- cross-posted to:
- globalnews@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- globalnews@lemmy.zip
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/1255681
Archived version: https://archive.ph/tAw7a
Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20230809205032/https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-66457089
Here’s the problem: everyone is fundamentally misinterpreting free speech. It doesn’t mean what people think it does: it’s not about stopping government oppression, it’s about enforcing fundamental respect for human beings, which means hate speech is banned regardless – because bigotry and hate speech by its nature censors other human beings, because it creates an environment where people are discredited and shunned by their peers for stupid reasons, denying them their right to be respected and heard. Hate speech isn’t speech, it’s censorship, and needs to be treated as a censoring act and not as speech since it’s not speech, it’s an action done with intent.
When people adopt that definition of free speech, we can go back to having our cake and eating it too and we’ll start to get back on the right path.
this explicitly not the text of the first amendment, but that document is garbage anyway so it doesn’t matter. I agree with you, but with an additional point: money is not speech and any attempt to use it as such must be squashed if democracy is to have any meaning.
Totally fair and reasonable
careful you’re gonna get a bunch of people calling you a commie.
The problem with this slippery slope is that anyone can designate something they don’t like as ‘hate speech’ or ‘bigotry’. In essence, it becomes impossible to criticize groups of people because someone can just call it ‘hate speech’ and get you censored for it, or worse.
Freedom of speech is just that: freedom of speech. You can say what you want about anyone you want. It makes sense to have exception for things like yelling ‘bomb’ in an airport or ‘fire’ in a movie theater, but that’s really where the exceptions should end.
Someone saying, “I hate and want to kill all x” should be allowed under free speech. It might not be pretty, but that’s why we, as competent adults, have our own means of shutting them out of the conversation. We don’t need to rely on the law for this.
Case and point: If it’s acceptable to say “I hate and want to kill all nazis/pedophiles”, it should also be acceptable to say “I hate and want to kill all people of color and homosexuals.” I know it’s not pretty and you may not like this, but that’s what freedom of speech is. Once we start censoring beyond that, it becomes a political tool to push an agenda and silence those who go against it.
On a lesser-scale, a lot of people have been trying to brand posts they don’t like as ‘trolling’ just to discredit them and get them removed. Same thing goes for ‘hate speech.’ Where is the line drawn? Usually wherever most people think it should be, regardless of if it’s accurate.
No they can’t, because we have concrete ideas of what constitutes it, and we also have common sense.
All systems can be torn apart by your logic so if we listen to you, we could never do anything.
Unfortunately, that’s just not the world we live in.
People aren’t beacons are virtue, and will gladly label something they don’t like as ‘hate speech’ just to get it removed even if it isn’t actually hate speech. As soon as enough people in their microcosm agree with them, the censorship happens.