11 ms·

Free speech under attack across Ireland, UK, Europe and globally

93 points by Bran_son 3y ago

j_french 3y ago
[flagged]
- Bran_son 3y ago
  > Free speech is not under attack in Ireland Please be specific. Which parts of the claim "The Irish government is proceeding with legislation to outlaw so-called “hate speech” – even after the vast majority of respondents to their public consultation expressed opposition to the idea" [1] are false? Or is the photo of a page of that law, showing that possession of material likely to incite violence or hatred (with no mention of truthfulness as defense) falsified? I understand some claims in that thread are speculative, but the majority is factual. Feel free to dispute the speculation, but please don't use it to trick people into thinking you've also disproven the facts the speculation is based on. [1] https://gript.ie/hate-speech-consultation-received-mostly-negative-responses/ https://gript.ie/hate-speech-consultation-received-mostly-ne...
  - slater 3y ago
    Where is that "vast majority" (73%) number coming from? From Gript. But what was their methodology? Where's the data to back up their claims?
    - Bran_son 3y ago
      The data is public, available from the Irish government at https://www.gov.ie/en/consultation/c3d5e9-hate-speech-public-consultation/ https://www.gov.ie/en/consultation/c3d5e9-hate-speech-public... I don't know their methodology, but you can double check their results yourself. If 3600 responses is too much to go through, you can do a random sampling of a smaller set. I've looked at the first 10 submissions from individuals. 8 of them are opposed to the law, 1 is unintelligible, and one thinks the law, as proposed, doesn't go far enough. Alternately, you can try to find reports on this consultation from some media that you trust. Though you may find they are all silent on it. Edit: In fact, when interviewed, even Ireland's prime minister Leo Varadkar didn't dispute Gript's characterization of the consultation results (he merely claimed that the results aren't representative of Irish opinion, for which he offered no evidence, and certainly didn't conduct a referendum to definitively answer the question), as the video in that thread shows: https://twitter.com/griptmedia/status/1654113707004239872 https://twitter.com/griptmedia/status/1654113707004239872
  - j_french 3y ago
    Please be specific. Which parts of the claim "The Irish government is proceeding with legislation to outlaw so-called “hate speech” – even after the vast majority of respondents to their public consultation expressed opposition to the idea" [1] are false? The only source for the "vast majority of respondents expressed opposition" claim I can find is your quoted source, a site that seems to focuses exclusively on culture war topics, and is based on their own analysis without publishing their data. Not a reliable source. I took a look at the gov.ie link you shared. It seems there were 104 written individual submissions, and 3528 online individual submissions. Whatever the prevailing mood of the responses, can this be taken to be an accurate snapshot of the public mood of a nation of 5 million people? Also, the gript.ie analysis ignored submissions by groups and elected officials. Or is the photo of a page of that law, showing that possession of material likely to incite violence or hatred (with no mention of truthfulness as defense) falsified? This law was debated in the Dáil by the TDs elected by the people to represent their views. People raised issued, amendments were made. The issue around possession of material likely to incite violence or hatred was raised. There was a largely civil public debate around it, where various groups raised various issues, including the specific one you mention. It just didn't go your way. This is how democracy works. What's happened here is that this seems to have been picked up by the US right (Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk have rowed in) and it's brought a lot of attention to it. We largely don't have the deeply polarised discourse here that the US has, our democracy is largely civil and functioning more or less as well as such an imperfect system can. What we're starting to get here in recent years is a vocal and emboldened fringe minority who feel entitled to bring the validity of the whole system of societal decision-making into question when it doesn't support their views. This is the thing that is dangerous here, we've already seen this trend lead to violence in the US.
- slater 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - rainytuesday 3y ago
    A bit meta, but I call this cognitive de-platforming. Not engaging with a thesis because the person in question is an outcast.
    - giraffe_lady 3y ago
      It's not "because they're an outcast." It's because of an assessment of their stated motivation and previous actions. That's not prejudice it's just judgement.
      - rainytuesday 3y ago
        Non-engagement with the thesis was the point, not the particulars of how he fell from polite society.
        kennywinker 3y ago
