This sounds like an awful lot of assumptions.
Come on. There's a debate to be had about hate speech and free speech, but it can't even get started on a reasonable footing if some of the participants don't know enough history to be able to answer this question.
The definition of minority is just as subjective.
In many peoples' opinion, life is more valuable than pure freedom, therefore we should take away (some) freedom in order to save lives.
To be clear, I am not in the camp that believes that, but I try to understand their point of view.
If the core agreement is that it's about hate against a group, then saying "minority" is nothing more than just a shortcut for a certain group and doesn't really add anything to the discussion of what is hate speech.
Can you elaborate on how we establish a causal relationship between hate speech and suicide? Let alone specifically hateful comments on YouTube? This doesn't seem corroborated by the suicide rates in the US over time. Rates were just as high (and in fact, higher in some years) in pre-internet days [1].
This claim is made even more questionable when taken in conjunction the previous comments' emphasis on its impact on minorities. Minorities in the US actually have substantially lower suicide rates than Whites [2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#/...
Sacrificing free speech for their sake of like doing a nation-wide ban on peanuts to help people with allergies: it will prevent quit a lot of accidental deaths, too. Except that peanuts are not essential for a functioning democracy.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17750236 (https://sci-hub.tw/10.1126/science.201.4357.748)
> Abstract: Fatal crashes of private, business, and corporate-executive airplanes have increased after publicized murder-suicides. The more publicity given to muder-suicide, the more crashes occurred. The increase in plane crashes occurred primarily in states where murder-suicides were publicized. These findings suggest that murder-suicide stories trigger subsequent murder-suicides, some of which are disguised as airplane accidents.
There have been some studies which found similar correlations with fatal car 'accidents.'
It's easy to speculate that comments discussing suicide, such as yours or mine, might also plausibly cause suicides. Perhaps that's something for you to consider.
Perhaps you're conflating hate speech with hateful (and harmful) actions. History is full of examples of the latter, but it's also full of examples of the former where no one was actually hurt, minority groups included.
Speech can be a precursor to action, but that doesn't make it a crime in itself (unless you're living in "1984"). What's that old rhyme about "sticks and stones..."?
Following a speech by president trump where he uses coded hate speech, violence against minorities increases.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3102652
I'm not arguing we make hate speech illegal, or have thought crime. In fact if it were up to me racists would be even more up front about their deplorable worldview. But I think it's very important that the employees of companies are allowed to exercise their own value systems by denying users of hate speech a platform.
This isn't a defense of banning anti-PRC posters though. Calling xi jinping Winnie the Pooh isn't hate speech. Discussing what constitutes hate speech could be another valuable discussion perhaps held elsewhere - I don't agree that a definition is impossible, if that's where you're thinking of going. I don't agree that there's a slippery slope.
I completely agree. That doesn't mean I have to agree with their value systems or stay silent about my discontent (and I'm not implying that you claimed that either).
I'm just tired of hearing the phrase "hate speech" used whenever these discussions happen, as if there were some fundamental human law that we have to protect people from ideas that might offend them - either via regulation or private company policy. Illegal or not, I don't think it helps to talk about "hate speech" in the context of censorship and free speech. It's like having a debate about which curse words are the worst, when really that's missing the point.
There's more at stake than being offended. If the reality was that the reason companies like Google kick out people for, say, ambiguously dogwhistling with sexist blog posts is because sexist blog posts hurt people's feelings, I wouldn't feel quite as strongly about how ethically good it is for Google to have taken said action.
However, it's not "just speech." As I linked elsewhere, studies show that after every dogwhistle-ridden Trump speech, violence against minorities increase. We've strayed into Sticks and Stones territory. Apparently, it's important to not let hate speech spread unfettered. Standing aside, allowing racists to post racist things on your platform, makes you directly culpable in actual violence being committed against minorities.
If I was the CEO of Google, I would not accept that violence is being committed that I could take direct action in preventing. If I was an employee, I'd put extreme pressure on my management to prevent that violence.
