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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

The definition of hate speech and its boundaries has been thoroughly explored by the US supreme court. A taste of it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_in_the_United_Stat...

THANK YOU! That was helpful to read.

This is my favorite bit, from right at the top: "Hate speech in the United States is not regulated, in contrast to that of most other liberal democracies.[1] The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that hate speech is legally protected free speech under the First Amendment. The most recent Supreme Court case on the issue was in 2017, when the justices unanimously reaffirmed that there is effectively no "hate speech" exception to the free speech rights protected by the First Amendment."

I like that part too, because it also brings up the notion that US version of near absolute free speech is not the only on that exists. That other countries have banned hate speech without falling into totalitarianism, banning legitimate political discourse, or falling into the other traps that a "slippery slope" argument pushes.

Most of the governments of those countries have been around since the end of WWII

What happens long-term when the people whose memories of the horrors of the early 20th century die off? That is still an open question.

==What happens long-term when the people whose memories of the horrors of the early 20th century die off?==

Surely you could think of race/religious/class based horrors that have occurred since WWII. There have been genocides in places like Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Yemen this century. There is an ongoing one in Darfur, Sudan [1]. Rwanda [2] and Bosnia and Herzegovina [3] had genocides in the 90s.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/witnessing-genocide-in-sudan-08...

[2] https://www.history.com/topics/africa/rwandan-genocide

[3] https://www.history.com/topics/1990s/bosnian-genocide

Curiously, some of those horrors are actually counterexamples to the way we think about these things. For example, the Rwandan Hutus were historically oppressed by the Tutsis as well as European imperialists (who reinforced the dominant position of the Tutsis). Prior to the genocide, it would have been relatively easy to write off Hutu nationalism as sympathetic and understandable while being more concerned with Tutsi nationalism (especially since there were Tutsi militias roaming the countryside.)

Likewise, I don't know about Bosnia, but it would be pretty understandable to sympathize with the Serbian attitude towards Croatia declaring independence from Yugoslavia because the last time Croatia declared independence from Yugoslavia, it was to literally collaborate with the Nazis. So Croatian nationalism would have seemed vaguely fascistic and threatening, but Serbian nationalism, not so much.

The reason censorship doesn't actually prevent genocide is because any ideology that's popular enough to actually inspire a genocide is too popular to be censored.

==The reason censorship doesn't actually prevent genocide is because any ideology that's popular enough to actually inspire a genocide is too popular to be censored.==

Do you have a source for this claim?

It seems to me that in every case where "ideology" plays a large role in people doing horrible things to each other, one of the common threads is propaganda (often built around de-humanizing the opposing side). Post-WWII Europe might be the best example of what a society with "censored" or regulated propaganda looks like.

> Do you have a source for this claim?

It's my own opinion.

> It seems to me that in every case where "ideology" plays a large role in people doing horrible things to each other, one of the common threads is propaganda (often built around de-humanizing the opposing side). Post-WWII Europe might be the best example of what a society with "censored" or regulated propaganda looks like.

My argument is that you cannot trust anyone to apply a fair standard for which propaganda could lead to people doing horrible things to each other and which propaganda could not. The far greater risk is for such a mechanism to be hijacked by the very demagogues it is intended to disarm.

It's easy. First, you pick out the most extreme and unpalatable examples of your opposition. Then you scapegoat them as a public menace worthy of censorship. Then you exploit the powers of censorship you've received and apply them more broadly. The rise of Hitler[1], for example, followed this literal pattern--he convinced the people that the Communist Party was enough of a public threat that they should be banned, received the executive powers necessary to do so, and then banned the Social Democrats too, for good measure.

It's understandable that post-WWII Europe has the particular set of scar tissue necessary to prevent the rise of another Hitler. The only problem is that Hitler himself rose to power on the back of the scar tissue that post-WWI Europe developed to prevent the rise of another Lenin.

I was thinking yesterday of the EU copyright law. Wouldn't something like that not be possible in the US due to the first amendment?

The US has plenty of history of censorship. The "imminent lawless action" standard was only established in 1969. Prior to that, for example during and shortly after World War I, teaching people how to evade the draft or advocating for them to do so was commonly prosecuted as "sedition". Eugene V. Debs ran for President on a Socialist ticket a number of times, many of which were from prison because he had been convicted of sedition.

This seems absurd to us today, but it was justified the same way people justify banning hate speech today. Even the cliche about "crying fire in a crowded theater" was coined in one of the Supreme Court cases that upheld the laws against sedition, as well as the more general arguments about whether the enemies of open, tolerant societies should be able to weaponize that openness and tolerance against them. If you squint, a lot of the rationale against banning hate speech looks a lot like they're just trying to make the world safe for democracy.

(Was the German Empire really an existential threat to the safety of democratic, open societies around the world? Is white nationalism?)

> other countries have banned hate speech without ... banning legitimate political discourse

This is, of course, entirely a matter of opinion.

IIUC, it becomes discerned by US law if someone acts on violent rhetoric. Then, the violent rhetoric can be used as evidence that the actions were part of a hate crime.

I'm 99% certain this is wrong. The boundary is "imminent" "lawless" action.

If your speech inspires someone to shoot someone an hour from now, it's legal. It wasn't imminent. If you speech will inspires someone to commit a non-violent but illegal action immediately, such as buying some drugs, it's potentially illegal (outside of 1st amendment protection).

I agree with you. Apologies; I was unclear. Scenario in my head: actor (a) spreads hate speech, actor (b) goes and kills someone named as the hated party by (a).

Unless (a) directly incited (b) (via the boundary test you cited), (a) isn't legally guilty of anything.

But if the law discovers (b) heard (a) and acted because they believed (a)'s rhetoric, (b)'s crime rises past just violent crime to hate crime (because their reason to commit violence was a hate-crime motivation).

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