        When people speak in bad faith, you don’t have to listen to them. The boy who cried wolf was in the wrong, not the townspeople who ignored him. Perhaps this is the one time when a normally un-reliable source is presenting a thesis that is intellectually sound - but unless a more reliable source picks it up, it’s not worth taking seriously.
        Bran_son 3y ago
        Conveniently, everyone across the political aisle from you speaks in bad faith.
        kennywinker 3y ago
        That’s definitely an easy position to fall into, but not an absolute truth. I’m quite sure most people against hate speech laws are coming from a reasonable fear of restrictions on speech. How slippery is the slope is a very fair thing to discuss and debate
- sebow 3y ago
  Plenty of other countries, especially western european ones, have since ~2015 introduced legislation (which later was either not/rarely enforced or walked back upon, though not removed) in which a person is presumed guilty until proven innocent for all kinds of 'hate speech', especially online. I'm not sure if you're trolling by calling such shifts in society merely conspiracy theories. If it happened like 1-10 times, sure. But that's not the case, and since then euroskepticism was on the rise, only until ~2020 when covid came and suddenly everybody fell in line and forget we even had other (bigger) problems in our society than merely a flu-tier virus. Note: I have not read the entirety of the thread as per i don't really care, only saw the part of a presumed legal document where you can be detained upon mere suspicions of wrongthought/wrongsay, which reminded me of similar legislation that passed in my country (& not only).
  - j_french 3y ago
    I'm not trolling, I'm pointing out that ascribing societal trends (which may or may not exist) to some hidden guiding hand through phrases like "falling into line" is suggestive of a conspiracy, i.e. a conspiracy theory. The phrase "conspiracy theory" has negative connotations I think because these theories are everywhere now, and so many are groundless variations of the same tropes. As for "cognitive deplatforming", making a judgement on how seriously to take a piece of writing based on the author's other writing seems reasonable to me. When I look at that Twitter account I see the same tired old tropes about the WEF, covid conspiracy, government thought control etc etc, poorly written with nothing insightful or original. So I come to the same conclusion as another commenter: supremely ignorable.
  - 1827163 3y ago
    Pressure groups are influencing the World Economic Forum and other globalist organizations to get countries to adopt these laws. So it's not a "conspiracy" of elites, rather that these pressure groups have managed to gain so much influence over the decades, that they in effect get to set our laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism
    - j_french 3y ago
- FrankyZunim 3y ago
  Don't be so dismissive. Just last month we had a US governor in a foreign country to sign away rights of his constituents back home in service of the interests of those rather influential foreigners. If these were Mongolians or New Zealanders, it would seem bizarre. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/ron-desantis-signs-bill-combat-hate-crimes-israel-rcna81799 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/ron-desantis-...
  - mansion7 3y ago
    From the article you linked: "the legislation — passed Wednesday by the Legislature — makes it a felony for hate groups to harass people for their religion or ethnicity. Florida had the fourth-highest number of antisemitic incidents last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League." He signed away his constituents' right to harass Jews? And wasn't this bill already approved by the legislature? One can already imagine the headlines if he DIDN'T sign it. "Desantis vetoes bill protecting Jews from white supremacists". Huh, that's not too different than the headlines one sees right now.
    - Runepika 3y ago
      The bill essentially bans political billeting on the grounds that someone would be offended by the speech. It is an anti-speech bill.
    - Bran_son 3y ago
      When the summary of a new law is comprised entirely of saying it bans things that are already illegal (such as harassment [1]), that's a good sign they're lying through omission. In this case, the law makes it a 1st class misdemeanor (up to 1 year jail time and $1000 fine [2]) to "display or project, using any medium, an image onto a building, structure, or other property without the written consent of the owner of the building, structure, or property" [3]. I.e. even if the display is not harassing or threatening in any way, and even if the owner does not complain, you can go to jail for up to a year. That includes any structure (such as a bridge or billboard), and any medium (unfurl a banner or use a projector). In other words, it makes illegal to spread a message through anything but official channels they can pressure and control. [1] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federal/Harassment.htm https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federa... [2] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/florida-misdemeanor-crimes-class-and-sentences.htm https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/florida-misd... [3] https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/269/BillText/er/PDF https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/269/BillText/er/P...
