Comment by brazzy
4 years ago
The German criminal code has a pretty good definition; good in the sense that it is limited. It applies to speech that fulfills 4 criteria:
* It happens in public
* it is capable of disturbing the public peace
* it attacks an entire segment of the population
* by inciting hatred, insulting, defaming or calling for violence or arbitrary measures against them.
You'll have a hard time explaining what the value is in allowing speech that fulfulls all of the above.
That doesn’t really solve the problem though because “inciting hatred” is subjective.
For example, there are people who would say that anyone who disagrees with the fat acceptance movement is guilty of “inciting hatred” against fat people.
Yet I would argue that we need to leave the door open to these kinds of uncomfortable conversations. Otherwise, people will be afraid to speak their minds because they don’t know if they’ve crossed the line.
Edit: Also, how do you define “capable of disturbing the public peace”?
> That doesn’t really solve the problem though because “inciting hatred” is subjective.
Lots of laws are subjective to some degree (And the degree here is really not very high here), that is absolutely normal and not problematic. For example, in order to decide whether someone was acting negligent, something called the "reasonable person standard" is used in US jurisprudence.
> For example, there are people who would say that anyone who disagrees with the fat acceptance movement is guilty of “inciting hatred” against fat people.
That is a silly strawman. Because it really doesn't matter what some unspecified "people" on the internet say on Twitter. What matters is what a judge says after carefuly consideration of the specific circumstances and possibly precedence cases, and possibly other judges on appeal.
> Yet I would argue that we need to leave the door open to these kinds of uncomfortable conversations. Otherwise, people will be afraid to speak their minds because they don’t know if they’ve crossed the line.
The line is not nearly as blurry as you make it out to be, nor is it difficult to stay well away from it.
> Also, how do you define “capable of disturbing the public peace”?
"public peace" has been defined in case law and commentaries as the peaceful coexistence of the population, free of fear of violence or lawlessness. "capable of" (geeignet) is a recurring term in German jurisprudence and means that an action is realistically fit to achieve something, considering the concrete circumstances of the case.
Speech is far more political than a negligence case. You really can’t expect to apply the same methodology and have it work just as well. This is one of those cases where I think we just need to accept that bad people will say bad things sometimes. Free speech is way too important and if the law goes too far it’s very difficult to change it.
My example wasn’t meant to be a straw man. I just think defining hate speech is extremely difficult and sometimes unpopular things need to be said in order to improve society.
Also, it’s not just “people on twitter”. I’m so sick of people dismissing these things using that framing. No, these people have power. The woke mob has power. They don’t like free speech and I guarantee you that if we implemented hate speech laws people will fight to enshrine their ideologies into law.
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Because all of the above criteria is subjective? The US Supreme Court has repeatedly denied the constitutionality of hate speech laws throughout history on the grounds of this and it violating the concept of free speech