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Determining murder is (fairly) objective. You have a dead person and a guy with a knife who confesses that he stabbed him. Determining hate speech isn’t usuall
by newsbinator 6y ago
Determining murder is (fairly) objective. You have a dead person and a guy with a knife who confesses that he stabbed him.
Determining hate speech isn’t usually (or ever?) objective. You have a living person and a guy with a chat bubble who confesses that he has a political opinion.
Sometimes you want that guy's speech.
Take the world of Star Wars, after the Empire has won. What is hate speech in their world? If you say that people who believe in the Sith religion are bad, that's "Hate Speech" and should be deplatformed.
- krageon 6y agoA political opinion and hate speech are distinct. There's at least one law body you can look at to help you understand why and how that is, namely the German one.
- diragon 6y agoThat's a great analogy because it highlights an important point: we're living in the real world, not in a movie. In the real world, it's sometimes fairly obvious when someone should be forcibly shut up. In the olden days, it meant leaving an establishment when some village idiot was rambling in there. Eventually, the owner of the establishment would stop letting the idiot in. That's what's happening in Twitter, nothing more. The scale is a lot larger, sure, but still.
- newsbinator 6y agoThat reminds me of: > The phrase "I know it when I see it" is a colloquial expression by which a speaker attempts to categorize an observable fact or event, although the category is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters. The phrase was used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it