- cauliflower99 3y ago
  If you read the proposed bill, you will see your statement is incorrect.
- throw852023 3y ago
  [flagged]
youwillsee1 3y ago
The thread is spot on. The hate speech laws have a very broad and vague definition so governments can act on populist impulses. In UK, some guys got arrested under this pretext for burning a cardboard pretending it was a Grenfell tower. How is this the governments business? At all? But people demanded "justice" and so the police stepped in [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8akk-nZtuk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8akk-nZtuk "hate speech"
- bobsmooth 3y ago
  The UK is a country where it's illegal to offend people. It really isn't surprising that those people would get arrested but actual perpetrators of the Grenfell tragedy get off scot-free.
- c0llision 3y ago
  I remember not too long ago Ireland had blasphemy laws. Does anyone remember what happened to the guy who was criminally charged for mocking God on TV?
- CommanderData 3y ago
  Context matters. I assume you left it out for good reason from your throwaway account? The video alone doesn't explain. Grenfell tower housed mostly a non-British populous. 72 people died horrible deaths and 70 injured (mostly non-Brits), it's the biggest strucutual death toll in UK history. In the video someone says a racist remark. The effigy has cartoons of brown people wearing religious attire. His intent is debatable to some and in a court of law. In my opinion he got away lightly for something hateful and racist. It was shared widely with the same racist sentiment (prominent nazi groups and anti-immigrant faces).
  - itisit 3y ago
    Tasteless and offensive? Sure. But why should it be illegal to do such a thing?
    - Tanjreeve 3y ago
throwawaylinux 3y ago
Something something thunderous applause.
kranke155 3y ago
Absolutely bizarre content. I feel like the Cambridge Analytica-type botfarms have been on overdrive lately.
- Bran_son 3y ago
  'Bizarre' in what way? Are you alleging the hate-speech laws mentioned aren't real?
  - kennywinker 3y ago
    Hate speech law can be real without any of the interpretation or spin put on it by the threat being real. I’m canadian. Canada has hate speech laws, and has for a long time. The stuff that gets charged under that law is almost always genocidal garbage. A few cases of less extreme (but still pretty extreme) content have been tried and tossed out. Idk if the irish law goes further, but this thread isn’t a reliable gauge of how this law fits into the irish legal system
    - Bran_son 3y ago
      > Idk if the irish law goes further Had you read the thread you would know that it does. It contains excerpts from the law, showing that mere possession of material that is "likely to incite hatred" is illegal. That's an incredibly broad definition. Does an article alleging there are many Jews in Biden's cabinet [1] qualify? Or a book alleging white people are racist and fragile [2]? [1] https://forward.com/news/462330/enough-for-a-minyan-a-jewish-whos-who-of-bidens-cabinet-to-be/ https://forward.com/news/462330/enough-for-a-minyan-a-jewish... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Fragility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Fragility
      - kennywinker 3y ago
        I mean I’d say no on both accounts. Are you so familiar with the irish legal system that you’re confidant both of these would be made illegal by the law as written? I’m not. Both of those things are not getting charged under the canadian system and i’m pretty sure the wording of our law isn’t too far different from the proposed irish law.
2015bok1 3y ago
This thread and the comments here don't make it clear how extreme the Irish law is. If you're found in possession of anything deemed hate speech, you are legally presumed to be guilty unless you can prove you are using it for law enforcement or academic purposes. Possession is punishable by up to 2 years imprisonment. https://twitter.com/LFJIreland/status/1652774182210396165 https://twitter.com/LFJIreland/status/1652774182210396165 It's an enormous amount of power that could allow the government to target literally anyone - if you look hard enough, many texts could be read as hate speech in this law (for example, the Bible advocates genocide against certain ethnic groups).
- kennywinker 3y ago
  The phrasing of this feels a little hyperbolic. If you’re found in possession of illegal guns, you’re “automatically assumed to be guilty” unless you can prove you have a valid reason to possess illegal guns. That’s how making things illegal works. You could just say “possessing hate material is illegal under this law”. Which is not a weird thing snuck into the law - it’s literally what the law is about.
