Stop going down this slope while you still can push back. If you give in, everyone who has an axe to grind will come with theirs.
However, to be more serious, your comparison makes no sense. The redefinition of hate speech by a certain political quadrant led us down this path. As soon as the standard changes from “inciting physical violence” to “saying things I don’t like,” then whoever wields the most power can censor at will. Strict standards of free speech are the only moral course of action, despite what the advocates of redefining language would have you think.
If we trust juries with the proper application of not always clear laws (and we do just that currently), than I don’t see the point of the usual “slippery slope” argument.
Determining hate speech isn’t usually (or ever?) objective. You have a living person and a guy with a chat bubble who confesses that he has a political opinion.
Sometimes you want that guy's speech.
Take the world of Star Wars, after the Empire has won. What is hate speech in their world? If you say that people who believe in the Sith religion are bad, that's "Hate Speech" and should be deplatformed.
In the olden days, it meant leaving an establishment when some village idiot was rambling in there. Eventually, the owner of the establishment would stop letting the idiot in. That's what's happening in Twitter, nothing more. The scale is a lot larger, sure, but still.
> The phrase "I know it when I see it" is a colloquial expression by which a speaker attempts to categorize an observable fact or event, although the category is subjective or lacks clearly defined parameters. The phrase was used in 1964 by United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to describe his threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio.
Arguments like this are the oil that makes the slope slippery. If you’ll be exactly as mad when someone “censors” harassment verses when they censor opinions they don’t like you send the message that they might as well just do that then.
> possible way to separate them from all other forms of communication
because the very people making that decision would be the very people youd least want to make that decision.
It seems obvious to you what is and isn’t hate speech, and it seems obvious we should be able to outlaw it as a result, but I suspect you’ll find your definition and that of 100 random people off the internet will differ substantially. There will be some common ground, but there will be some fuzzy bits around the edges. Who do we give the power to decide which of those fuzzy bits to enforce end which not?
Trump won’t be in power for much longer in the US, but someone like him will probably be in power again. Is that the kind of person you want defining what is and isn’t hate speech? Or perhaps is should be Jeff Bezos who decides what is and isn’t hate speech?
What happens when someone in power decides that talking about the wrong god or the wrong kind of sexuality or the wrong kind of people is “hate speech”? What checks and balances will be in place to prevent that from happening? We have some recourse against a US president in the form of the constitution, but we have none against Amazon. Do we just trust that the tech giants will always have our best interest at heart?
Now, if they manage to do a, they can have an easier time removing said opponents, but only with some corruption on the juries’ side. And if that happens, they could do away with the change of law, since any law can be applied to the oppnents in this case.
My counter to "who decides what hate speech is" - we need to actively figure it out. We can't sit back and say "it's too hard to decide" so we should tolerate all speech either by decision or inaction.
Not actively engaging is as dangerous as letting a specific group decide.
> Not actively engaging is as dangerous as letting a specific group decide.
Having the government decide what people are and are not allowed to say sounds a lot more dangerous to me. That’s how you end up with an official state religion and all other beliefs are outlawed, or you you end up with not being allowed to talk about being gay in public without fear of being stoned to death.
No we don't.
So why is some speech that hurts people banned, while other speech that hurts people is allowed? This should be the test for what counts as hate speech. Can you call the press "the enemy of the people" if that leads to journalists getting hurt? Can you call certain demographic groups a threat to society if that leads people to take action against those groups? Is it only the people who stormed the Capitol who are guilty of that, or also the politicians and others who encouraged them?
There is always going to be some limit to free speech. The question is: is that line in the right place? Does it need to be moved one way or the other? Does it allow speech that endangers lives? Does it ban speech that doesn't? That has to be a constant evaluation.
(That said, I regret banning communication apps. I'd rather see people be held accountable for the things they say on those apps. By the law, not by corporations.)
There, the Court held that inflammatory speech--and even speech advocating violence by members of the Ku Klux Klan--is protected under the First Amendment, unless the speech "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action"
Still supports my point: there are limits to free speech when it involves inciting violence (or other lawless action).
And there's still also libel laws which make lies illegal in some cases. Though I believe that's a civil rather than criminal issue.