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Yes and no. Hate speech can be arbitrarily defined, but speech inciting violence has a solid definition. There's a line between calling out refugee acceptance a

Yes and no. Hate speech can be arbitrarily defined, but speech inciting violence has a solid definition. There's a line between calling out refugee acceptance and questioning immigration to calling for all refugees to be hanged and for illegal immigrants to be physically harassed. There is an overlap between the two categories, but accepting hate speech and not accepting speech inciting violence is a very tough line to walk for any legislative body, and we're talking about human made bureaucratic institutions which need to make laws that can be clearly defined and followed. I don't think there's a one size fits all law here, and everything needs to be taken on a case by case basis, but free speech purists always ignore the fact that speech inciting violence can have a material impact on the world.

gjsman-1000 4y ago
"always ignore the fact that speech inciting violence can have a material impact on the world" Not as much as you think. In the US (I know that this story is about the UK but bear with me), speech inciting violence can be charged criminally already, as you can see by the investigations into the former president over whether he incited violence with his Jan 6 remarks. Whether I agree with that is irrelevant, I'm making the point that remarks inciting violence aren't 1st Amendment protected. The second problem is that Hate Speech regulation is, actually, being used against religious people in the countries with Hate Speech laws. In Finland, there was a criminal prosecution for a pastor who quoted the Bible that Men-who-have-sex-with-men is "abominable" even though none of the violent passages were mentioned, nor did the pastor have any violent comments regarding the quote. This was openly admitted by the prosecution, who said the charge was not that it was violent, but that it was "hateful."
- welshwelsh 4y ago
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    > This IS violence and it's a way of silencing gay people. Dehumanization is violence. This type of speech is why gay people are marginalized and why they feel the need to keep their sexuality a secret. I'm against dehumanisation, silencing and marginalisation. I don't agree that speech can be violence. I think it's important to make this distinction. Do you really want to disslove the distinction between someone beating you up, and someone saying nasty things to you?
    - anon84873628 4y ago
      You shifted the argument. It's not "someone saying nasty things to you". It's "someone saying nasty things about you to a large group of people." I'm not saying I agree, but it does change the logic.
      - denton-scratch 4y ago
        Violence is beating you up. Saying nasty things may be bad, but it's not bad because it's violence, whoever you say it to. It may change someone's logic, but whether the nastiness is addressed to one person or a multitude doesn't change my logic. Verbal "violence" isn't violence.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    That logic doesn't follow. Making people feel afraid or ostracised into hiding isn't violence. Not everything bad is violence.
  - benj111 4y ago
    If I declare my hate for gay people I'll be ostracised, is that also violence against me? Why should the law be getting involved in the social dynamics of ostracism? Free speech doesn't mean you only get to hear what you want to hear.
    - anon84873628 4y ago
      Because the paradox of tolerance
      - benj111 4y ago
        Aren't both sides being intolerant? One side is "I hate gays" the other is 'thats violence and I'll lock you up' Half the problem with today's 'progressive' politics is that it's intolerance dressed up as tolerance. And Im not a right winger by any stretch.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      > Free speech doesn't mean you only get to hear what you want to hear. (I'm assuming you're speaking of US 1st Amendment free speech) I don't think it means anything about what I hear. I choose what I hear: I take in a bit of TV news, and some radio. I follow a few blogs. Nobody is obliged to consume Faceache and Twaddle. Your question: No, being ostracised isn't violence. Boycotts are not violence. If I prefer not to meet you or deal with you, that isn't violence. Violence would be forcing me to deal with an anti-gay bigot when I don't want to. Does that help?
  - intimidated 4y ago
    The word "abominable" is dehumanizing? What about "loathsome", "detestable", "disgusting"? > Fuck that pastor and may he rot in prison. Your eagerness to use state violence against innocent folks—that is intimidating. Should I use violence against you before you can use it against me?
  - nobody9999 4y ago