  - catiopatio 3y ago
    We’re talking about the possession of illegal words. That’s what makes this quite a bit different than your gun analogy.
    - kennywinker 3y ago
      Does it? I mean we can argue if making hate speech illegal is a good idea or a bad idea - but making it illegal doesn’t throw out the concept of innocent until proven guilty as the phase “automatically assumed to be guilty” suggests. Someone yelling fire in a crowded theatre isn’t “automatically assumed to be guilty”, they’ll be charged and placed on trial and the state will have to prove that a) they yelled fire, and b) this was the kind of speech we agree isn’t protected because it’s intended to cause harm. Similarly, if i’m caught possessing hate material the state would charge me and have to prove that i did possess that material, and that material fits the definition of hate speech.
slotrans 3y ago
Those places don't have free speech. They never have.
- tommit 3y ago
  Yikes. You talking about Ireland, UK, Europe or ... globally?
uvnq 3y ago
[flagged]
- Tanjreeve 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - uvnq 3y ago
    Case in point. "Let's kill the unpeople."
    - Tanjreeve 3y ago
      You seem to be equating my hate speech with actual violence. I don't know why you are so anti free speech but I worry that your censorious beliefs are creating a mathematical gradient pushing our society and culture towards punishment, revenge, hatred, and tyranny.. and who knows what the limits are to how far it will go
    - dang 3y ago
      It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed on HN—it's against the guidelines and destroys what the site is supposed to be for, so we have to ban accounts that do it, regardless of what they're battling for or against. For more explanation see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  - prepend 3y ago
    Many bigots have jobs and produce economic value. Each bigot has a mother who loves them. Many bigots have children they sacrifice for and protect. But most importantly, bigots can be redeemed. If you violently remove someone, they lose the potential for redemption. That’s my general response to “what value do bigots have.” But what about bigots who brought about exceptional change in the world. If they had been removed, violently, the world would be worse off. Karl Marx was a bigot, anti-Semite and Mark Twain too. Malcolm X was a bigot and furthered civil rights. LBJ was a bigot who passed the civil rights act. Lincoln was a bigot that ended slavery. Bigotry is bad, but it’s not someone’s defining characteristic. We want to end bigotry and help people commit less bigotry.
TheGigaChad 3y ago
[dead]
CommanderData 3y ago
No thing as free speech, there's consequences to saying anything you want. Rightly so hate speech is removed from platforms and those people face prison time. What falls under that is constantly changing. There's no real debates on whether Nazis should be given platforms on reddit or YouTube.
- hyperdunc 3y ago
  Wait until the definition of hate speech changes to include something _you_ want to say.
sph 3y ago
"So this is how liberty dies... with thundering applause." The amount of people defending these laws in this thread is a frightening proof of this. Everywhere these days you can find someone smart and utterly naive with their "but actually..." argument pushing the Overton window closer and closer to a censorship state, and there are not enough neutral people arguing for free speech itself. Only the weirdos and racist ones which are easy to hate and root against. So all this playing Devil's advocate is actually helping along the normalization of these free speech bans. https://youtu.be/BiqDZlAZygU https://youtu.be/BiqDZlAZygU
- uvnq 3y ago
  The Overton window will go further than that due to the beliefs of the ideologues pushing to remove "hate speech". They believe that hate speech is literal violence and genocide, as bad as murder or mass murder. I posted a comment warning that this anti-hate-speech legislation may go further as time goes by, towards killing of people, and even further from there, and got 1 comment supportint the "violent removal of bigots from society". These people believe you are committing genocide with your words, why wouldn't we expect them to act as if they actually are preventing genocide? Here is the comment, before they change or delete it: Tanjreeve 8 hours ago | parent | next [–] Society might be a fair amount improved if we had a strategy where we aimed to remove bigots, violently if necessary. What value do they actually bring? (At the time of me posting this comment, the only replies were the one above and another supporting hate speech laws and citing a common anti free speech strawman along the lines of "you are wrong that your free speech does not mean freedom from consequences")
Tanjreeve 3y ago
I thought this would be about all of the arrests of environmental protestors and anti royalist campaigners in the UK rather than the usual drivel about the right to be bigoted.

