Transcriber: Annika Bidner Reviewer: Raneem ABDULAZEEZ
"People like you come here and destroy this country!
How the f*** can you sit and defend people of color,
and make us Swedes feel like we're bad people,
only because we are racists."
What would happen if we all reached out to someone that we fear,
and actually got to know that person?
How would that change our world?
I received this message on Facebook.
I sometimes get messages like these from men who are angry,
and my first impulse is that I really don't want to open it,
because these messages are often including
racism, sexism or threats.
They are sent to frighten me, to silence me.
And it's fascinating,
all the feelings and thoughts I get from only two sentences.
Like if I had defended people of color from racists,
how does that destroy the country?
Most people of color in Sweden are actually Swedish.
Are racists feeling bad about being racists?
And if so, is that a bad thing?
I don't think a lot of people are racist to begin with.
I think racism is something that we do, something that is learned,
not something that we are.
Very few people are full-time racists.
My next impulse is that I want to write something nasty back.
And I have a lot of ideas....
But I'm over 40 years old, and born in the Middle East.
I have children that look like me.
I really don't have time for any more misunderstandings,
any more hatred.
So although full-time racists are rare, everyday racism is not,
so this is something I have been a subject to for all my life,
even before I had a language.
To be the scapegoat, to be excluded, discriminated, harassed.
So the nationalist populism scares me way more than these messages.
But what if we, the silent majority, who believe in human rights,
started to speak our minds?
Not to seek conflict, just share our truth, share our stories.
Maybe we could stop the polarisation.
Maybe we could start having meaningful conversations
with each other, and make some real change.
So that thought made me start counterspeaking three years ago.
I just started talking to people
who were sharing hateful posts and desinformation on social media,
and I just talked to them, asked a lot of questions,
and tried to connect.
I realized many more need to do this on a regular basis.
So I started a group on Facebook, and I called it "I am here",
because I am here too.
I added 20 of my friends,
and we were using the hashtag to find each other
in the comment fields, because they were pretty hateful.
And as the group grew, we developed the methods
and the strategies, to improve the work.
"People like you come here and destroy this country!!!"
I checked out the profile, and it isn't fake.
It's a young man, and he is almost half my age.
And by the look of what he shares on his profile, and how he interacts,
I get the feeling that he might not have a job.
And maybe not a whole lot of close friends.
And he writes posts that are misspelled, and grammatically incorrect,
so that's the first thing that I would have attacked,
if I was about to write something nasty back to him.
But the first rule that I made three years ago
was to always make the best interpretations
of what others say.
So this is extra important if we talk to someone online,
where we don't see the facial expression or we don't hear the tone of voice,
so a lot of information that we have in real life conversations is gone.
So always assume others mean well,
but reading his message again:
"People like me, who come here..."
I struggle.
Is he implying that I have come to his country,
that I have lived in two of his lifetimes?
So I need to read the message again and again, before I've calmed down,
and can read it as I have promised,
with empathy and understanding.
And when I finally read it like that,
it becomes clear to me that he is not in power.
I am.
He's the one reaching out to me, he's the one who's been contacting me.
I'm the older, I'm the one with a master's degree,
I'm the one with the voice.
To him, I'm the establishment.
I'm the reason why he hasn't become his dreams.
And yet I complain, and try to make him change.
To him, I'm the threat.
So, I follow my next rule, and write an answer back,
using a low impact approach.
So instead of answering with aggession, I stay calm.
"Hey! Thank you for getting in touch!
I really hope I'm not destroying our country.
I don't defend people of color,
as much as I defend equal rights for all people.
Do you think Sweden would become a better country
if we had more racism?"
Actually it's the low impact approach that got me thinking
that the #iamhere initiative would never lead to any clashes
even though we are interacting with extremists, nationalists
and trolls online, so maybe it was a little bit naive.
But I remember just minutes before pressing the button
of the first group in Sweden,
I said to my husband,
"How can empathy and reason pose a threat to anyone?"
Well, one year after having started the first group,
we had police protection on our house.
And my father recieved a bullet in the mail, for Father's Day,
and anyone who collaborated with us or were supporting us
were also being threatened.
Every day for months I read new lies about me
that were spread all over social media.
Sometimes several times a day.
And the threats with all the details of how and when I was going to get killed.
They got to me.
Every night I decided this couldn't go on.
I need to stop.