    >Think of it this way. If you're a gay person, and the people around you say that men having sex with men is "abominable," does that make you more or less likely to freely express your sexuality? >This IS violence and it's a way of silencing gay people. Dehumanization is violence. This type of speech is why gay people are marginalized and why they feel the need to keep their sexuality a secret. There's a long history in many places of criminalising and discriminating against those who are gay. That's wrong. And it's understandable that folks whose liberties have been infringed by such laws and cultural repression would treat their orientation as a political issue and push their elected representatives to support their liberty. And that's generally a good thing. But legislators have one primary tool -- legislating. Which is why we get laws that criminalise one thing or another, whether that may be appropriate or not. At the same time, there's an old saw: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. And that's, for the most part (patterns of harassment are a small subset of unpleasant speech and are already criminalised in many places), the truth. I am a practitioner of BDSM. Which is often demonised as "abuse." It isn't, of course, as everything I do with a partner is consensual. I generally don't publicly discuss my sex life, because it's private. But if I did (as I am now), and you were to say that I'm a "rapist" or an "abuser" or a "criminal" because of my practices, you'd be wrong. But saying such things isn't "violence." Rather it's just ignorant, unpleasant and busybody[0] behavior. If we accept your argument, then we'd need to ban any speech that anyone finds objectionable, uncomfortable or unpleasant/nasty. And if we were to do that, I imagine you'd find yourself sharing a jail cell with the pastor you're deriding for his "violence." Is that the sort of world in which you want to live? For me, the answer is an emphatic "no." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busybody https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busybody Edit: Fixed typo. Added the missing link.
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    > does that make you more or less likely to freely express your sexuality? If the law operates on subjective criteria like this, then literally anything could conceivably be labelled a crime by somebody. Can society function on this standard?
- benj111 4y ago
  >The second problem is that Hate Speech regulation is, actually, being used against religious people. Why is that a problem? Why should it be any better if you quote hate speech from the Bible rather than mein kampf? Further, you say it was quoted without the violent passages. But the implication is still there, if you quote the Bible saying gay people are evil, it stands to reason that you also stand by the following passage that they should be stoned to death. So I'm not even sure this is that far from inciting violence anyway.
  - the_third_wave 4y ago
    Because, when you like it or not, religion is a protected category just like sexual orientation is. Members of protected categories are allowed freedoms which are not allowed outside those categories, one of these being the citation of scripture. Rest assured that there are plenty of people who think the same about the displays of obscenity which pride parades have turned into but since these are also part of a protected category they can't do anything about it either. The solution to these problems is to do away with protected categories altogether and just apply the law to all in an equal fashion - I'm all for it.
    - benj111 4y ago
      Protected category in your location. Plus I still don't see the problem. Surely protected categories are there to protect people, not give them cover to do otherwise illegal things. People can discuss mein kampf without getting to hate speech, the same should be true of a religious text. And if that is impossible maybe that religion shouldn't have special protections.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > Members of protected categories are allowed freedoms which are not allowed outside those categories That's not really how it works in the US. Except for age, every protected category applies to everyone. Even if your answer is "none", that's protected as much as any other answer.
dmix 4y ago
Of course, all of the recent anti-speech movements have been pushing way beyond inciting violence. It's even going beyond 'hate speech' to merely offensive. That's why it's so controversial.
- _fat_santa 4y ago
  There's also the concept of "speech is violence". The parent comment makes the assertion that there is a difference between hate speech and speech that incites violence. While the line seems very clear, the issue becomes when you start redefining what "violence" is, or start extrapolating. Say you go out and make a disparaging comment about a protected class, the comment is disparaging but it does not directly call for violence. An argument will be made my some that even though your comment does not cause violence, a crazy person will hear your comment and then proceed to commit violence based off of that. You can extrapolate that to almost anything. I can say "I think Javascript is a terrible programming language". Some crazy will take that to mean: "JS is terrible, therefore all JS devs are terrible, therefore I need to go out and commit violence against JS devs". The argument could be made here that the comment "I think javascript is a terrible programming language" is actually a call to violence because someone interpreted it that way.