93 points by Bran_son 3y ago

j_french 3y ago

[flagged]

Bran_son 3y ago
> Free speech is not under attack in Ireland Please be specific. Which parts of the claim "The Irish government is proceeding with legislation to outlaw so-called “hate speech” – even after the vast majority of respondents to their public consultation expressed opposition to the idea" [1] are false? Or is the photo of a page of that law, showing that possession of material likely to incite violence or hatred (with no mention of truthfulness as defense) falsified? I understand some claims in that thread are speculative, but the majority is factual. Feel free to dispute the speculation, but please don't use it to trick people into thinking you've also disproven the facts the speculation is based on. [1] https://gript.ie/hate-speech-consultation-received-mostly-negative-responses/ https://gript.ie/hate-speech-consultation-received-mostly-ne...
- slater 3y ago
  Where is that "vast majority" (73%) number coming from? From Gript. But what was their methodology? Where's the data to back up their claims?
  - Bran_son 3y ago
    The data is public, available from the Irish government at https://www.gov.ie/en/consultation/c3d5e9-hate-speech-public-consultation/ https://www.gov.ie/en/consultation/c3d5e9-hate-speech-public... I don't know their methodology, but you can double check their results yourself. If 3600 responses is too much to go through, you can do a random sampling of a smaller set. I've looked at the first 10 submissions from individuals. 8 of them are opposed to the law, 1 is unintelligible, and one thinks the law, as proposed, doesn't go far enough. Alternately, you can try to find reports on this consultation from some media that you trust. Though you may find they are all silent on it. Edit: In fact, when interviewed, even Ireland's prime minister Leo Varadkar didn't dispute Gript's characterization of the consultation results (he merely claimed that the results aren't representative of Irish opinion, for which he offered no evidence, and certainly didn't conduct a referendum to definitively answer the question), as the video in that thread shows: https://twitter.com/griptmedia/status/1654113707004239872 https://twitter.com/griptmedia/status/1654113707004239872
- j_french 3y ago
  Please be specific. Which parts of the claim "The Irish government is proceeding with legislation to outlaw so-called “hate speech” – even after the vast majority of respondents to their public consultation expressed opposition to the idea" [1] are false? The only source for the "vast majority of respondents expressed opposition" claim I can find is your quoted source, a site that seems to focuses exclusively on culture war topics, and is based on their own analysis without publishing their data. Not a reliable source. I took a look at the gov.ie link you shared. It seems there were 104 written individual submissions, and 3528 online individual submissions. Whatever the prevailing mood of the responses, can this be taken to be an accurate snapshot of the public mood of a nation of 5 million people? Also, the gript.ie analysis ignored submissions by groups and elected officials. Or is the photo of a page of that law, showing that possession of material likely to incite violence or hatred (with no mention of truthfulness as defense) falsified? This law was debated in the Dáil by the TDs elected by the people to represent their views. People raised issued, amendments were made. The issue around possession of material likely to incite violence or hatred was raised. There was a largely civil public debate around it, where various groups raised various issues, including the specific one you mention. It just didn't go your way. This is how democracy works. What's happened here is that this seems to have been picked up by the US right (Donald Trump Jr. and Elon Musk have rowed in) and it's brought a lot of attention to it. We largely don't have the deeply polarised discourse here that the US has, our democracy is largely civil and functioning more or less as well as such an imperfect system can. What we're starting to get here in recent years is a vocal and emboldened fringe minority who feel entitled to bring the validity of the whole system of societal decision-making into question when it doesn't support their views. This is the thing that is dangerous here, we've already seen this trend lead to violence in the US.
slater 3y ago
[flagged]
- rainytuesday 3y ago
  A bit meta, but I call this cognitive de-platforming. Not engaging with a thesis because the person in question is an outcast.
  - giraffe_lady 3y ago
    It's not "because they're an outcast." It's because of an assessment of their stated motivation and previous actions. That's not prejudice it's just judgement.
    - rainytuesday 3y ago
      Non-engagement with the thesis was the point, not the particulars of how he fell from polite society.
      - kennywinker 3y ago
        When people speak in bad faith, you don’t have to listen to them. The boy who cried wolf was in the wrong, not the townspeople who ignored him. Perhaps this is the one time when a normally un-reliable source is presenting a thesis that is intellectually sound - but unless a more reliable source picks it up, it’s not worth taking seriously.
