24 hours, 1.5 million copies of the video had been taken down
from the platform. There was one upload per second to YouTube in the first 24
hours."
The right to free
expression, she wrote, "does not include the freedom to broadcast mass
murder."
Ending that threat,
she added, necessitates collaboration—thus the Christchurch Call.
It calls on
"governments and private corporations to prevent the posting of terrorist
content online, to remove it quickly when it does appear, and to prevent the
use of live-streaming to broadcast violence," as the Irish Times reported.
The Trump
administration gave the initiative a hard pass.
While saying it
supported the call's "overall goals," the White House's Office of
Science and Technology Policy said in a release that "the best tool to
defeat terrorist speech is productive speech, and thus we emphasize the
importance of promoting credible, alternative narratives as the primary means
by which we can defeat terrorist messaging."
In the wake the
Christchurch attacks, Ardern's government passed a ban on military-style semiautomatic
weapons—a move praised by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
"Sandy Hook
happened six years ago and we can't even get the Senate to hold a vote on
universal background checks w/ #HR8," the freshman congresswoman tweeted
at the time. "Christchurch happened, and within days New Zealand acted to
get weapons of war out of the consumer market."
The inaction has
Ardern scratching her head.
Speaking to CNN's
Christiane Amanpour, Ardern said this week: "Australia experienced a
massacre and changed their laws. New Zealand had its experience and changed its
laws. To be honest, I do not understand the United States."