easytiger 4y ago
This is irrelevant because the wording of the OLHB and the Equalities Act etc are specifically to allow a single self report of "harm" or anxiety unestablished by any further investigation as a basis for a criminal conviction. That's not on
johndevor 4y ago
> speech inciting violence has a solid definition. ...which is?
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  Speech directing people to hurt other people physically. Sorry, I don't approve of definitions of "violent" that include saying mean things to them.
  - Rebelgecko 4y ago
    How "direct" does the direction need to be? "Hey, here's a knife, use it to go stab this person" is pretty direct. What about "So-and-so ought to be stabbed" or "Golly I sure wish someone would get around to stabbing $whoever"
    - dTal 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_turbulent_priest%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      1 and 2 are clear incitements to violence, and are clearly illegal already. I don't know about 3; that appears to be a possibly truthful statement about the speaker's state of mind, and truthful or not, it seems legitimate to me. IANAL.
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        > What about "So-and-so ought to be stabbed" > [That is a] clear incitement to violence, and [is] clearly illegal already. Not in the US it's not. Clear and present danger, not hypothetical horseshit. I'm shocked at how unfamiliar censorship maximalists are with the current state of speech rights. I think it's why they think that censoring anti-vanilla ice cream speech or anti-Nolan Batman films speech is such a small step. Every single would-be censor thinks it's illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater, and don't realize that phrase was used to jail someone for anti-war speech. What makes you think that "incitements to violence" are illegal? Is is that "incitement" is a very legal-sounding word?
mc32 4y ago
But even inciting violence is not perfect: If you call for the ouster of a powerful person or an unpopular person, or we look at the anti-Wallstreet movement in the late aughts, there was 'hate speech' in lots of the megaphone speakers's words. Even calling for the death of a mass murderer, in some cases that can be a call to violence. Even inciting a protest can be a call to violence. It's getting close to "I can say down with Reagan and I won't get arrested --Me too, I can yell down with Reagan in Red Square and will not get arrested" territory. There was time we considered the "Go fuck yourself Mr. Cheney" guy during Katrina(?) symbolic of free speech...(unlike France till recently) but today "Let's go Brandon" in some circles is "hate speech".
t974958fgghg 4y ago
I don't think it's as clear as you think it is. Consider that nearly every law and government policy is enforced by means of violence. Therefore, most political advocacy is in fact advocacy for violence. People who are "questioning immigration" are usually calling for state violence against migrants. How else are they going to reduce immigration? When the government bans inciting violence, it's not all violence, just the violence that's against the interest of the state in enforcing its monopoly on violence. It doesn't make any difference for the people who are being incited against whether it's a government or some other violent group that ultimately acts on the speech. Another thing to note is that laws against inciting violence ban advocacy for defensive violence against the state's offensive violence. It's legal to advocate for all people of a particular demographic to be executed by the state, but it's illegal to advocate for those people shooting the cops who come to arrest them.
- ctoth 4y ago
  > People who are "questioning immigration" are usually calling for state violence against migrants. How else are they going to reduce immigration? I believe the popular phrase was something about building a wall, which while it might be xenophobic doesn't seem necessarily violent?
  - t974958fgghg 4y ago
    I think the wall is just a political symbol. Everybody understands that a wall alone won't reduce immigration as people can easily go over, under and around a wall. At most, a wall might slow down or redirect migrants, making the violent enforcement more effective.
pessimizer 4y ago
> free speech purists always ignore the fact that speech inciting violence can have a material impact on the world. Free speech but only when it is impossible that speech may have any material impact on the world is not free speech, it is maximally restricted speech.
shitlord 4y ago
What about speech inciting violence against Russian soldiers in Ukraine? Many in the western world support this sort of speech. Some of them even lobby their governments to send weapons to Ukraine for killing Russian soldiers. Should this sort of speech be banned?