        Bran_son 3y ago
        Conveniently, everyone across the political aisle from you speaks in bad faith.
        kennywinker 3y ago
        That’s definitely an easy position to fall into, but not an absolute truth. I’m quite sure most people against hate speech laws are coming from a reasonable fear of restrictions on speech. How slippery is the slope is a very fair thing to discuss and debate
sebow 3y ago
Plenty of other countries, especially western european ones, have since ~2015 introduced legislation (which later was either not/rarely enforced or walked back upon, though not removed) in which a person is presumed guilty until proven innocent for all kinds of 'hate speech', especially online. I'm not sure if you're trolling by calling such shifts in society merely conspiracy theories. If it happened like 1-10 times, sure. But that's not the case, and since then euroskepticism was on the rise, only until ~2020 when covid came and suddenly everybody fell in line and forget we even had other (bigger) problems in our society than merely a flu-tier virus. Note: I have not read the entirety of the thread as per i don't really care, only saw the part of a presumed legal document where you can be detained upon mere suspicions of wrongthought/wrongsay, which reminded me of similar legislation that passed in my country (& not only).
- j_french 3y ago
  I'm not trolling, I'm pointing out that ascribing societal trends (which may or may not exist) to some hidden guiding hand through phrases like "falling into line" is suggestive of a conspiracy, i.e. a conspiracy theory. The phrase "conspiracy theory" has negative connotations I think because these theories are everywhere now, and so many are groundless variations of the same tropes. As for "cognitive deplatforming", making a judgement on how seriously to take a piece of writing based on the author's other writing seems reasonable to me. When I look at that Twitter account I see the same tired old tropes about the WEF, covid conspiracy, government thought control etc etc, poorly written with nothing insightful or original. So I come to the same conclusion as another commenter: supremely ignorable.
- 1827163 3y ago
  Pressure groups are influencing the World Economic Forum and other globalist organizations to get countries to adopt these laws. So it's not a "conspiracy" of elites, rather that these pressure groups have managed to gain so much influence over the decades, that they in effect get to set our laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entryism
  - j_french 3y ago
FrankyZunim 3y ago
Don't be so dismissive. Just last month we had a US governor in a foreign country to sign away rights of his constituents back home in service of the interests of those rather influential foreigners. If these were Mongolians or New Zealanders, it would seem bizarre. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/ron-desantis-signs-bill-combat-hate-crimes-israel-rcna81799 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/ron-desantis-...
- mansion7 3y ago
  From the article you linked: "the legislation — passed Wednesday by the Legislature — makes it a felony for hate groups to harass people for their religion or ethnicity. Florida had the fourth-highest number of antisemitic incidents last year, according to the Anti-Defamation League." He signed away his constituents' right to harass Jews? And wasn't this bill already approved by the legislature? One can already imagine the headlines if he DIDN'T sign it. "Desantis vetoes bill protecting Jews from white supremacists". Huh, that's not too different than the headlines one sees right now.
  - Runepika 3y ago
    The bill essentially bans political billeting on the grounds that someone would be offended by the speech. It is an anti-speech bill.
  - Bran_son 3y ago
    When the summary of a new law is comprised entirely of saying it bans things that are already illegal (such as harassment [1]), that's a good sign they're lying through omission. In this case, the law makes it a 1st class misdemeanor (up to 1 year jail time and $1000 fine [2]) to "display or project, using any medium, an image onto a building, structure, or other property without the written consent of the owner of the building, structure, or property" [3]. I.e. even if the display is not harassing or threatening in any way, and even if the owner does not complain, you can go to jail for up to a year. That includes any structure (such as a bridge or billboard), and any medium (unfurl a banner or use a projector). In other words, it makes illegal to spread a message through anything but official channels they can pressure and control. [1] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federal/Harassment.htm https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federa... [2] https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/florida-misdemeanor-crimes-class-and-sentences.htm https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/resources/florida-misd... [3] https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/269/BillText/er/PDF https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/269/BillText/er/P...
cauliflower99 3y ago
If you read the proposed bill, you will see your statement is incorrect.
throw852023 3y ago
[flagged]

