It seems to me a repeating pattern that once freedom of thought, speech and expression is limited for essentially any reason, it will have unintended consequences.
Once the tools are in place, they will be used, abused and inevitably end up in the hands of someone you disagree with, regardless of whether the original implementer had good intentions.
As such I’m personally very averse to restrictions. I’ve thought about the question a fair bit – there isn’t a clear cut or obvious line to draw.
Please elaborate and motivate your answer. I’m genuinely curious about getting some fresh perspectives.
I think speech that depicts a real person being abused–e.g CSEM, revenge porn–should be prohibited. Credible threats should also be illegal. Otherwise, I don’t think there should be many state-enforced restrictions on speech. I think hate speech laws are a pretty bad idea, because the people in power will inevitably use them against marginalized people. Laws intended to protect the vulnerable can easily be used to oppress them further. We’re seeing this with pro-Palestinian groups being labeled hate groups right now in the name of “protecting” people from “antisemitism.” (Antisemitism is a real problem, don’t get me wrong, but a lot of people who get prosecuted for it haven’t actually done anything except support Palestine.)
I do think that communities should enforce their own speech prohibitions, though. For example, social media platforms shouldn’t tolerate racism. Even if you think racists have a moral right to spread their racism (they shouldn’t), you have to understand that some forms of speech inherently suppress others. If you’ve got a neo-nazi screaming racial slurs at an event, obviously the people of color there will not feel safe to speak up, and their voices will not be heard. You have to decide whose speech you want to protect.
This is quite frankly, ass-backwards reasoning.
If legitimate laws are getting twisted and abused to fuck with people by governments, then those same government will just pass new laws to fuck with people if they want to.
Literally every western country in the world has anti-hate speech laws, and by and large they are not problematic. It’s only in dumb-fuck america that everything needs to be black and white and you can’t draw subtle nuanced lines. Yeah, the UK probably errs too much on the side of repressing speech, like when they banned Palestine Action for vandalizing a military base, yet at the same time, I just saw a pro-palestine protest shut down the main tourist district of Scotland today, and the police just made sure everyone was safe from external threats. No suppression of any anti-Israeli or pro-Palestine speechse.
It’s very easy to write hate-speech laws, it’s dumb as fuck to think they’re more problematic than not having them.
You claim these laws aren’t a problem, then mention that governments are in fact abusing them literally right now.