I know it already is but should it be?
No. They should get fined for every statement
YES. Someone or something will manipulate criteria for what is hate speech OR ANTISEMITISM, all for its convenience to support genocide or BILLIONAIRE to oppress common people. Imagine if it’s not protected by laws. Fuck censorship, BURN ISRAEL AND KILL BILLIONAIRE!
Yes.
They should be encouraged to say whatever they want to say.
What they really want isn’t freedom of speech but freedom from consequence. And that’s something they shouldn’t have.
abolish all laws, and let oppressed people deal with hate speech the way they want
No, but it’s better to have it protected by free speech than it would be to have governments decide what constitutes hate speech.
I think we basically accomplish the same thing with libel and criminal statutes. There’s a pretty clear line. It’s kept limited to a strict victim-perpetrator dynamic, where you’re not going to get arbitrary speech suppression where no one was harmed.
Yes. The reason why is because there’s no clear definition on what hate speech even is. Regulating something that has no clear definition and often is context dependent infringes on regular speech.
By voluntary associations (like a fediverse instance) absolutely not.
By government? Absolutely. What happens when disparaging the One True God Baby Jesus or His Followers is declared hate speech?
Whatever powers you give the government, you also give to the worst form of that government which you can imagine. The civil liberties that protect rapists and drug dealers are the same ones that are helping keep more people from being kidnapped by ICE in America.
This is an important point. There’s a big difference between guys with guns telling you what you can say, and a local get-together. Sometimes people act like they should be able to say whatever they want wherever they want, even if they’re like standing in someone else’s house
More generally I think this https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship is a good way to think about things like this.
Yes
/full stop
Yes. I don’t trust anyone to draw the line on what does or doesn’t count as hate speech.
Now, calls to violence are little more black-and-white. I can see a ban on that.
Calls to violence are already not protected as free speech under the first amendment. Niether is obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, and commercial speech such as advertising.
No, it should not. “My freedom ends where it starts infringing on other peoples rights.” is the basic law of humanity. Any law book should basically follow this line, and mostly actually do.
I don’t know why you are being downvoted, this is correct: “My freedom ends where the next person’s freedom starts.” We can do everything we want as long it doesn’t harm or encroach (and “harm” and “encroach” are loaded words in this context) on the next person. “Harm” and “encroach” here means you don’t diminish the other persons rights, at all.
“At all” is kinda contradictory part. Limiting harm to others would already necessitate limiting freedoms and the more people and closer together they live the more freedoms are limited.
Living in the middle of nowhere and a person can do almost whatever pops in their mind, almost absolute freedom.
Living in a city and there’s a long list of laws/rules/regulations that already limit what one can do. Not that those are bad limitations.
Individuals should not limit other’s freedom, and as such the law can restrict individual freedoms to that purpose.
The problem is you hand government and courts the right to decide what is hate speech.
In the UK the government is already trying to classify anti-zionist speech as banned hate speech.
Laws are weapons, your enemies can use them against you.
Imagine living in Queensland rn. Where the phrase “from the river to the sea” is banned…
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-05/qld-hate-speech-laws-passed-parliament/106420306
“Hey Bob, want to kayak from the river to the sea tomorrow”
Government seething intensifies
I’d rather know someone is a nazi then not know
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. A lot of extremists like to be heard. I like to know when they’re coming.
Specific well-defined instances of hate speech like “all members of group XYZ deserve to die” should be banned IMO. More ambiguous things should not, otherwise the government can start banning political sentiments that it does not like.
Putin and his friends absolutely deserve to die. I’m not really killing anyone, but I can say that (well, outside of Russia, because freedom of speech doesn’t work there). Freedom of speech allows me to say how exactly I don’t like him and his gang.
Also, from reading about cases where people were jailed for something they have said - if it’s allowed to prosecute people for anything, somebody might try to mess with your words to make you look guilty. For example, the law regarding “rehabilitating nazism” was used to prosecute people who were saying something about USSR working with nazi Germany in the beginning of WW2, or similar. Examples (sorry, too long to type so It’s llm summaries:- A person in Perm was fined 200,000 rubles for sharing an article that mentioned the “joint attack on Poland by the USSR and Germany” in 1939, which the authorities portrayed as “rehabilitating Nazism.”
- A woman in Smolensk was fined for posting a historical photo of her home under Nazi occupation, where a Wehrmacht flag and soldiers appeared in the background.
So if you make a word or a concept “bad”, someone will try to use it maliciously, at some point. It doesn’t help when court is not independent, that opens up a road to charging many people you don’t like on daily basis.
That does not sound like a charitable interpretation of my argument. For example
A woman in Smolensk was fined for posting a historical photo of her home under Nazi occupation, where a Wehrmacht flag and soldiers appeared in the background.
This has nothing to do with well-defined instances of hate speech. Even the Putin example is quite far fetched, though I guess I should have used a more precise example
Yes because otherwise you can shut down speech you dislike by labeling it “hate speech”
Canada restricts hate speech, as does most of Europe.
Yet its the US with the speech suppression issues going on right now.
You shouldn’t base a law on “The current government is okay” simply because the next one might not be.
That implies the bad government will care about following the laws, or won’t change the law or its enforcement
Even with everything going on in America right now, it definitely doesn’t suppress free speech more than Germany or Britain. I mean the Palestine Action thing is still happening (while Reform gets to yap all day long, mind you).
And that’s why you need a democratic process and not a dictatorship that decides unilaterally what is fine.
On the other hand, if you protect the nazis, you are one of them and you are letting them oppress whoever they want.
Personally, I know what side I prefer.
you want dictatorship of the majority? That just means minority groups (which may be the more moral group, eg anti slavery in the past, women’s rights in the past, lgbt+ rights now, vegans now) will be oppressed instead. To protect minorities you need absolute free speech, not just democracy
I said a democratic process, not a majority vote. To protect minorities you need laws that protect minorities and individual rights, freedom of speech is secondary, and actually often contradicting with the first part of my sentence.
It’s no mystery why the ones throwing “freedom of speech” all day long in all conversations are the nazis. If freedom of speech is king, then hate speech is tolerated. What needs to be of the utmost importance is the respect of individuals, and freedom of speech becomes a consequence of that.
How can minorities exist if they don’t have the freedom to express their minority opinions even if they’re 'hateful" to others? It sounds like only sanctioned minorities would be protected under your system, which makes no sense.
What about hating billionaires, I expect you would think that 'hate speech " is fine?
If individuals are respected, then their minority opinions will be fine as long as they are not breaking the rule of not blocking other’s freedoms.
Billionaires are in many way hostile to society as a whole, and destroy the freedom of most people, by choice. Nothing forces them to do it, they aren’t born that way or whatever else, and they are breaking the rule of respecting other’s freedom; as such hating on billionaires is not hate speech, because they broke the rule first and are doing it willingly and with complete choice over the matter.
But you’re right, there shouldn’t be hate speech against billionaires, because they shouldn’t be allowed to exist.
