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Dealing With Hate Speech

Entry 2146, on 2021-08-13 at 21:19:37 (Rating 3, News)

Hate speech has recently become a significant subject here in New Zealand. The government wants to extend and modify current hate speech laws, but is very poor at giving details on what would and wouldn't be covered. Of course, that is fairly typical of this government, who have demonstrated a repeated tendency to introduce poorly considered new regulations based on emotion rather than logic.

One of the key drivers of this new law is the Christchurch Terror Attack, where the gunman had been radicalised to the extent of carrying out multiple murders. At a more trivial level, we also see regular censoring of any comments on stories from the major news sources which are not favourable to minorities which are deemed worthy of extra protection.

For example, any comments on the Facebook page of the New Zealand Herald which were not supportive of trans-gender weightlifter Laurel Hubbard were removed and comments shut down shortly afterward.

So it seems that it is not really hate speech which is being targeted, although that is difficult to establish because no one seems to know what hate speech even is. It seems more like any opinions which aren't supportive of "minority" and "disadvantaged" groups are being discouraged or actively punished. In fact, the penalties for what the government blithely refers to as "hate speech" might exceed those for assault and other crimes which most would consider are far more serious.

The most common catch-phrase I hear is that the problem is "speech which might bring minority groups into disrepute" - which is the main way the concept of hate speech is being packaged. It might also "lead to violence" against those disadvantaged groups, so the claim is that violence could be reduced if hate speech was eliminated.

The first question is: is this true?

I did a bit of informal research on the internet, looking for reports, papers, opinion pieces, and discussion documents on this subject. There were a lot of articles saying hate speech does lead to violence, but in almost every case these were just opinions offered by groups who are unlikely to be unbiased in their assessment of this issue. For example, one report strongly supported suppression of hate speech but came from a Muslim political group. That doesn't mean they were wrong, but it does raise serious questions, especially since there were no references to sources, or citations of actual research.

In fact, most of the more credible items seemed to indicate that hate speech does not lead to violence in any substantial way. In fact, some research indicates violence increases when free speech is suppressed.

The second question is: if it is true (which it probably isn't) are there unintended negative consequences of curtailing free speech?

Even if we could prove that suppressing hate speech did lead to less violence (again, I have to say I think this is not true) there are inevitable problems which might arise which partly or fully make the gains less worthwhile.

For example, if I suspect a local Muslim group has been infiltrated by extremists and I am concerned about possible violence as a result, I would most likely not be able to discuss this under hate speech legislation. If the problem escalated, and lead to real violence, is this a good outcome? Clearly not.

We must be prepared to tolerate a small amount of genuinely hateful speech to protect true free speech. I would prefer to have all topics (but see the points below) open for discussion, and risk some unpleasant stuff, than have a "sanitised" environment where difficult but important material cannot be discussed.

The final question: is there a better way to deal with hate speech than suppressing it through legal penalties?

Many commentators (including me) point out that the answer to fighting incorrect or dangerous opinions is not suppress them, but to bring them out into the open where they can be argued against, The usual claim which covers this is something like "the answer to eliminating bad ideas is not hiding them, but by presenting good ideas against them."

Note that this also eliminates the other potential negative consequence of suppressing opinions: who decides what is good and what is bad? It might be that an idea which seems bad on the surface survives extensive counter-arguments and turns out to have some merit. In that case that idea should be taken seriously. If it is suppressed before it can even be examined then important new ideas might be lost forever.

Of course, the biggest overall threat from suppression of opinions is political bias. Currently, many parts of the world are suffering from an environment of excessive political correctness and hysterical overreaction against real and imagined deficiencies of the dominant culture. It is very easy to see how hate speech laws could be used to increase this irrational bias. So what is defined as hate speech might be more the result of political fads rather than anything with greater objective merit.

It is tempting to say that all speech should be allowed, but that idea can be fairly simply dispensed with with a counter-example like this: can I use my free speech to tell the world what your bank account password is? (assuming I discovered what it was through some nefarious means!). Here's another: can I report to the cops that you have a meth lab in your basement, even if I don't have any evidence that you actually do, but I want to harass you in some way?

Maybe free speech should cover everything which couldn't be reasonably thought of as private, but there are other times when it is harmful too. That is when there are potentially immediate real physical negative consequences from what I say. For example, I might give a fake tsunami warning and cause a traffic accident because of the crowds trying to escape to high ground. But if I did the same when I had really good reason to think there was a tsunami, would that be OK?

Sure, in many instances the incorrect or harmful information might be corrected, but what about any harm which it causes before that can happen?

Clearly, anyone who thinks that this is easy is fooling themselves. We can never have true and absolute free speech, but we can try to remove as many barriers as possible to it. Extra laws targeting specific forbidden subjects, is definitely a step in the wrong direction.

Comment 1 (6825) by Anonymous on 2021-08-19 at 11:28:49:

You say we need to fight bad ideas with good ideas, but why bother if we can just stop bad ideas instead?

Comment 2 (6827) by OJB on 2021-08-19 at 12:55:43:

The problem is deciding what are good and what are bad ideas. First, appraising the goodness or badness of an idea is very subjective; a good idea to one person is bad to another. Also, what is good or bad changes with time. Finally, the bad ideas still exist in the mind of the originator unless they are discredited in some way. For all those reasons, we are better to allow the ideas to be expressed instead of arbitrarily suppressing them.

Comment 3 (7253) by Ken Spall on 2022-08-06 at 20:01:16:

Also, how can we be aware of bad ideas or comments until we are able to hear them, for this to occur we need free speech.

Comment 4 (7254) by OJB on 2022-08-06 at 22:50:39:

Exactly. The best way to counter bad ideas is to challenge them with good ideas. Otherwise, how do we even know they’re bad? Additionally, many “bad” ideas aren’t bad at all; they are just inconvenient to people in power, or not politically correct, etc.

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