Free speech under attack across Ireland, UK, Europe and globally | Hacker News Reader

Free speech under attack across Ireland, UK, Europe and globally

twitter.com

93 pointsBran_son83 comments

The thread is spot on. The hate speech laws have a very broad and vague definition so governments can act on populist impulses.

In UK, some guys got arrested under this pretext for burning a cardboard pretending it was a Grenfell tower. How is this the governments business? At all?

But people demanded "justice" and so the police stepped in

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8akk-nZtuk "hate speech"

The UK is a country where it's illegal to offend people. It really isn't surprising that those people would get arrested but actual perpetrators of the Grenfell tragedy get off scot-free.

I remember not too long ago Ireland had blasphemy laws. Does anyone remember what happened to the guy who was criminally charged for mocking God on TV?

Context matters. I assume you left it out for good reason from your throwaway account? The video alone doesn't explain.

Grenfell tower housed mostly a non-British populous. 72 people died horrible deaths and 70 injured (mostly non-Brits), it's the biggest strucutual death toll in UK history. In the video someone says a racist remark. The effigy has cartoons of brown people wearing religious attire.

His intent is debatable to some and in a court of law. In my opinion he got away lightly for something hateful and racist. It was shared widely with the same racist sentiment (prominent nazi groups and anti-immigrant faces).

Tasteless and offensive? Sure. But why should it be illegal to do such a thing?

Bigotry turns into a feedback loop that finishes in violence often encoded in political systems and then you get violence + state. E.g Nazis started with "remove Jews from Germany" then shockingly when a lot of Jewish people don't want to leave their homes then it escalates as the bigotry whipped up at first runs into the reality of how to make it real. By the time they seized the full state machinery then it was too late.

No one can or will ever agree on what is and isn’t bigotry and the views of those who do agree are constantly changing. It’s a ridiculous thing to attempt to make illegal. Those who try are destined to find themselves jailed for bigotry.

Has this ever actually happened?

> Bigotry turns into a feedback loop that finishes in violence

Completely agreed. So long as I get to define what is bigotry, and what is valid grievance.

Why not established political mechanisms and democratic pressure?

> Bigotry turns into a feedback loop that finishes in violence often encoded in political systems and then you get violence + state.

I don’t think this is a causal relationship. Just think about the trillions of acts of bigotry that take place each year and how few of them result in genocide. Bigotry is bad, genocide is super duper bad. But saying one leads to the other needs to be qualified that it’s like a one in a billion chance. Equating bigotry with genocide debases the severity of genocide and is like saying unkindness leads to genocide. Or that not saying “bless you” leads to a feedback loop that ends in murder.

If we say "ah but think about the causal relationship anti semitism has a low risk of turning into a pogrom" that doesn't really carry a lot of water for the majority of Jewish people considering the amount of times it has happened in history in real life and not in debate club

For the sakes of what are nearly always incredibly low value and tedious "debates" I'm fairly ambivalent on defaulting towards removing hate speech. We can get enough of it from our government and media in the UK anyway so it's clearly not under any real threat.

"So this is how liberty dies... with thundering applause."

The amount of people defending these laws in this thread is a frightening proof of this.

Everywhere these days you can find someone smart and utterly naive with their "but actually..." argument pushing the Overton window closer and closer to a censorship state, and there are not enough neutral people arguing for free speech itself. Only the weirdos and racist ones which are easy to hate and root against.

So all this playing Devil's advocate is actually helping along the normalization of these free speech bans.

https://youtu.be/BiqDZlAZygU

The Overton window will go further than that due to the beliefs of the ideologues pushing to remove "hate speech". They believe that hate speech is literal violence and genocide, as bad as murder or mass murder. I posted a comment warning that this anti-hate-speech legislation may go further as time goes by, towards killing of people, and even further from there, and got 1 comment supportint the "violent removal of bigots from society". These people believe you are committing genocide with your words, why wouldn't we expect them to act as if they actually are preventing genocide?

Here is the comment, before they change or delete it:

Tanjreeve 8 hours ago | parent | next [–]

Society might be a fair amount improved if we had a strategy where we aimed to remove bigots, violently if necessary. What value do they actually bring?

(At the time of me posting this comment, the only replies were the one above and another supporting hate speech laws and citing a common anti free speech strawman along the lines of "you are wrong that your free speech does not mean freedom from consequences")

This thread and the comments here don't make it clear how extreme the Irish law is. If you're found in possession of anything deemed hate speech, you are legally presumed to be guilty unless you can prove you are using it for law enforcement or academic purposes. Possession is punishable by up to 2 years imprisonment.

https://twitter.com/LFJIreland/status/1652774182210396165

It's an enormous amount of power that could allow the government to target literally anyone - if you look hard enough, many texts could be read as hate speech in this law (for example, the Bible advocates genocide against certain ethnic groups).

The phrasing of this feels a little hyperbolic. If you’re found in possession of illegal guns, you’re “automatically assumed to be guilty” unless you can prove you have a valid reason to possess illegal guns. That’s how making things illegal works. You could just say “possessing hate material is illegal under this law”. Which is not a weird thing snuck into the law - it’s literally what the law is about.

We’re talking about the possession of illegal words.

That’s what makes this quite a bit different than your gun analogy.