Outside of that, rhetoric that you consider hateful is not a direct cause of any harm. That is a dangerous road to go down and it's far better to counter with your own speech instead.
Studies would show that a thousand other things are also followed by an increase in violence. In literature, movies, telephone calls – anywhere people communicate with other people, you will find that some people communicate offensive (to someone) ideas, and as a result, other people who are prone to violence will be pushed over the edge and do something harmful. Those who seek violent ideas will find them regardless of censorship. And those who seek positivity and love will find them.
It is absolutely "just speech". We haven't crossed any magical boundary today that we hadn't crossed 229 years ago when the bill of rights was ratified. If you want to fully prevent violence from ever occurring by censoring speech, you're welcome to live in a communist country. But of course, you won't find what you're looking for there either.
You mean, when black people were still considered non-human? I don't think the bill of rights, nor the people that wrote it, gets to stand on its own laurels. There's plenty of room to debate the problems with the Constitution as it stands today.
> If you want to fully prevent violence from ever occurring by censoring speech, you're welcome to live in a communist country.
I'm not sure what to do with an HN poster that conflates the economic theory of Communism with the authoritarian plutocracies of China and north Korea.
Oh hoh if you wanna live in a capitalist country like Russia, where the secret police can disappear you for speaking out against the democratically elected president, maybe you should just move there!
See how ridiculous that sounds?
Agreed, but I'm talking specifically about free speech, not any other parts of the constitution or the people who wrote it. I'm not debating the need for a "living constitution".
"Perhaps most important is that Sanders’ wording implies that the 226% jump stems from comparing hate crimes before and after a Trump rally within the same county, when in fact it’s a comparison from Trump rally counties to similar counties that did not host a Trump rally."
What is hate? What is offensive? It's whatever you want it to be!
When in doubt, err on the side of freedom and liberty.
An interesting part of this discussion is that Youtube is operating globally. There are a number of countries with the concept of “hate speech” in the law. Saying it doesn’t exist in US law is only a partial answer.
Otherwise countries with most restrictive laws basically dictate what is allowed or not to the rest of the world (though in practice that’s already in part the case).
You may disagree with the definition, but that's what people are talking about. If you want to elevate the discussion, you should avoid pointless semantic arguments IMO.
No it's not. Here you have Google removing anti-communist speech which is not sexist, not racist and not homophobic. And communists aren't even a minority in China (though thankfully a minority in most of other countries). But "I hate Nazis" is also hate speech, obviously - should Google ban anybody who hates Nazis? Maybe not, you say? So there's some hate that is allowed, but some is verboten. And who decides which is which? Ah, now we are getting to the point of "hate speech" term - "hate speech" is hate I disapprove of. If I approve of it, it's a vigorous and righteous indignation against the evils of this world and should be lauded, but if I disapprove - it's "hate speech" and should be banned. Now we need only do figure out who holds the power to decide these questions... but wait, we already did, Google decides that. All hail Google, the bastion of free speech and protector from the hate speech! I, for one, welcome our new speech overlords.
> Hate speech is defined by Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". Hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation".
This is a workable definition and it doesn't lead to a slippery slope argument.
Why not? Because you said so? If somebody hates communists and publicly proclaims that I don't see how it's not hate speech. Unless, of course, you massage the definition to match exactly the cases you like. Religion and ideology are the same thing - or, more precisely, religion is subset of ideology with some specific properties. Why would anti-certain ideology be different from anti-another ideology because some of these ideologies call themselves "religion"? How does it make any sense?
> something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation
Ok, so hating buddhists is hate speech, but hating communists isn't. And hating atheists is ... who knows. Now sure about Wiccans either. How about Objectivists? That looks like exactly the definition to match one narrow case of US contemporary politics (I'd even say very narrow sliver of a contemporary US politics), where racial and sexual discrimination issues is all the rage. But outside that context it makes zero sense, the categories it chooses are just arbitrary.
