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.
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.