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Here's the money quote : "44 percent [of U.S. college students] — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,”
by renaudg 9y ago
Here's the money quote :
"44 percent [of U.S. college students] — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does. More shockingly, a narrow majority of students — 51 percent — think it is “acceptable” for a student group to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. An astonishing 20 percent also agree that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking."
Well, f* you millennials, I suppose ?
- retox 9y agoI'm still undecided whether the root of those kinds of beliefs are the echo-chamber effect of social media, or because of the education system.
- DrScump 9y agoI believe the answer to that is "yes".
- SandersAK 9y agoOr you know, hate speech is illegal: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/95-815.pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/95-815.pdf updating for the angry: hate speech, as in "fighting words," which is to say language used to incite violence towards a specific person.
- function_seven 9y agoWhat page of your link supports that? I don’t see “hate speech” referenced anywhere in the PDF.
- daveguy 9y agoThe relevant passage doesn't specifically say "hate speech. It's the fighting words / treats section. Here is the relevant passage: --- Fighting Words and True Threats So-called “fighting words” also lay beyond the pale of First Amendment protection.19 The “fighting words” doctrine began in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, where the Court held that fighting words, by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace and may be punished consistent with the First Amendment.20 In Chaplinsky, the Court upheld a statute which prohibited a person from addressing “any offensive, derisive or annoying word to any other person who is lawfully in any street or other public place,” calling “him by any offensive or derisive name,” or making “any noise or exclamation in his presence and hearing with the intent to deride, offend or annoy him, or to prevent him from pursuing his lawful business or occupation.”21 The state court construed the statute as forbidding only those expressions that “have a direct tendency to cause acts of violence by the person to whom, individually, the remark [was] addressed.”22 Given the limited scope of application, the Supreme Court held that the statute at issue did not proscribe protected expression.23 --- Most hate speech falls under this category. For instance, advocation of the murder of a large group of people would obviously be unprotected hate speech.
- function_seven 9y ago> advocation of the murder of a large group of people would obviously be unprotected hate speech. It really isn’t. Every day there are thousands of people in this country that say something to the effect of, “We should nuke the entire Middle East and turn it into glass”. That is not a crime. You may find that idea repugnant, but it’s not “fighting words”.
- dabbledash 9y agoUnder which exception do you believe hate speech falls?
- jbapple 9y agoSome people may say that the Virginia v. Black, which allowed the state to ban "burning a cross with the intent of intimidating any person or group of persons", allows the state to make "hate speech" illegal. A person who believes that might say that cross burning is "hate speech" but not a "true threat", which is what the court called it. That person would presumably then believe that some "hate speech" can be made illegal in the US, and may still be illegal in Virginia.
- didgeoridoo 9y agoListen, you ignorant little wannabe totalitarian: "hate speech" is protected speech, and that link says nothing contradicting that principle. Where did you think this was going to get you? Did you think people wouldn't click through to read it?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dang 9y agoThat's seriously not ok on HN and will get your account banned. Your other comment in this thread was much better. More of that, please, and none of this—regardless of how wrong someone else is. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- SandersAK 9y agoThis comment shouldn't be flagged and dead because ad-hominem is protected!
- atom-morgan 9y agoCmd + F..."hate speech". Nothing.
- daveguy 9y agoTry Cmd + F..."Fighting words". Something. Advocation of violence toward others is not protected speech.
- BadassFractal 9y agoExcept, legally speaking, it doesn't work the way you think it does. This always gets invoked and nobody ever knows how it functions. Here's a lawyer chiming in on the history of Fighting Words and its current application: https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-censorship-tropes-in-the-medias-coverage-of-free-speech-controversies/ https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...
- jnbiche 9y agoNot in the USA, it's not.
- didgeoridoo 9y agoRegarding your edit: Surely you recognize that the speakers that are being shouted down and violently assaulted on college campuses don't fit this description. When college students say that it's appropriate to use violence to stop speech, they mean to stop Charles Murray, not Charles Manson.
- SandersAK 9y agoAre we talking about this Charles Murray? "A huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It's going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say.” —regarding his book, Losing Ground, quoted in “Daring Research or Social Science Pornography?: Charles Murray,” The New York Times Magazine, 1994 “The professional consensus is that the United States has experienced dysgenic pressures throughout either most of the century (the optimists) or all of the century (the pessimists). Women of all races and ethnic groups follow this pattern in similar fashion. There is some evidence that blacks and Latinos are experiencing even more severe dysgenic pressures than whites, which could lead to further divergence between whites and other groups in future generations.” —The Bell Curve, 1994
- didgeoridoo 9y agoYep. Not seeing true threats in there, do you? Calls for extermination? Incitement to violence? Unpopular speech is not unprotected speech. In fact, it's the only speech where protection means anything.
- DrScump 9y agoAll animals are equal... but some are more equal than others.
- phreanix 9y agoI was actually thinking more of “two legs bad, four legs good!”
- ttflee 9y agoWhat you described just reminded me of the Culture Revolution in China during Mao’s last decade.
- cvsh 9y agoThis is not something unique to millennials, or any recent generation. As long as we've had public opinion polling, large portions of the population have supported cracking down on speech they dislike. Why do you think the First Amendment is necessary? Because criminalizing speech has always been popular, as long as it's Bad Speech.
- chrisco255 9y agoApparently it was pretty unpopular in colonial America...
- haberman 9y agoThat poll appears to have significant problems in methodology: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/22/college-free-speech-violence-survey-junk-science https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/22/college-free... (I say this as someone who strenuously agrees with the NYT article overall).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- echlebek 9y agoThis is just the US coming in line with the rest of the civilized world, which does not permit hate speech. Hate speech is speech that encourages violence towards specific groups of people. Therefore it's worthwhile to make a free speech exception for it, in the interest of keeping the peace. edit: clarity
- renaudg 9y agoThe issue, of course, is to define hate speech. Most speakers being "no-platformed" on American campuses these days absolutely do not "encourage violence towards specific groups of people". It seems sufficient that they challenge prevailing viewpoints to be shouted down. There's this totalitarian attempt at labelling any disagreement as "micro-aggressive", to equate it to hate speech that must be suppressed. But none of that remotely reaches the threshold for legally defined hate speech in most countries. It's even usually completely orthogonal to that scale.
- dang 9y ago> Well, f* you millennials, I suppose ? This sort of flamebait amounts to trolling. Would you please not vandalize HN threads like this? We've already had to ask you to post civilly and substantively or not at all. Eventually, throwing Molotov cocktails (or peeing in the swimming pool, or whatever this is) will get you banned on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html