Comment by rich_sasha

> I see no reason why hate speech should be given the benefit of the doubt

Because a lot of speech people don't like gets relabeled as hate speech - which is's not. Or a lot of discussion/debate topics that are sensitive get relabeled as hate.

I agree that threats of violence cross a line, but I think that many countries interpret hate speech to be much broader than this, and there's certainly room for people to disagree, or for one person to say something in a neutral and non-hateful way that another person interprets as a hateful attack.

Some edge cases might include: arguing about interpretations of historical events (eg. Holocaust denial, colonialism, nuclear bombings); arguing about the economic effects of immigration policy; suggesting that one country or another is currently committing genocide; suggesting that one country or another is not currently committing genocide; expressing support for a country or political party that some consider to be committing genocide; arguing that travel restrictions should be imposed on certain countries to contain an epidemic; writing "kill all men" on reddit; publishing a satirical political cartoon depicting the prophet Mohammad; advocating political independence for some geographic region; expressing support for the police in an instance in which they took a state-authorized violent action; expressing support for a vigilante; expressing support for one's country during a violent conflict; expressing sympathy with the opposing side during a conflict; demanding stronger legal penalties for criminals (eg. supporting Singapore's death penalty for drug dealers); publishing a fiction novel in which the villain is a member of a minority group and acts in accordance with a stereotype.

Personally, while I think limits are necessary, the guidelines should be extremely specific and the interpretation extremely narrow to minimize any chilling effect on legitimate expression and discussion. Even where speech can verge into hurtful or offensive territory, I think it's important to allow it in the open, because I think dialogue builds more bridges than it burns. I am concerned that a lot of internet hate-speech legislation goes too far into leaving hatred open to interpretation, which results in conversation spaces being closed down because of the potential liability.

The problem is that policing hate speech creates a police state worse than allowing hate speech to exist. The system you need to create to police the hate speech will result in more violence against people than letting the hate speech exist. To me, your very statement "freedom of speech ends where threats of violence appear" is a form of hate speech. You are hating on my principle of free speech. It actually makes me physically sick to read those words, because I know where they lead.

Generally on the Internet you would make use of existing tools to prevent people from talking to you if you find them hurtful. For example, I could just block you and not deal with you any more. Sometimes people get around those to harass others. That is definitely bad and we already have laws against harassment and ways for law enforcement to find those individuals without creating a full police state on the Internet. Posting your opinion once is not harassment, no matter how much it makes me want to puke. Or as we used to say in a more civilised time, I abhor your speech, but I will fight to the death for your right to speak it.

I don't know where you got your conclusion from - I am European and I don't mind violent speech. In fact I think we generally need a lot more freedom since many countries give their citizens barely more freedom than serfs had. School shootings have been a perennial favourite for your type to parade around so you can rule over a disarmed population, but e.g. Czechia lets you have a gun at home as easily as the USA and they do not have that problem. USA's problem is mostly societal.

Your opinion sounds like it was formed in the ivory tower of university with no connection with reality. Please get more varied life experience and reconsider your position.

> Liberal gun laws mean lots of people have them, logically leading to more people being shot.

Explain Czechia and Switzerland, then, please.

> Free speech is taken much further in the US, almost to the point of inciting violence.

Yes, that's where we (here in the U.S.) draw the legal line. But almost inciting violence is not inciting violence. Since the U.S. made free speech the focus of the very first rule in the constitution, an enormous amount of jurisprudence and precedent has emerged around exactly how to make those tricky case by case judgements. Whether one agrees with it or not, it's easily the most evolved, detailed and real-world tested (over many decades) body of free speech law humanity has. Because it's deep, complex and controversial, there's also quite a bit of misunderstanding and misinformation about U.S. free speech law. I see incorrect assertions and assumptions quite often in mainstream media outlets who should know better. Here's a good primer on some of the most common misunderstandings: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/free-speec...

I've studied and read a lot about free speech and the first amendment as I find it fascinating. It took me quite a while to really understand how and why the U.S. implementation got to where it really is (and not the exaggerations and extrapolations that sometimes get amplified). In terms of free speech current practice and precedent, I now think the U.S. has got it just about right in the tricky balance between ensuring the open exchange of ideas (even unpopular ones) against preventing actually real and serious defamation, libel and incitement. To be sure, the U.S. system is based on the principle that it's not the job of the current government in power to force adults to be nice, reasonable or respectful in either words or tone. Freedom of speech means the freedom to be wrong, stupid, or mean, to be insulting or offensive - even to provoke or inflame should you choose to.