Is hating scientologists "hate speech"? Well, depends on whether it's a religion or not, right? Because if it's not then no hate speech for you. Is hating furries "hate speech"? If it's about sex fetish then yes, "sexual orientation", but if it's just about cosplay then no, because it doesn't fit the official categories. And so on. Completely nonsensical definition, unless you use it exactly as declared - to privilege certain categories of speech and suppress others, because you want so. There's no logical basis under it, just an arbitrary list.
> This is a workable definition and it doesn't lead to a slippery slope argument.
It's not workable because it selects arbitrary categories based on certain political agenda. If you expand it using "such as" and argue, for example, that regardless of whether Scientology is a religion or not, hating for the group characteristic of belonging to it is under "such as" - good, then how anti-communism is not "such as"? If I make a church that declares Vladimir Lenin a top saint and otherwise the views would completely match communist views with the exception that I also would celebrate Lenin's birthday once a year and call it a religion, now anti-communism is a hate speech? Or only if it's directed against me, but if it's against Chinese communist who has the same ideology but officially not in my church then it's not? Again, nonsensical.
That may be your definition but it is not the definition and certainly is not close to being the "generally understood" definition.
All words are made up but definitions should not change with the wind. What is happening with hate speech is that it has morphed into "speech that a minority group found offensive." This is not a workable definition because what you find offensive is not what I find offensive. The most broadly accepted definition based on the laws I see on wikipedia is "speech that encourages imminent violence."
The only reason we are even discussing this is because people have begged online platforms to police speech. The inevitable conclusion when you police speech is this problem we are discussing right now. You ultimately just devolve into tyranny of the majority where dissenting thoughts are silenced.
>You may disagree with the definition, but that's what people are talking about.
Just because you don't want there to be nuance doesn't make the nuance go away.
> Hate speech is defined by Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". Hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation".
If I may clarify, the key part of the definition is "based on something such as [a core characteristic of a person that has no relationship to the hate] such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". So hating someone for doing something is not hate speech. Hating someone for what they "are" (at their "core", if there's such a thing) is hate speech.
This isn't about finding things offensive (although clearly hate speech is found offensive by most people).
I disagree strongly about whether policing speech inevitably devolves into censorship. We already police speech, for example calls to violence in the US, with no visible devolution. We also police where you can physically be, without limiting your ability to go about your life with no undue policing. The slippery slope argument without supporting evidence is lazy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men...
If so, what do you think should be done about it?
While your questions are fair, it is noteworthy that you haven't clarified or backed up your original claim. As someone reading this thread, I'm a bit surprised people are engaging with you. Personally, I would not engage with someone who makes an unsubstantiated claim, and instead of backing it up keeps trying to poke holes in others' responses.
The fact that hate speech is subjective is evidenced by my questions which examine just how loose and vague the definitions are. There still is no clear answer on what hate speech is, beyond the 1st Amendment which I think is good enough.
If you mean something else, then please state what it is that's unsubstantiated.
(At least in this comment you are providing a qualifier ("I think..."))
I don't claim that the 1A has no problems, but it does have less problems and that's still an improvement, and it has worked for more than a century for this great nation.
What other evidence would you like to see?
What do you mean by "other" evidence? You didn't provide any.
> but it does have less problems
Unsubstantiated claim.
> and it has worked for more than a century for this great nation
Unsubstantiated claim.
To respond in a manner similar to your other comments:
What does "worked" mean? How is it an improvement? How does it have fewer problems? Where exactly did it work in whatever great nation you're thinking of. Have you considered where it didn't work? What is the metric for "worked"?
The metric is personal freedom and how much you can do without the government or someone else preventing you from doing so. Anyone can say what they want and people can ignore and block, leading to more freedom for all.
This is an improvement. It was also what we had before. It worked everywhere in America. I don't know of any place where it didn't work and do note that many countries without freedom envy the American way.
Please do a simple search before making incredibly wrong claims. There was one very famous case in the decade you refer to. And when you look at the history of American companies in general, you'll find more.
