What if you don't represent a populist movement and your views don't cater to the masses?
Would you like it if people could anonymously publish and distribute hate speech? It's tricky.
I'm making an assumption, but in most scenarios it's the powerful few controlling the masses, and doing so through controlling the flow information.
"It never occurred to either the enemies or the apologists for slavery, that if no one would employ the free laborer, his condition was infinitely worse than that of actual slavery--nor did it occur to them, that if his wages were less than the allowance of the slave, he was less free after emancipation than before." --George Fitzhugh
Can one argue for the return of a more civilized form of slavery without being called evil, a racist, bigot, hate monger, etc.?
It's because so many views that "don't represent a populist movement" and "don't cater to the masses" also don't fall straight into a single bucket ("hate speech", "encouraging violence", "ignorant flaming", "hard truth", "trolling", "devil's advocacy") that I like the American view expressed by geuis. If you're not being forced to listen (because while one may have the right to speak, one doesn't have the right to be heard), change the channel. Starting from this point lets us discuss the potential exceptions like whether we ought to allow television personalities to ask the public to kill someone, and if we do, if someone acts on it does the asker receive some amount of punishment? I think it's important in having a useful discussion to start from a solid position rather than starting from "it's tricky".
Words have an impact on the world. If you call for violence against a group of people, you can be held accountable for that in Canada. Nobody is saying you can't say "I hate <group of people>", but when you say "<group of people> should be killed" you've crossed a line and can be held legally accountable.
It's a tricky issue, but personally I think our system is more in line with most people's natural sense of morality. If I call for violence, and violence happens, am I not at least partially culpable in that violence? Especially if I am a community leader, or other person of influence.
That's an opinion, and precisely why it's tricky. I understand "freedom of speech" is a fundamental representation of liberty, especially to Americans. There is also a school of thought that believes in looking at the normative angle of policy; when things can be determined, objectively, to be hateful or vile, why allow them? I'd rather live in a world that didn't allow hate speech than a world that does. Of course, how do you determine "hate speech" objectively, at the margin? That's the tricky part.
And what is the objective criteria used to determine hatefulness and vileness? I am interested in how such a thing can be formulated in a definitively objective way.
I think by "objective" you probably mean "almost universally agreed", not actually "objective", because I don't think that any truly objective measurements of hatefulness and vileness are known.