Communities taking safety into their own hands

Younus Imam was completing a master’s degree in disaster and emergency management at York University when the Quebec City mosque attack sent shock waves of fear and horror throughout Canada and around the world.

Beyond mourning the deaths of the six men who were brutally gunned down on Jan. 29, 2017, four years ago this Friday, the tragedy spurred Imam to research ways to improve mosque security. This eventually led him to join the Salam Project, which provides mosques with security audits and training. It is one of several examples of how vulnerable communities are taking their safety into their own hands.

The group includes law enforcement, military and emergency services professionals and has so far delivered over 120 public presentations, even during the pandemic.

“My mosque is where I find peace,” Imam told me recently from his home in Toronto. “I feel that it’s my duty and responsibility to do this work; to get out the message that safety is something that we can all practice.”

In memory of the massacre in Quebec City, as well as the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, and the mosque killings in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019, the group released a guide this month based on three pillars of security: prevention, preparation, and response.

“There have been two lethal attacks on mosques in Canada,” said Imam, referencing the stabbing death of a volunteer caretaker at a Toronto mosque late last year by a man with ties to a hate group. “We don’t want to stoke fear, but if something happens, we want people to ask themselves whether or not they have the tools to keep themselves safe.”

Providing people with ways to maintain their own personal safety was also the impetus behind another initiative that aims to provide a barrier against the pernicious nature of racist online content.

Ryan Chan, project lead on social media for the Chinese Canadian National Council for Social Justice, told me that while his organization strongly advocates for stricter government legislation to curb online hate, it isn’t waiting around.

The group approached Ishtiaque Ahmed, assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, to assist with the development of an online program that would allow users to identify anti-Asian racist social media posts and remove them from a user’s feed.

Chan said the urgency to act became clear at the start of the pandemic when anti-Asian sentiment was particularly strong, impacting on people’s lives.

“Things were super difficult in the early months of the pandemic and online hate speech was at the centre of that,” he said in an interview, describing how he faced harassment and verbal abuse, as did friends and family.

A survey last June by Angus Reid found that almost one third of Chinese Canadians reported being physically attacked during the pandemic. Another study by Moonshot UK found that online searches for violent, right-wing extremist content increased by up to 324 per cent between January and April of last year in six Canadian cities.

Furthermore, a new poll released Monday by the Canadian Race Relations Foundation and Abacus Data found that racialized Canadians are three times more likely to have experienced online hate than those who are non-racialized.

For Ahmed, permitting hate to fester unchallenged online risks driving marginalized groups off social media platforms altogether. Along with filtering out offensive tweets from personal news feeds, Ahmed’s team is also developing a “checker” software (in the form of a browser plug-in) that would let the creator of a potentially offensive tweet know when their content could be hateful or spreading misinformation before they post. The prototype should be publicly available by the spring.

By then, we expect the federal government to have finally tabled new legislation to hold social media companies accountable for the hate spewed on their platforms and the introduction of stricter measures to prevent far-right, white supremacist groups from mobilizing. After all, community action can only do so much.