youwillsee1 3y ago

The thread is spot on. The hate speech laws have a very broad and vague definition so governments can act on populist impulses. In UK, some guys got arrested under this pretext for burning a cardboard pretending it was a Grenfell tower. How is this the governments business? At all? But people demanded "justice" and so the police stepped in [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8akk-nZtuk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8akk-nZtuk "hate speech"

bobsmooth 3y ago
The UK is a country where it's illegal to offend people. It really isn't surprising that those people would get arrested but actual perpetrators of the Grenfell tragedy get off scot-free.
c0llision 3y ago
I remember not too long ago Ireland had blasphemy laws. Does anyone remember what happened to the guy who was criminally charged for mocking God on TV?
CommanderData 3y ago
Context matters. I assume you left it out for good reason from your throwaway account? The video alone doesn't explain. Grenfell tower housed mostly a non-British populous. 72 people died horrible deaths and 70 injured (mostly non-Brits), it's the biggest strucutual death toll in UK history. In the video someone says a racist remark. The effigy has cartoons of brown people wearing religious attire. His intent is debatable to some and in a court of law. In my opinion he got away lightly for something hateful and racist. It was shared widely with the same racist sentiment (prominent nazi groups and anti-immigrant faces).
- itisit 3y ago
  Tasteless and offensive? Sure. But why should it be illegal to do such a thing?
  - Tanjreeve 3y ago

throwawaylinux 3y ago

Something something thunderous applause.

kranke155 3y ago

Absolutely bizarre content. I feel like the Cambridge Analytica-type botfarms have been on overdrive lately.

Bran_son 3y ago
'Bizarre' in what way? Are you alleging the hate-speech laws mentioned aren't real?
- kennywinker 3y ago
  Hate speech law can be real without any of the interpretation or spin put on it by the threat being real. I’m canadian. Canada has hate speech laws, and has for a long time. The stuff that gets charged under that law is almost always genocidal garbage. A few cases of less extreme (but still pretty extreme) content have been tried and tossed out. Idk if the irish law goes further, but this thread isn’t a reliable gauge of how this law fits into the irish legal system
  - Bran_son 3y ago
    > Idk if the irish law goes further Had you read the thread you would know that it does. It contains excerpts from the law, showing that mere possession of material that is "likely to incite hatred" is illegal. That's an incredibly broad definition. Does an article alleging there are many Jews in Biden's cabinet [1] qualify? Or a book alleging white people are racist and fragile [2]? [1] https://forward.com/news/462330/enough-for-a-minyan-a-jewish-whos-who-of-bidens-cabinet-to-be/ https://forward.com/news/462330/enough-for-a-minyan-a-jewish... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Fragility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Fragility
    - kennywinker 3y ago
      I mean I’d say no on both accounts. Are you so familiar with the irish legal system that you’re confidant both of these would be made illegal by the law as written? I’m not. Both of those things are not getting charged under the canadian system and i’m pretty sure the wording of our law isn’t too far different from the proposed irish law.

2015bok1 3y ago

This thread and the comments here don't make it clear how extreme the Irish law is. If you're found in possession of anything deemed hate speech, you are legally presumed to be guilty unless you can prove you are using it for law enforcement or academic purposes. Possession is punishable by up to 2 years imprisonment. https://twitter.com/LFJIreland/status/1652774182210396165 https://twitter.com/LFJIreland/status/1652774182210396165 It's an enormous amount of power that could allow the government to target literally anyone - if you look hard enough, many texts could be read as hate speech in this law (for example, the Bible advocates genocide against certain ethnic groups).

