[nsaje]

Free speech does not give you the right to hate speech. The title is misleading, because they only agreed to remove hate speech only, not all anti-immigration comments.

EDIT: To clarify, hate speech is for example speech inciting doing harm to others. As a concrete example, in the heat of the refugee crisis, I was regularly seeing calls to arms to go shoot all the refugees at the borders on my Facebook wall. It made me cringe.

[adventured]

> Free speech does not give you the right to hate speech.

I would argue that's exactly what it does.

I'd further argue that hate speech and the threat of violence should be separated into two distinct categories for clarity. Clarity is extremely, extremely important when you're dealing with the edges of acceptable speech. It's dangerous to load them both into one concept that can be wielded by politicians and the media for control purposes over speech and free expression.

It's also important to clarify that the threat of violence is not a form of speech, it's a threat (of violence). That's another obvious reason why "hate speech" should not cover threats of violence to begin with, it intentionally muddles the concepts. Just like smashing someone in the face should not fall under free expression: it's an act of violence. Free speech ends at the point of violence, putting violence and speech together generates a contradiction of terms that can only benefit people looking for levers of control.

The concept "hate speech" is already a broken, frequently abused tool for controlling people. It's clearly going to get much worse in the coming years given the rise of extreme political correctness, the 'protect my feelings' movement. "Hate speech" is by default devoid of nearly all meaning, and nearly anything can be claimed to be hate speech, because "hate" is a generic term that can vary wildly and is inherently subjective. It was of course used for that exact reason: you can't legislate control over speech, therefore create empty jargon to do the same thing, and then load anything you want into it. A method frequently employed by totalitarian regimes.

Are my posts, which openly express my dislike of elves, hate speech? You bet. Why? Because I say so. You can never successfully refute that.

[illumen]

Except what counts is explicitly encoded in law, not what anyone makes up.

"Are my posts, which openly express my dislike of elves, hate speech?"

No, because that's really silly. The law would let you do that.

If instead you asked people to kill people, that would be taken down.

[DominikR]

To support free speech is to support free speech precisely when you disagree with the opinion voiced.

Either you support that people may say whatever the hell they like to say or you are definitely NOT in support of free speech.

[_ak]

Except people are calling to torch refugee homes and for violence against refugees, and refugee homes have been attacked and/or torched, more than 800 this year. At least one person was killed in these attacks. That's far beyond where free speech ends.

[DominikR]

Making a racist statement is something completely different than telling you to go out and torch someones home.

The latter encourages you to actually commit a criminal act, while the first is just an opinion that you might dislike or not and therefore criticise.

[rewqfdsa]

There is no such thing as "hate speech". What you call "hate speech" is merely speech that you find disagreeable. Free speech is valuable not when it protects those who already agree with you. "Hate speech" is very vaguely defined, and you can use the label to smear people raising perfectly legitimate facts like "group differences are recent, profound, and heritable".

[mrtree]

Exactly. +1 to this

[illumen]

Except when it is precisely defined in law. Which is what we are talking about here from the article.