While the government won't send men with guns to force you to shut up, other citizens are also free to exercise their rights to tell you (and everyone else) you're an asshole, that you're wrong and exactly why. They are equally free to be rude, offensive and even hateful against your ideas and you. One of the key ideas behind the U.S. constitution is every fundamental right granted to all citizens comes with matching responsibilities for all citizens. In other words, no right is free - they have actual, personal costs for each citizen. In the case of the first amendment, the responsibilities include tolerating speech that's wrong, boorish, offensive or even hateful. As well as the responsibility to exercise your own good judgement on which speech to ignore, reject and/or counter. The open marketplace of ideas, like all markets, is two-sided. Another responsibility is accepting the consequences of exercising your free speech unwisely. Your fellow citizens are free to ignore, argue, yell back, openly mock or just laugh at you. Ultimately, the framers of the constitution believed the majority of citizens can figure out for themselves who's an idiot and who's worth listening to. Which ideas are worth considering and which are important to stand against.

What defines hate speech? Who defines hate speech? Does hate speech result from the speech or the actions of those against the speech? Should the speech of protestors have consequences for disturbing the peace? What consequences should the state force onto individuals for speech, or actors affected by speech?

Americans for lack of a better description grapple with violence of the state differently than Europeans, but it seems neither are without consequence.

Death threats are not protected by free speech. I know you are trying to make a hyperventilating political point but it’s just not a genuine thing. I am a little surprised at the anoint of those on HN that are against free speech. I mean, don’t you realize that without it, a government you don’t like could imprison you for “denying basic facts oh biology” just as another country does for “denying historical events”. It’s madness.

During the Rwandan genocide, the radio stations played incitement to violence. While "hate speech" is inclusive of speech that incites violence, the types of hate speech which people have contemporary political disagreements about (including this thread) do not include such incitement.

More importantly, causality doesn't erase culpability. The step that immediately preceded the [Charlie Hebdo shooting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo_shooting) was publishing a cartoon in a newspaper. Those who create hateful environments may have some culpability, but those that act almost always have greater culpability than those who speak.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Quran_burnings_in_Sweden

Does burning a religious book "incite violence" ? It causes it, for sure. Free expression brings about, in the fanatic, a great desire to oppress the speaker. That's why we have such a freedom in the first place.

It seems though that allowing a country which already has problems with “lawful free speech,” to tamp down more on free speech would bring issues no?

Without mentioning the oxymoron that lawful free speech is.

Yes, incitement is illegal, but you haven't said what kind of speech you actually have in mind. Rather, you've made a tautological assertion that we can't allow incitement because incitement is illegal.

> Clearly that's nonsense, but I do understand the underlying desire.

I wanna eat hamburgers like Peter Griffin in the stroke episode. But I don't because I'm an adult with logical thinking abilities and I know that there are consequences to my actions even if they are not immediate.

I have less, much less, than zero sympathy for people who advocate for doing things with law and government that the history textbooks are stuffed full of the horrific and nearly inevitable eventual consequences of.

Having benign motives doesn't absolve people for being stupid.

Not that any of this is in disagreement with your points.

Of course hatred, bullying, etc. is real -- what I was referring to is some special amount or abundance of it as caused by free discussion on the internet (rather than, say, revealed by it; or even, minimised by it).

We're not running the counter-factual where the internet does not exist, or was censored from the start, and where free expression and discussion has reduced such things.

The salem witch trials are hardly a rare example of a vicious mob exploiting a moral panic to advance their own material interests -- this is something like the common case. It's hard to imagine running a genocide on social media -- more likely it would be banned as "propganda" so that a genocide could take place.

We turned against the internet out of disgust at what? Was is the internet it itself, or just a unvarinished look at people? And if the latter, are we sure the internet didnt improve most of them, and hasnt prevented more than its caused?

I see in this moral panic the same old childish desire to see our dark impulses as alien, imposed by a system, to destroy the system so that we can return to a self-imposed ignorance of what people are really thinking and saying. It's just victorian moralism and hypocricy all over again. Polite society is scandalised by the portrait of dorian gray, and we better throw the author in jail .

That's not quite my argument. A little more formally:

There's a base rate of human malevolence running in each society. We do not know this base rate, and we can only sample malevolence via mass media (, police reports, etc.). If the mass media (including internet) were a neutral measurement device then we could say for sure that what we're seeing is just the background conditions of society leading to eg., riots, etc.

Because our measuring device isnt neutral we have a problem: are the things we see caused by our measuring? Do we cause more malevolence by participating in social media, which also makes us aware of it?

My argument is that we are presently significantly over-estimating the effect of our participation in the internet as a cause. My view is that its effects at reducing bad-stuff are likely more potent than its effects at causing it, and the vast majority of what we see isn't caused by the internet at all.

One argument for this is that it seems baseline malevolence (violence, etc.) is significantly decreasing, is historically very high, and that nothing we see via the internet is suprisingly above this historical case.