A/78/195 28. While it can be suggested that some two thirds of hate speech on social media targets minorities, most social media platforms pay little direct attention to minorities in their community standards or content moderation guidelines, or even fail to mention them specifically. TikTok, for example, refers in its community guidelines to such matters as trafficking or trade in live animals, and any part of an endangered animal, and defines hate speech or behaviour as content that attacks a person or group because of protected attributes, such as race, ethnicity and religion. However, the guidelines do not contain a single reference to the word “minority”. While endangered animals legitimately get a mention, minorities, unfortunately and counter-intuitively, do not, despite the fact that minorities are overwhelmingly the targets and victims of most hate speech on social media (A/HRC/46/57, para. 78). 29. Thus far, no significant steps have been taken towards implementing any of the recommendations the Special Rapporteur presented in his thematic report on hate speech, social media and minorities, including the recommendation that States, the United Nations and OHCHR should initiate a process to develop a global voluntary code of conduct for social media platforms to combat hate speech and should draft guidelines on combating hate speech targeting minorities on social media, as a matter of urgency (ibid., para. 91), nor have his warnings on the increased dangers and potential harm regarding the use and misuse of artificial intelligence yet yielded any noticeable effect (ibid., paras. 73 and 74). 30. Perhaps in no small part because of this lack of action, hate speech on social media targeting minorities remains largely unimpeded, even in creasing and fuelling continuing racist, toxic, hostile and even violent behaviour against many minorities worldwide because of an insufficient focus on those who are its main targets, namely, minorities. D. Minorities and the prevention of violent conflicts 31. One of the main focuses and thematic priorities of the Special Rapporteur has been to clarify the close link between the denial of the human rights of minorities and the conditions leading to violent conflicts. These issues gained a great deal of attention and interest during the 2021 regional forums and were highlighted in the recommendations resulting from those forums and from the fourteenth session of the Forum on Minority Issues, held in Geneva in 2021. 32. The Special Rapporteur warned in his 2022 report that most contemporary conflicts were internal conflicts and were rooted in the long-standing denial of human rights obligations, and in particular in the discrimination against and exclusion of compact or significant minority group populations, skewed patterns of political participation and representation and the distribution of socioeconomic goods, and the repression or dismissal of the culture, language or religion of those minorities (A/HRC/49/46, para. 42). 33. He pointed out that, generally, the patterns shown in most of these conflicts were similar, involving long-standing claims of exclusion and inequalities of a significant and concentrated minority population that raised consistent red flags from a human rights point of view and provided potential warning signs for avoiding violent conflicts. Even efforts to alleviate inequalities and promote development often sidestepped minorities or Indigenous communities, and therefore risked add ing fuel to grievances of exclusion and discrimination and accentuating the cleavages that could lead to conflicts (ibid., para. 55). 34. The Special Rapporteur submitted that the key to conflict prevention was for the United Nations and other members of the international community to acknowledge directly that most conflicts involved minorities or the instrumentalization of their 23-15818 9/21

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