Does it? I mean we can argue if making hate speech illegal is a good idea or a bad idea - but making it illegal doesn’t throw out the concept of innocent until proven guilty as the phase “automatically assumed to be guilty” suggests.

Someone yelling fire in a crowded theatre isn’t “automatically assumed to be guilty”, they’ll be charged and placed on trial and the state will have to prove that a) they yelled fire, and b) this was the kind of speech we agree isn’t protected because it’s intended to cause harm. Similarly, if i’m caught possessing hate material the state would charge me and have to prove that i did possess that material, and that material fits the definition of hate speech.

If it’s possible to possess illegal words, then yes, we’ve abandoned the presumption of innocence. What moral failing is the possessor of illegal words guilty of?

That’s a strawman. There’s no illegal words in hate speech laws like the one in question. There are illegal intents, illegal publications, etc. - those already exist. To go back to my previous example: “fire” isn’t an illegal word. But shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre (where there is no fire) is an illegal action intended to cause harm.

Thinking genocidal thoughts, even saying genocidal ideas aloud, all are ok under most western hate speech laws. The line is usually in publishing or broadcasting genocidal ideas.

Hate speech laws are on a slope, and at the bottom is of that slope is authoritarian thought police territory, for sure, but it doesn't seem that slippery a slope from where i’m standing.

The law here states that if you possess the hate speech the assumption is that you intend to publish or broadcast it. You have to prove that you don't (by being an academic or law enforcement for instance). This is an attempt to keep people from engaging with crimethink, not broadcasting it.

Is there something about text that advocates for genocide that is worth engaging with? I’m not convinced there is. This is paradox of tolerance territory (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance).

Last time I checked, "innocent until proven guilty" was still a foundational principle of Western law. Certain factions may be working hard to chip away that foundation with the intent of enforcing an ideological homogeny, but it's not gone yet.

And as far as i understand this law doesn’t change that. The state would still have to charge you and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you did indeed possess hate material. Just like how it would have to prove you possessed a stolen gun or whatever. Which is exactly my point - the phase “automatically assumed to be guilty” is phrased to make it seem like the law throws out innocent until proven guilty, which i don’t think it does.

Yes. The banning of private ownership of weapons is also tyranny.

Sorry, i forgot 2nd amendment absolutists exist. Replace “illegal guns” with “stolen guns” to make the point make sense again. Also while you’re at it try out replacing “illegal guns” with “icbm launchers” just to check if you actually believe banning private ownership of weapons is always tyranny.

I think the issue is that by the law’s definition, Huckleberry Finn contains hate speech. And many other items.

So everyone has hate speech and the government can selectively choose who to prosecute. And just the act of defense is punishment enough, so the law is bad on that account.

If everyone in the country has an illegal gun then the law would be similar. In this case the law is not properly able to be enforced. In the US this would render it invalid.

Those places don't have free speech. They never have.

Yikes.

You talking about Ireland, UK, Europe or ... globally?

No thing as free speech, there's consequences to saying anything you want. Rightly so hate speech is removed from platforms and those people face prison time. What falls under that is constantly changing.

There's no real debates on whether Nazis should be given platforms on reddit or YouTube.

Wait until the definition of hate speech changes to include something _you_ want to say.

Absolutely bizarre content. I feel like the Cambridge Analytica-type botfarms have been on overdrive lately.

'Bizarre' in what way? Are you alleging the hate-speech laws mentioned aren't real?

Hate speech law can be real without any of the interpretation or spin put on it by the threat being real. I’m canadian. Canada has hate speech laws, and has for a long time. The stuff that gets charged under that law is almost always genocidal garbage. A few cases of less extreme (but still pretty extreme) content have been tried and tossed out. Idk if the irish law goes further, but this thread isn’t a reliable gauge of how this law fits into the irish legal system

> Idk if the irish law goes further

Had you read the thread you would know that it does. It contains excerpts from the law, showing that mere possession of material that is "likely to incite hatred" is illegal. That's an incredibly broad definition. Does an article alleging there are many Jews in Biden's cabinet [1] qualify? Or a book alleging white people are racist and fragile [2]?

[1] https://forward.com/news/462330/enough-for-a-minyan-a-jewish...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Fragility

I mean I’d say no on both accounts. Are you so familiar with the irish legal system that you’re confidant both of these would be made illegal by the law as written? I’m not. Both of those things are not getting charged under the canadian system and i’m pretty sure the wording of our law isn’t too far different from the proposed irish law.

[flagged]

Hate speech today is amplified by social networks that had been non-existent 20 years ago.

I would like to see what happens to your "free speech beliefs and how they don't affect you" if you happened to accidentally say something wrong on a video and then be bullied by thousands of nutties on the internet, including doxxing and swatting you on a regular basis.

> I would like to see what happens to your "free speech beliefs and how they don't affect you" if you happened to accidentally say something wrong on a video and then be bullied by thousands of nutties on the internet, including doxxing and swatting you on a regular basis.

Another comment supporting pain and suffering for the people they disagree with. "You are wrong that free speech does not have consequences" is a common anti-free-speech strawman, a dishonest tactic, and is not even remotely what I said

That's what I said though not you, haven't I?

Which non-abstract pain and suffering do you mean?

Something something thunderous applause.

I thought this would be about all of the arrests of environmental protestors and anti royalist campaigners in the UK rather than the usual drivel about the right to be bigoted.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com