Comment by dathinab
5 months ago
but in case of hate speech it is relatively clear in most cases what is and isn't hate speech even through people on both sides love to pretend it isn't
5 months ago
but in case of hate speech it is relatively clear in most cases what is and isn't hate speech even through people on both sides love to pretend it isn't
If people on different sides of political divides are investing a lot of effort in labeling one another's arguments as “hate speech”, which seems to be what you're saying, that sounds like pretty strong evidence that it is not in fact relatively clear what is and isn't hate speech. And, once a book, news article, or political platform has been successfully suppressed, it is of course no longer clear whether or not it was hate speech, because you can't tell what it said; you only know what its political opponents say about it.
In particular, right now, there are numerous credible claims of human rights violations by Israeli troops in Gaza, and widespread criticism of those violations is being labeled as anti-Semitic hate speech, correctly in some cases, while defenses of the same violations are being labeled as Islamophobic hate speech, also correctly in some cases.
These are among the reasons that hate speech is uncontroversially legal in the US.
No that is not at all what I am saying.
What I am saying is that it doesn't matter weather people label others as hat speech or not because EU countries don't work by a curt of public opinion and convictions aren't based on this.
The regulations are about removing clear cases of hate speech, not about policing gray areas.
Like there is absolutely no reason to give someone who says all Jews of Muslims should be killed a platform. Or someone who main talking point is that Hitler didn't succeed in killing all, or people which systematically harass other people.
And more or less all of the things social platforms have to police are things _which anyway are already illegal_. It's just that due to the pseudo anonymity of the internet, internationalization, bots, sock puppet accounts and social platform having little reason to cooperate with the police persecuting such things in the traditional way isn't viable.
Sure making it viable would be nice, but I have to yet find a practical way which wouldn't be a form of mass surveillance much worse then such regulations.
Also both in past and presence there have been more then just a few examples about how not hindering hat speech will reliable kill innocents. There are larger examples like the genocide in Myanmar Facebook contributed to. Or smaller examples like recently a innocent teen being murdered by a mob because of people having been radicalized/riled up by hate speech on social media. Or if you want to go back to the 30th a huge part of why the Nazis gained power was that they could effectively spread hat speech and misinformation about how the Jews where at fault for everything bad (WW1, the depression in the 20th, the terms Germany had to accept at the end of WW1 etc.), or about the so called Stab-in-the-back myth, or about pseud science about how the "grate arian race" gets replaced and all mixed up etc.. The relevant part here is how effective they where able to spread this and make part of the population accept it, not whether they came up with it. (Other huge parts where that politics was too polarized to continue working and the previous conservatives helped him as an external person into power as they hoped to fix their issue of losing ground and unify Germany, in a very twisted way they did succeed, at cost of their own existence).