gjsman-1000 4y ago

"always ignore the fact that speech inciting violence can have a material impact on the world" Not as much as you think. In the US (I know that this story is about the UK but bear with me), speech inciting violence can be charged criminally already, as you can see by the investigations into the former president over whether he incited violence with his Jan 6 remarks. Whether I agree with that is irrelevant, I'm making the point that remarks inciting violence aren't 1st Amendment protected. The second problem is that Hate Speech regulation is, actually, being used against religious people in the countries with Hate Speech laws. In Finland, there was a criminal prosecution for a pastor who quoted the Bible that Men-who-have-sex-with-men is "abominable" even though none of the violent passages were mentioned, nor did the pastor have any violent comments regarding the quote. This was openly admitted by the prosecution, who said the charge was not that it was violent, but that it was "hateful."

welshwelsh 4y ago
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  > This IS violence and it's a way of silencing gay people. Dehumanization is violence. This type of speech is why gay people are marginalized and why they feel the need to keep their sexuality a secret. I'm against dehumanisation, silencing and marginalisation. I don't agree that speech can be violence. I think it's important to make this distinction. Do you really want to disslove the distinction between someone beating you up, and someone saying nasty things to you?
  - anon84873628 4y ago
    You shifted the argument. It's not "someone saying nasty things to you". It's "someone saying nasty things about you to a large group of people." I'm not saying I agree, but it does change the logic.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      Violence is beating you up. Saying nasty things may be bad, but it's not bad because it's violence, whoever you say it to. It may change someone's logic, but whether the nastiness is addressed to one person or a multitude doesn't change my logic. Verbal "violence" isn't violence.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  That logic doesn't follow. Making people feel afraid or ostracised into hiding isn't violence. Not everything bad is violence.
- benj111 4y ago
  If I declare my hate for gay people I'll be ostracised, is that also violence against me? Why should the law be getting involved in the social dynamics of ostracism? Free speech doesn't mean you only get to hear what you want to hear.
  - anon84873628 4y ago
    Because the paradox of tolerance
    - benj111 4y ago
      Aren't both sides being intolerant? One side is "I hate gays" the other is 'thats violence and I'll lock you up' Half the problem with today's 'progressive' politics is that it's intolerance dressed up as tolerance. And Im not a right winger by any stretch.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    > Free speech doesn't mean you only get to hear what you want to hear. (I'm assuming you're speaking of US 1st Amendment free speech) I don't think it means anything about what I hear. I choose what I hear: I take in a bit of TV news, and some radio. I follow a few blogs. Nobody is obliged to consume Faceache and Twaddle. Your question: No, being ostracised isn't violence. Boycotts are not violence. If I prefer not to meet you or deal with you, that isn't violence. Violence would be forcing me to deal with an anti-gay bigot when I don't want to. Does that help?
- intimidated 4y ago
  The word "abominable" is dehumanizing? What about "loathsome", "detestable", "disgusting"? > Fuck that pastor and may he rot in prison. Your eagerness to use state violence against innocent folks—that is intimidating. Should I use violence against you before you can use it against me?
- nobody9999 4y ago
  >Think of it this way. If you're a gay person, and the people around you say that men having sex with men is "abominable," does that make you more or less likely to freely express your sexuality? >This IS violence and it's a way of silencing gay people. Dehumanization is violence. This type of speech is why gay people are marginalized and why they feel the need to keep their sexuality a secret. There's a long history in many places of criminalising and discriminating against those who are gay. That's wrong. And it's understandable that folks whose liberties have been infringed by such laws and cultural repression would treat their orientation as a political issue and push their elected representatives to support their liberty. And that's generally a good thing. But legislators have one primary tool -- legislating. Which is why we get laws that criminalise one thing or another, whether that may be appropriate or not. At the same time, there's an old saw: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. And that's, for the most part (patterns of harassment are a small subset of unpleasant speech and are already criminalised in many places), the truth. I am a practitioner of BDSM. Which is often demonised as "abuse." It isn't, of course, as everything I do with a partner is consensual. I generally don't publicly discuss my sex life, because it's private. But if I did (as I am now), and you were to say that I'm a "rapist" or an "abuser" or a "criminal" because of my practices, you'd be wrong. But saying such things isn't "violence." Rather it's just ignorant, unpleasant and busybody[0] behavior. If we accept your argument, then we'd need to ban any speech that anyone finds objectionable, uncomfortable or unpleasant/nasty. And if we were to do that, I imagine you'd find yourself sharing a jail cell with the pastor you're deriding for his "violence." Is that the sort of world in which you want to live? For me, the answer is an emphatic "no." [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busybody https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busybody Edit: Fixed typo. Added the missing link.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > does that make you more or less likely to freely express your sexuality? If the law operates on subjective criteria like this, then literally anything could conceivably be labelled a crime by somebody. Can society function on this standard?
benj111 4y ago
>The second problem is that Hate Speech regulation is, actually, being used against religious people. Why is that a problem? Why should it be any better if you quote hate speech from the Bible rather than mein kampf? Further, you say it was quoted without the violent passages. But the implication is still there, if you quote the Bible saying gay people are evil, it stands to reason that you also stand by the following passage that they should be stoned to death. So I'm not even sure this is that far from inciting violence anyway.
- the_third_wave 4y ago
  Because, when you like it or not, religion is a protected category just like sexual orientation is. Members of protected categories are allowed freedoms which are not allowed outside those categories, one of these being the citation of scripture. Rest assured that there are plenty of people who think the same about the displays of obscenity which pride parades have turned into but since these are also part of a protected category they can't do anything about it either. The solution to these problems is to do away with protected categories altogether and just apply the law to all in an equal fashion - I'm all for it.
  - benj111 4y ago
    Protected category in your location. Plus I still don't see the problem. Surely protected categories are there to protect people, not give them cover to do otherwise illegal things. People can discuss mein kampf without getting to hate speech, the same should be true of a religious text. And if that is impossible maybe that religion shouldn't have special protections.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > Members of protected categories are allowed freedoms which are not allowed outside those categories That's not really how it works in the US. Except for age, every protected category applies to everyone. Even if your answer is "none", that's protected as much as any other answer.

dmix 4y ago

Of course, all of the recent anti-speech movements have been pushing way beyond inciting violence. It's even going beyond 'hate speech' to merely offensive. That's why it's so controversial.

