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As the OP mentioned, many countries, including democratic ones, do have laws around hate speech. Wikipedia has a few words about it in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_France#The...

You also have laws against defamation that consider it illegal to defame people based on race and other criteria (since the 19th century in France).

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The last such law in France was just cancelled for being unconstitutional.

And in practice they are impossible to enforce for a platform like Facebook, since in the end it's a judge who has to decide what is, and what is not hate speech.

In practice, enforcement is selective and the sentences are never formally enforced since it would create de-facto political prisoners, which gives a bad image to a democratic country.

So I'm not sure they're a good example.

Okay, let me be more specific. Define it for me in US law.

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