> The metric is personal freedom and how much you can do without the government or someone else preventing you from doing so.
> This is an improvement. It was also what we had before. It worked everywhere in America. I don't know of any place where it didn't work and do note that many countries without freedom envy the American way.
As others have pointed out to you, by that metric, the US failed considerably. It's not what we had before in practice. People have pointed out places where it didn't work.
> do note that many countries without freedom envy the American way.
And many Americans envy other countries for traits they have that the US lacks. What's the relevance?
Large amounts of anecdata of people reporting (e.g. with the first post on a new blog) that they have finally found places where they can freely engage in Internet discourse; and explaining that they hadn’t been engaging in Internet discourse up until then, because any attempt previously was met with people reacting to the cultural “outgroup” signifiers in their message, rather than to the content of the message itself.
> What does hate speech have to do with minority populations?
Pretty much every country other than the US has an official legal definition of hate speech—but even the US has a definition of hate crime. Both terms are defined in terms of prejudice toward a group. Wikipedia’s definition of “hate crime”, for example:
“A hate crime (also known as a bias-motivated crime or bias crime) is a prejudice-motivated crime which occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of their membership (or perceived membership) of a certain social group or race.”
> Do people within those populations never say hateful things, even to each other?
“Hate speech” doesn’t literally mean “hateful speech.” If just say something with hatred, you’re not engaging in hate speech. If you say something with prejudice, intending injury to the victim because of that prejudice, you’re engaging in hate speech.
Keeping that in mind, you can certainly commit an act of hate speech (or a hate crime generally) against someone in the same intersection of groups as you. It probably implies that you hate yourself (or don’t consider yourself a part of such group/groups), though.
Group membership doesn't have anything to do with minorities though. You can define groups however you want, so a "minority" is entirely dependent on the context of the situation and just as subjective as the hate speech. So who are you considering minorities and what is this anecdotal data that claims they did not participate in forums? Must every forum be welcoming to everyone? Did no other forum exist? Could they not have created their own forum? If they talked to each other, does that mean a forum exists? And if so, doesn't that mean they are free to engage in their own discourse after all?
Either way, the point that if hate speech is targeting against a "group", then that group can be anything and anyone. There is no specific connection to "minorities", whatever that means to you. It just dilutes the discussion about defining hate speech.
That is entirely specious, pedantic and irrelevant. In the context relevant to hate speech, there is no doubt that, say, LGBTQ individuals or Jews are minority groups. I don't think you can really be serious about denying this (given that the numbers are what they are). I am not sure what point you are trying to make here.
>There is no specific connection to "minorities", whatever that means to you.
There is no essential connection between hate speech and minorities, but there's a very obvious connection. Historically, many victims of hate speech and other hate crimes have been members of minority groups. And it's not difficult to see why. It's a lot easier for a majority group to persecute a minority group than vice versa.
Hate speech is subjective. Minority is subjective. Even if there are commonly considered minority groups, it doesn't solve for the definition of hate speech other than just being a shortcut to defining a group membership that is the basis for the "hate".
Therefore there is really no connection (essential or otherwise) that is useful to the discussion of what is hate speech.
The connection, as various people have explained to you, is that minorities within a society tend to be more vulnerable to hate speech and its associated effects.
Either way, so what if it affects minorities more often? The question is What is hate speech? and saying "it affects minorities more" does not solve for that definition at all. Hence why the connection does not matter/exist.
As to your ‘so what’, you now seem to accept that there is a connection between minorities and hate speech, which was the point at issue.
To pick a smaller minority, what about "Baby Boomers". Should the "OK, boomer" meme be banned as hate speech? At 22% of the US population, they constitute a smaller minority than the proportion of non-white Americans (28%, excluding White Hispanics).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we shouldn't give extra protections to groups of people who have historically faced disproportionate amounts of violence (and other harms), just that we should maybe call it "selected minority endangering speech" instead of "hate speech", and be clear about the specific cost-benefit trade-off we are making by how we choose and delineate those categories of people and how much speech is covered.