_fat_santa 4y ago
There's also the concept of "speech is violence". The parent comment makes the assertion that there is a difference between hate speech and speech that incites violence. While the line seems very clear, the issue becomes when you start redefining what "violence" is, or start extrapolating. Say you go out and make a disparaging comment about a protected class, the comment is disparaging but it does not directly call for violence. An argument will be made my some that even though your comment does not cause violence, a crazy person will hear your comment and then proceed to commit violence based off of that. You can extrapolate that to almost anything. I can say "I think Javascript is a terrible programming language". Some crazy will take that to mean: "JS is terrible, therefore all JS devs are terrible, therefore I need to go out and commit violence against JS devs". The argument could be made here that the comment "I think javascript is a terrible programming language" is actually a call to violence because someone interpreted it that way.

easytiger 4y ago

This is irrelevant because the wording of the OLHB and the Equalities Act etc are specifically to allow a single self report of "harm" or anxiety unestablished by any further investigation as a basis for a criminal conviction. That's not on

johndevor 4y ago

> speech inciting violence has a solid definition. ...which is?

denton-scratch 4y ago
Speech directing people to hurt other people physically. Sorry, I don't approve of definitions of "violent" that include saying mean things to them.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  How "direct" does the direction need to be? "Hey, here's a knife, use it to go stab this person" is pretty direct. What about "So-and-so ought to be stabbed" or "Golly I sure wish someone would get around to stabbing $whoever"
  - dTal 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_turbulent_priest%3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    1 and 2 are clear incitements to violence, and are clearly illegal already. I don't know about 3; that appears to be a possibly truthful statement about the speaker's state of mind, and truthful or not, it seems legitimate to me. IANAL.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      > What about "So-and-so ought to be stabbed" > [That is a] clear incitement to violence, and [is] clearly illegal already. Not in the US it's not. Clear and present danger, not hypothetical horseshit. I'm shocked at how unfamiliar censorship maximalists are with the current state of speech rights. I think it's why they think that censoring anti-vanilla ice cream speech or anti-Nolan Batman films speech is such a small step. Every single would-be censor thinks it's illegal to shout fire in a crowded theater, and don't realize that phrase was used to jail someone for anti-war speech. What makes you think that "incitements to violence" are illegal? Is is that "incitement" is a very legal-sounding word?

mc32 4y ago

But even inciting violence is not perfect: If you call for the ouster of a powerful person or an unpopular person, or we look at the anti-Wallstreet movement in the late aughts, there was 'hate speech' in lots of the megaphone speakers's words. Even calling for the death of a mass murderer, in some cases that can be a call to violence. Even inciting a protest can be a call to violence. It's getting close to "I can say down with Reagan and I won't get arrested --Me too, I can yell down with Reagan in Red Square and will not get arrested" territory. There was time we considered the "Go fuck yourself Mr. Cheney" guy during Katrina(?) symbolic of free speech...(unlike France till recently) but today "Let's go Brandon" in some circles is "hate speech".

t974958fgghg 4y ago

I don't think it's as clear as you think it is. Consider that nearly every law and government policy is enforced by means of violence. Therefore, most political advocacy is in fact advocacy for violence. People who are "questioning immigration" are usually calling for state violence against migrants. How else are they going to reduce immigration? When the government bans inciting violence, it's not all violence, just the violence that's against the interest of the state in enforcing its monopoly on violence. It doesn't make any difference for the people who are being incited against whether it's a government or some other violent group that ultimately acts on the speech. Another thing to note is that laws against inciting violence ban advocacy for defensive violence against the state's offensive violence. It's legal to advocate for all people of a particular demographic to be executed by the state, but it's illegal to advocate for those people shooting the cops who come to arrest them.

ctoth 4y ago
> People who are "questioning immigration" are usually calling for state violence against migrants. How else are they going to reduce immigration? I believe the popular phrase was something about building a wall, which while it might be xenophobic doesn't seem necessarily violent?
- t974958fgghg 4y ago
  I think the wall is just a political symbol. Everybody understands that a wall alone won't reduce immigration as people can easily go over, under and around a wall. At most, a wall might slow down or redirect migrants, making the violent enforcement more effective.

pessimizer 4y ago

> free speech purists always ignore the fact that speech inciting violence can have a material impact on the world. Free speech but only when it is impossible that speech may have any material impact on the world is not free speech, it is maximally restricted speech.

shitlord 4y ago

What about speech inciting violence against Russian soldiers in Ukraine? Many in the western world support this sort of speech. Some of them even lobby their governments to send weapons to Ukraine for killing Russian soldiers. Should this sort of speech be banned?