kennywinker 3y ago
The phrasing of this feels a little hyperbolic. If you’re found in possession of illegal guns, you’re “automatically assumed to be guilty” unless you can prove you have a valid reason to possess illegal guns. That’s how making things illegal works. You could just say “possessing hate material is illegal under this law”. Which is not a weird thing snuck into the law - it’s literally what the law is about.
- catiopatio 3y ago
  We’re talking about the possession of illegal words. That’s what makes this quite a bit different than your gun analogy.
  - kennywinker 3y ago
    Does it? I mean we can argue if making hate speech illegal is a good idea or a bad idea - but making it illegal doesn’t throw out the concept of innocent until proven guilty as the phase “automatically assumed to be guilty” suggests. Someone yelling fire in a crowded theatre isn’t “automatically assumed to be guilty”, they’ll be charged and placed on trial and the state will have to prove that a) they yelled fire, and b) this was the kind of speech we agree isn’t protected because it’s intended to cause harm. Similarly, if i’m caught possessing hate material the state would charge me and have to prove that i did possess that material, and that material fits the definition of hate speech.

slotrans 3y ago

Those places don't have free speech. They never have.

tommit 3y ago
Yikes. You talking about Ireland, UK, Europe or ... globally?

uvnq 3y ago

[flagged]

Tanjreeve 3y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- uvnq 3y ago
  Case in point. "Let's kill the unpeople."
  - Tanjreeve 3y ago
    You seem to be equating my hate speech with actual violence. I don't know why you are so anti free speech but I worry that your censorious beliefs are creating a mathematical gradient pushing our society and culture towards punishment, revenge, hatred, and tyranny.. and who knows what the limits are to how far it will go
  - dang 3y ago
    It looks like you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed on HN—it's against the guidelines and destroys what the site is supposed to be for, so we have to ban accounts that do it, regardless of what they're battling for or against. For more explanation see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comment&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0&query=primarily%20test%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- prepend 3y ago
  Many bigots have jobs and produce economic value. Each bigot has a mother who loves them. Many bigots have children they sacrifice for and protect. But most importantly, bigots can be redeemed. If you violently remove someone, they lose the potential for redemption. That’s my general response to “what value do bigots have.” But what about bigots who brought about exceptional change in the world. If they had been removed, violently, the world would be worse off. Karl Marx was a bigot, anti-Semite and Mark Twain too. Malcolm X was a bigot and furthered civil rights. LBJ was a bigot who passed the civil rights act. Lincoln was a bigot that ended slavery. Bigotry is bad, but it’s not someone’s defining characteristic. We want to end bigotry and help people commit less bigotry.

TheGigaChad 3y ago

[dead]

CommanderData 3y ago

No thing as free speech, there's consequences to saying anything you want. Rightly so hate speech is removed from platforms and those people face prison time. What falls under that is constantly changing. There's no real debates on whether Nazis should be given platforms on reddit or YouTube.

hyperdunc 3y ago
Wait until the definition of hate speech changes to include something _you_ want to say.

sph 3y ago

"So this is how liberty dies... with thundering applause." The amount of people defending these laws in this thread is a frightening proof of this. Everywhere these days you can find someone smart and utterly naive with their "but actually..." argument pushing the Overton window closer and closer to a censorship state, and there are not enough neutral people arguing for free speech itself. Only the weirdos and racist ones which are easy to hate and root against. So all this playing Devil's advocate is actually helping along the normalization of these free speech bans. https://youtu.be/BiqDZlAZygU https://youtu.be/BiqDZlAZygU

uvnq 3y ago
The Overton window will go further than that due to the beliefs of the ideologues pushing to remove "hate speech". They believe that hate speech is literal violence and genocide, as bad as murder or mass murder. I posted a comment warning that this anti-hate-speech legislation may go further as time goes by, towards killing of people, and even further from there, and got 1 comment supportint the "violent removal of bigots from society". These people believe you are committing genocide with your words, why wouldn't we expect them to act as if they actually are preventing genocide? Here is the comment, before they change or delete it: Tanjreeve 8 hours ago | parent | next [–] Society might be a fair amount improved if we had a strategy where we aimed to remove bigots, violently if necessary. What value do they actually bring? (At the time of me posting this comment, the only replies were the one above and another supporting hate speech laws and citing a common anti free speech strawman along the lines of "you are wrong that your free speech does not mean freedom from consequences")

Tanjreeve 3y ago

I thought this would be about all of the arrests of environmental protestors and anti royalist campaigners in the UK rather than the usual drivel about the right to be bigoted.