It seems to me a repeating pattern that once freedom of thought, speech and expression is limited for essentially any reason, it will have unintended consequences.
Once the tools are in place, they will be used, abused and inevitably end up in the hands of someone you disagree with, regardless of whether the original implementer had good intentions.
As such I’m personally very averse to restrictions. I’ve thought about the question a fair bit – there isn’t a clear cut or obvious line to draw.
Please elaborate and motivate your answer. I’m genuinely curious about getting some fresh perspectives.
This is quite frankly, ass-backwards reasoning.
If legitimate laws are getting twisted and abused to fuck with people by governments, then those same government will just pass new laws to fuck with people if they want to.
Literally every western country in the world has anti-hate speech laws, and by and large they are not problematic. It’s only in dumb-fuck america that everything needs to be black and white and you can’t draw subtle nuanced lines. Yeah, the UK probably errs too much on the side of repressing speech, like when they banned Palestine Action for vandalizing a military base, yet at the same time, I just saw a pro-palestine protest shut down the main tourist district of Scotland today, and the police just made sure everyone was safe from external threats. No suppression of any anti-Israeli or pro-Palestine speechse.
It’s very easy to write hate-speech laws, it’s dumb as fuck to think they’re more problematic than not having them.
You claim these laws aren’t a problem, then mention that governments are in fact abusing them literally right now.
Really showing off your capacity for nuance in that comment
Say what you like, but I just can’t think of any way to write hate speech laws that isn’t incredibly abusable. Handing the government an excuse to punish to people is inherently dangerous. While it’s certainly necessary in some instances, I think we should be very, very careful about adding to the list of things you can get thrown in prison for.
There is no situation where something is not abusable. doesn’t mean you cannot have that thing. It means you figure out how to improve the consequences for the abuser.
Right, but there are degrees of abusable. There’s a difference between “yes, you could abuse this thing” and “this thing will inevitably be abused.” In my opinion, hate speech laws fall into the latter category. I know of too many cases of them being abused… and worse, they don’t even seem to do much to prevent hatred. See this article.
That’s an utterly trash article.
No, I think that cherry picking extreme cases of people trying to abuse hate speech laws, not discussing the final outcomes of those cases including when the accuser was punished for abusing hate speech laws, and not examining their positive cases in any way shape or form, is obviously fucking asinine and doesn’t prove the point the author thinks.
No, I wouldn’t.
you can effectively combat anti-Semitism, but still end up with more of it, if you start with higher levels of anti-Semitism
there are a million other factors effecting anti-Semitism, drawing a causal relationship between high anti-Semitism rates and whether or not they have hate-speech laws is asinine, kindergarten level, “reasoning”
hate-speech laws are not just about anti-Semitism, but about literally every other hateful prejudice as well
The author of that article is, quite frankly, a fucking idiot at best, or an ideologue intentionally trying to deceive you at worst.
The on the ground reality is that in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Europe, etc, groups like the KKK will be investigated and prosecuted, and in the US they won’t. If you think hate speech laws are so bad you’re gonna have to find enough cases of abuse that they cancel out all the cases of far right terror groups being successfully disrupted, and here’s the thing, you won’t, because they don’t exist.
There’s a reason that hate-speech laws are broadly popular in the countries that have them.