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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

How does that relate to the article? It seems like a completely different subject to me, but maybe I'm misunderstanding you.

> there’s been a cultural shift in the liberal establishment over the years away from protecting speech, even hateful speech to actively espousing and advocating for censorship

The shift is to protecting the rights of people oppressed by hate speech, in the balance between its speakers and victims. It's based on the idea that the politically vulnerable have their rights - including their free speech - abridged by hate speech. It says hate speech censors the politically vulnerable, so at some points, we must censor one or the other.

It's tricky, but portraying it as 'anti-free-speech' is like portraying 'pro-life' advocates as 'anti-personal-rights'. If we're honest then it's not that simple, whatever one's perspective.

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Can you define hate speech? Or “politically vulnerable”? I’m not dogging you but this sounds like an argument that someone who would like to ban E2E encryption would make. No one has a right to not be offended and we have already clearly defined where words become terroristic threats. Although the law is the least of my concerns as I get downvoted for having an opinion not totally in lock step with the social-liberal worldview.

I could take a stab at defining it but both are already defined in law (if we take 'politically vulnerable' as 'protected classes', for example) and I'd be adding to the infinite Internet crap pile if I didn't do some research first. Plenty of other dangerous speech is illegal, such as forms of incitement. It's not about feeling offended - a common way to belittle a serious, challenging issue.

I'm not sure how E2EE is implicated: If the speech isn't heard by the politically vulnerable, it's much less likely to be oppressive; if someone texts me hate speech over Signal, the encyrption doesn't matter. If it's a plan of violence, that's of course a different and existing issue.

> I get downvoted for having an opinion not totally in lock step with the social-liberal worldview.

The victim routine degrades the credibility of your comment. It looks like someone just following standard right-wing rhetoric. Also, you don't offer convincing evidence.

> I could take a stab at defining it but both are already defined in law

"Hate speech" is not defined in US law. Hate speech -- however one chooses to define it, outside of threats and incitements to violence -- is not illegal.

Hate crimes are a different story.

I've been applauding deplatforming and censorship of racist hate groups for years now, but more recently I've started becoming a bit worried that we're falling into a bizarro-world version of Niemoeller's "First they came for the socialists...".

On one hand I am worried that we are devolving to a state where no one is allowed to express an opinion that might just offend some hypothetical person, somewhere, even if no one can actually find that person. And on the other I worry that deplatforming shitty people doesn't actually fix all that much, and can often make matters worse.

> """I've been applauding deplatforming and censorship of racist hate groups for years now, but more recently I've started becoming a bit worried that we're falling into a bizarro-world version of Niemoeller's "First they came for the socialists...".

On one hand I am worried that we are devolving to a state where no one is allowed to express an opinion that might just offend some hypothetical person, somewhere, even if no one can actually find that person."""

Remember that any party that would want to stifle speech could easily pay a third party to claim to be offended by speech.

Other people speaking does not censor you. Deciding not to speak because someone upset you is not an infringement of your rights

To be clear I am not talking about the heckler's veto, where someone tries to actively interfere with the reception of someone's speech

> Other people speaking does not censor you.

It depends what they say. If they say 'advocate for yourself and we'll lynch you', it does effectively censor you.

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