I disagree since I think censorship can be desired when combatting hate speech. Maybe we just disagree how exactly we use the word ‘censorship’.
You are addressing the wrong problem. You’re focusing on the symptom rather than the disease.
Fighting hate speech rather than hatred itself only strengthens the hatred. As soon as you say “you mustn’t say that” you validate the hatred and give it power. Look at any counterculture, positive or negative. Trying to suppress it only validates it, gives it legitimacy as being important enough for the establishment to want to suppress, and if the people who might support the hatred already don’t like the people who would suppress the hate speech, you’ve just poured fuel on the fire.
The problem to be fixed isn’t hate speech, it’s hatred. It’s a tougher problem to solve, but a much more important one that you will actually get a productive effect by solving it.
You make a good point. Hate must be addressed at its root.
I see hate speech censorship as important for protecting the victims/vulnerable. How can we protect these people without this censorship?
Do you have any favourite examples of how a society can fight hatred?
how can we protect people without this censorship?
We don’t, nor should we try to.
Protecting people’s feelings from offense is not a valid activity in a free society. The second you start down the road of ‘we must regulate this guy’s words and actions to protect that guy’s feelings’ we become a nanny state full of people with paper thin skins.
We accept that one consequence of free speech is that sometimes people will say things that are hurtful. We do that because the alternative is getting rid of free speech.
Hate must be addressed at its root.
I could not agree more. Fighting hatred with hatred only breeds more hatred. But that seems to be the standard strategy today, it’s okay to not just refuse to tolerate intolerance, but to be actively intolerant of those who themselves seem intolerant. It is just fighting bad with bad and the result is more bad.
The way we fight the roots of hatred is with open discourse. The people who have hate in their hearts, we do not isolate them, we do not wall them off from society, we do not practice and encourage intolerance against them. We show them a better way. We make ourselves examples of doing better, not just against the people they don’t like, but against the people we don’t like.
We try to build bridges and encourage communication. For all the people who say immigrants are lazy lawbreakers, we show them immigrants who are the hardest working motherfuckers there are and pay their taxes. For the people who think black people are a problem, we introduce them to black people who break their stereotypes.
For the overwhelming majority of people who have hate in their hearts and intolerance and prejudice, those feelings are based on stereotypes.
People don’t join the KKK because they start in a mixed culture and then conclude black people are a problem. They join the KKK because they have stereotypes they see reinforced in media and TV.
There was a famous Black dude whose name I don’t remember, but he of his own volition managed to deprogram a whole bunch of KKK members. All he did was sit down and fucking talk to them. That’s it. Like sit down at the bar next to them and start a conversation. Many of the KKK members had never encountered a respectable well-spoken black person before (let alone one willing to talk to them) and were completely blown away because it broke the stereotype of a black person that they joined the KKK to fight against.
A good number of them ended up leaving the KKK and giving this man their robes on the way out. So there’s this friendly black dude who has a big box of KKK robes that were given to him by ex-members he deprogrammed.
That is how we fight hate. We fight hate with love, we fight intolerance with tolerance and open arms, we fight stereotypes with exposition, we fight ignorance with knowledge.
Otherwise it’s like we are saying there’s too much stupidity in society so we’re going to prevent people with lower IQs from attempting school. It doesn’t work.
No, the community needs to cyber bully them off the platform. They need to feel rejection for their words, not censorship. Censorship lets them frame themselves as the victim as they seek out a smaller echo chamber on the fringes. They need to learn their words will turn the community against them
We still have to live with them. We can’t ignore them or silence them - we have to correct them
And what would happen when the community itself is built on hatred and welcomes hate wholeheartedly?
What do you mean? It works the same way, the opinion of the community will pull you closer to the group consensus. Too much exposure will have horrible things you don’t really believe spilling out of your mouth
Don’t go there, don’t spread word about it, don’t feed it in any way. It’s like flood water - pull others out of it if you can, but minimize your exposure
As to shutting them down if you have the ability? Shutting down a cesspool is good - it fragments the echo chamber, and some members won’t make the migration. The only question is if I trust the one making that decision to remain impartial
Who would you have define hate speech in the US? SCOTUS?
Many citizens may agree on the definition, but I wouldn’t trust our government to draw those lines.
Many countries have working anti-hate speech laws. It’s not really a big problem for freedom of speech in those countries.
Except for the countries that have anti-hate laws that are deliberately vague and specifically used to jail anyone who is disliked by the government. China and Russia come to mind as examples, but I’m sure they aren’t the only ones.
Besides hate-speech, I’m not sure how much should be censored really. China does a lot of censoring to ‘protect’ their citizens from everything, I’m not sure this would be a good thing even if that really was a goal.
And protecting children from traumatising content looks like another good thing to do, but under that banner I usually see governments doing whatever they want without caring about children past using their image.
Those countries don’t have partisan polarization propaganda preschoolers writing their legislation.