A better analogy would be if the critics of homophobes genuinely thought that homophobia was literally a fear of homosexuals, causing the homophobes to complain that this framing of their position made it hard for them to explain their objection to homosexuality.
By hiding the subjectivity of "hate speech", people then get surprised or angry when it does or doesn't get applied to terms like "communist bandits" or "OK, boomer", or "eat the rich". The real debate isn't about whether the terms are hateful (as the name suggests), but whether the specific groups that are targeted need the specific protections being implemented.
Sorry, it just seems like you are deliberately trying to introduce confusion about what hate speech is into this discussion.
There's nothing particularly 'subjective' about the definition of hate speech. At least, it's no more subjective than the definition of 'free speech' or 'censorship' or any of the other relevant concepts in this domain. There's a perfectly objective history of persecution targeting certain minority groups.
I accept that there are objective historical examples of majority groups persecuting minority groups, and I'll ignore the difficulties of constructing well-defined subsets of a population (e.g. "working class") or whether a given group is numerically a minority (e.g. "females" in many countries). What I still think is subjective, though, is how much (and what sort of) persecution is necessary before a group becomes entitled to claim that hateful language used against them is "hate speech".
Imagine a hypothetical African country that had, say, France as its colonial occupier, under an apartheid system, but then allowed free elections, leading to the native population gaining political power. If the native population had talked about "getting rid of" their French occupiers, while the apartheid system was in place, presumably your definition of "hate speech" wouldn't have applied to that speech. But would your definition also not apply to similar speech (targeted at the same French people) after the occupying minority population lost their power? Would some amount of time (and violence) have to pass before the minority was entitled to point out that the hateful speech directed towards them was this special kind of "hate speech"?
Again, I apologise if this seems like a contrived example (and it's very hard to come up with an example that people don't have instinctive pre-conceptions and biases around), but I'm trying to explore if your definition really is as neutral as you think it is. You're right, though, that terms like "free speech" can be very nebulous, while still being useful concepts.
If your point is that you can contrive edge cases then, well, duh. There are also edge cases involving free speech and just about every other legal/moral/political concept.
I think that for a lot of people, they are exposed to a few clear examples of hate speech, and unconsciously build a heuristic that says "Anything that makes me feel the same sense of disgust towards the speaker or sympathy towards the target, is hate speech". Fortunately that heuristic works quite well most of the time for people, but I think it can work so well that the people using it don't question it, and don't realise that their definition has some blind spots in some areas, or scope-creep in others.
So, regarding my contrived edge case, when you say "the history matters", do you mean that the majority can continue to talk about "getting rid" of the minority without it being classed as hate speech, because the minority were historically privileged?
Alternatively, perhaps you mean "speech can change from being allowed to being hate speech (and vice versa) over the course of history". I don't disagree that the meaning of (and people's sensitivities to) words can change over time, but in my example, the change in circumstances happens in a single day. If that is significant, then it means the definition of hate speech depends not solely on the words themselves, or the size of the target group relative to that of the speaker's group, but rather on some sort of determination of whether the target "deserves" to be a subject of hate because of their membership of a group that you (the arbiter of hate speech) deems to be currently or historically over-represented politically.
I really am trying not to put words into your mouth, and I appreciate you taking the time to understand my concerns. Hopefully we'll both be more clear about what we mean when we use the term "hate speech" in future.
Minorities are likely to use persecution because their position is vulnerable.
People often say "minorities" when they mean "protected class." Women are not a minority, but they're a protected class. Billionaires are a minority, but they are not a protected class. Who decides what constitutes a protected class? Case law. When a suitable number of cases demonstrate harm on the basis of membership in a class, then that class may be considered for inclusion in the definition.
The definition of hate speech in Canada is quite narrow, and hinges on the definition of protected class. Progress is slow and methodical, and not the slippery slope thay you drscribe.
No, in the US, women are not legally a protected class. Gender is a protected class, which prohibits discrimination against women, or men.