But in the morning, I started working anyway.
Because what really terrifies me is that we live in a world
where journalists and politicians and opinion formers
get politically motivated threats,
for saying everyone should have equal rights.
And that it works!
Politicians quit their jobs, journalists dare not cover certain issues,
and a lot of the people that were supporting us
said they couldn't anymore.
It wasn't worth taking that risk.
So apparently,
the low impact approach is a threat to some people.
It's a big threat to everyone
who spreads fear
and hate, in the first place.
To them, the silence of the majority is a must.
But we can't stay quiet.
We're a 150,000 people now in the global #iamhere network.
In the first group that I started, in Sweden, we're 75,000,
and in Germany we're 45,000,
and I started new groups with local representatives
in ten European countries.
And we're starting here in Greece soon.
I had replied to his message and I recieved this answer back.
"You want to silence anyone who don't think like you.
But we don't want Sharia laws and Islamism.
To me, you represent evil."
Okey, so maybe we're not hitting it off as best friends immidiately,
but at least we're talking now.
And all my impulses are back on combat mode again.
It's really rude of him to accuse me of stuff,
instead of just asking.
He obviously knows nothing about me.
My work is not about changing everyone else's views.
It's about standing up for my own.
It's about empowering each other,
to stand up for our own beliefs.
And we separate opinion from hate speech.
So for instance,
"I don't think there should be any immigrants
coming to this country"
that's an opinion.
But if you write,
"Muslims are cockroaches,
we need to stomp, stomp, stomp on them until they are all dead"
then that's hate speech.
We need to start to share our views,
start to share facts.
Silence encourages the oppressor, never the victim.
In the hateful comment fields, we focus on stopping the hate,
support the targeted, support each other,
and stop polarisation,
by talking to people that are stuck in other echo chambers than our own.
We are not trying
to reach professional trolls this way,
they are motivated
by political or economic reasons.
But we can reach others.
Beacuse I have seen it several times.
Again and again, it happens.
When people are starting commenting
after we have interacted in a comment field,
people who are not members of the group,
they also use a different tone, different words,
start using arguments instead of hate speech.
And we, the members, don't agree on anything,
other than to protect human rights.
We come from all political backgrounds.
And we believe it's possible
to have a reflective political debate online.
We also use the groups to practice civil courage together.
Because when you practice civil courage online,
you also get more courageous in real life too.
And after a couple of months of being in the group,
members don't even need it anymore.
Any every once in a while,
someone, we have supported, thanks us for our work.
Sorry for the Swedish here, but basically what they are saying
is they were about to give up
because they were receiving so many threats,
but our support helped them keep going.
Journalists, editors, politicians, activists, actors.
So that's my answer back to him.
I also try to find our common ground.
And I empathize on what we are sharing.
"I'm not trying to silence anyone, on the contrary,
I work to ensure that no one is silenced, to make people dare speak their mind.
Sharia laws and Islamist extremism, all extremism terrifies me too."
I don't agree to us being divided, him and I.
That's only what people who thrive from this polarisation want us to think.
Diving us into groups, pointing out the one group as a threat,
and it might be mainstream journalists, homosexuals or muslims, immigrants.
What ideas about this young man do I have that aren't true?
So, the best way to find out is of course to ask.
So I ask.
"What about you? What motivates you?"
That evening, I get to use all the tools that I've learned.
I listen, I stay with the core issue of the conversation,
and I don't wander off and tell him what he's like or what he thinks.
I ask him questions, lots of questions, follow up questions.
And when I'm not sure of what he means by a term or a definition, I ask him.
So we keep going, him and I.
We're still writing.
But I no longer struggle with my messages.
And he doesn't accuse me of anything anymore.
We laugh, we get inspired.
We talk about fear, about economy,
about anxiety, about love.
It turns out he has a lot of humor,
that he's kind and he is empathetic,
and that he wants to become my psychologist.
I think it would be a great idea if he follows up on that.
Because I tell him stuff that I don't even tell my friends.
So this man reached out to me, someone he thought represented evil,
someone that he feared.
And I can't say I liked it, at first
but I realized the other day that I was longing for his next message.
Because we've had the most exciting conversations
that I've had in a long time.
And just before I came on stage,
we were joking about me being so stressed out
about coming here today.
So he sent me this song; [Green Day - Panic Song]
That he thought I'd like, and I really do.
Thank you.
(Applause)