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Comment by johndevor | Hacker News Reader

Problem is the author never defines hate speech.

Hate speech is like porn. It's a case of "I can recognize it when I see it." It's certainly not something objective and it depends on the cultural background of people to define it. The author can't define it because the very definition of hate speech will vary from place to place and person to person.

The author makes other mistakes too such as thinking history that was already written is an absolute truth when it's actually something subjective written by the "winners." I lived through that once, the history that I was taught as truth in my school many years ago was proven to be false a few years ago and the lies were based on what today you'd consider hate speech.

I think the moment we can solve detecting hate speech using a machine will be the same a machine can pass the Turing test because it's impossible to define hate speech in objective terms. Meanwhile we have two equally incomplete solutions: allow all speech or let some people subjectively censor things. Neither of those things will satisfy the author of this post (well maybe the latter will).

I completely agree with your first point. You've put it much better than me.

History is written by the winners, however, even if the Nazis had won the war, I think people would still understand that discrimination against any particular group is wrong. Who knows?

Censorship isn't something I stand for. However, in the UK I can be vocal about my opinions as long as I'm not harassing certain groups for no reason. Sure, thats censorship, but I can speak out against my government without showing hatred if they were to take the policy too far. Its a fine line.

>History is written by the winners, however, even if the Nazis had won the war, I think people would still understand that discrimination against any particular group is wrong. Who knows?

I think that had that been the case the people who remained alive would be people with ideologies aligned with Nazism and would consider discrimination against a particular group the right thing to do. Of course there will always be people who stand against the winners, real life proves this: Nazis still exist.

> Nazis still exist

Sadly, they always will. There will always be people with ill intent in this world, because the world isn't perfect. However these neo-Nazis use free-speech to get a voice that they otherwise wouldn't have.

Hate speech can not be defined. Hate speech describes how the speech is interpreted by the audience. The same speech that is interpreted to be non-hateful by one person may be interpreted as being hateful by a different person. For any particular speech, chances are you’ll be able to find one or more people on this planet who consider it hateful. Therefor there’s as many different definitions of hate speech as there are people alive, and those definitions are just as likely to change from one moment to the next as people are. So if you want to censor hate speech, it is only possible to do so according to an opinionated perspective. The result being that you don’t actually end up censoring hate speech, you simply end up censoring speech that defies some established orthodox perspective. If you want to allow for free speech, then you must allow for the possibility that some people will consider some of that speech to be hateful (or offensive, or untrue, or dangerous...).

This reminded me of a dialog I witnessed many years ago. One guy was describing how offended he was when people used the term "black", because he considered himself "African American". The other guy, who considered himself "black", loathed the term "African American".

Hate does not exist in words. It exists in the mind of the person using the words. And we can never know what is in that mind without knowing the person on an intimate level. Until we all understand this, all this noisy anger and offense will never end.

This. Lot of "mind reading" going on these days, when in fact it's often people projecting their fears onto others.

And mixes it with misinformation somehow too so the argument is all over the place.

Hate speech is already well defined and contextualized within the first few sentences of the post.

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