7 ms·
>There are morons on the internet and there need to be ways to enforce a takedown for hate speech IMHO. No. God no. This is functionally no different from ev
by tsotha 11y ago
>There are morons on the internet and there need to be ways to enforce a takedown for hate speech IMHO.
No. God no. This is functionally no different from every justification for censorship since the invention of the written word. How can the expansion and flexibility of the term "hate speech" not tip you off to the foolishness of this position?
- icebraining 11y agoPlaying Devil's advocate, just because the term "hate speech" is vague, doesn't mean the laws must be.
- tsotha 11y agoSpeech is too complicated to spell out things explicitly. There are too many ways to imply things ambiguously, particularly when you take context into account. In practice what you do with hate speech laws is give the government tools to arrest people it doesn't like and ignore the sorts of speech you thought you were banning.
- Retra 11y agoI take it you don't know what an idiom is?
- icebraining 11y agoI thought I used one right in the beginning of my post. Care to be more specific, please?
- Retra 11y agoIf you try to create laws prohibiting hate speech, you can get around them by creating idioms. So your laws have to account for context, and that's not something laws are able to do effectively. In fact, the less vague your laws are, the less able they are to account for context.
- fineman 11y agoBut, the "reasonable person" referenced in so many laws does recognize idiom. If I say "I'm going to fuck your shit up", literally that sentence is either a homosexual come-on or means nothing - but idiomatically it means "I will hurt and/or kill you", and at that point a (credible?) threat has been uttered... So if your "specific" law said "insult X is fighting-words but insult Y isn't", yes that's retarded. But if it says "if a reasonable person would feel the comments were more threat and libel designed to raise hatred against them than criticism..." it might at least be on the right track.
- fineman 11y agoSo sure, where someone puts their name on it go to their house, haul them to court, and threaten them with jail/compensation unless they remove/repent certain things. But when there is no identity and you could never find one do you get stuck in an infinite loop of righteousness or do you move on?
- icebraining 11y agoThat's a different issue; I was just disagreeing with that specific criticism. I don't support hate speech laws, hence "playing devil's advocate".
- fineman 11y agoSorry. Carry on. :) And yes, they are a subjective tool for punishing the unpopular.
- EGreg 11y agoOk, how about libelous speech that can ruin careers, creditworthiness etc? I guess we can just all hope EVERYONE who matters will ignore anonymous libelous speech. But then, what if someone writes under a false name? In short, can some speech be harmful enough to warrant forced removal from the public record? How about a leader inciting his followers to violence? Where are the limits of free speech?
- tsotha 11y agoIf I were running things free speech would be absolute, including incitement. We already have laws against incitement, and they're only enforced against the people the government doesn't like.
- fineman 11y agoSure, there are limits of acceptable speech and those are even far below what you and I would call hate speech. But wasting too much (any) time of the issue of what we should ban misses the issue that ultimately we can't really ban much. If we want to block something, maybe we need to do the social-media equivalent of hands-across-american or something. But regardless if it's a "good" idea, blocking anything effectively is just hopes and prayers. Your pony is in the mail. Next!
- dublinben 11y agoLibel can be resolved through the courts. If you can demonstrate that you have been harmed by someone's untrue speech, then you can be granted restitution.