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Comment by Zak | Hacker News Reader

You can read the law and decide that for yourself. You're probably safe if your potentially rude comments aren't related to race, sex, age, gender, religion, or sexual orientation. These are the relevant sections:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2021/14/section/3/enacted

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2021/14/section/4/enacted

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Thanks. Please note that I explicitly don't want to make _rude_ comments – apparently, it is enough that someone is _offended_ by my comments. (And yes, I know that you said "potentially rude", but still – rudeness has little to do with it.)

It's not quite about whether the person reading is offended. It's about whether a "reasonable person" would find it likely to "stir up hatred" against one of the protected classes.

Of course, that's still highly problematic. Is a statement like "Marjorie Taylor Greene wants to replace secular democracy with a theocracy based on a twisted interpretation of Christianity" likely to stir up hatred against fundamentalist Christians? It's ambiguous enough to have a chilling effect.

Can a statement of fact even be considered hate speech?

Also "Christian fundamentalist" isn't a protected class. If anything they're the class many protected classes need protecting from.

The way this law is written relies on a test of whether a "reasonable person" would consider the statement "abusive". If a police officer decides it is, then you're having a bad day even if a judge or jury later decides it is not. Regardless of one's position on hate speech laws in general, this hate speech law is at risk for subjective interpretation.

Religion is a named protected class in the legislation. There is no reason to believe it couldn't be applied to extreme or fundamentalist religions, and I chose a particularly contemptible example of it to illustrate a point.

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