| It's better to ban nothing when it comes to speech. Any restrictions at all rapidly escalate into enormous restrictions, hypocrisy and logical contradictions. Actually by now, I automatically assume anyone who uses the phrase "hate speech" doesn't actually care about violent speech at all, just shutting down people they don't agree with. Consider that students in America keep arguing that any opinion they don't like is "violence" that makes them feel "unsafe", and of course anyone to the right of Marx is "promoting intolerance and hatred". That's a pretty bad abuse of the word violent, but if you say the only kind of speech that is banned is speech that incites violence then pretty quickly everyone is claiming any ideological enemy is "inciting violence" with whatever justification they can find. So there had better be really good reasons for such bans. But are there? I am struggling to think of cases where someone stood up and announced "kill those people" and it actually happened, outside of extremist Islamic preachers e.g. the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. That's rare, but also, the moment you say that sort of preaching isn't allowed anymore you run into the question of people's right to practice religion, as there is quite a lot of incitement to violence in basically every ancient holy book. And then there's the hate speech that doesn't get prosecuted because it's by politically important groups: https://www.salon.com/2013/05/07/twitters_latest_unfunny_tre... In the end, when I see the apparently small amount of physical world violence definitively and directly caused by speech, vs the huge numbers of people trying to classify things they disagree with as hate speech, I am forced to conclude that the cost/benefit ratio is not worth it and the first amendment has got it right. |
But I think that the sort of wording that nokcha posted in the sibling comment does a pretty good job at putting the breaks on any tendencies to extend the meaning of inciting violence endlessly.
I think the real problem of overreach arises because governments are trying to outsource censorship to huge corporations that are running our centralised internet.
These corporations are not going to be as wise as the judge ruling on Brandenburg v. Ohio. They are going err on the side of caution and ban everything remotely suspicious to avoid controversy. And then everyone will say it's not censorship because it's not the government doing it.
You are right that bans on speech are only very rarely needed. But that's how it should be. It should be a tool of last resort just like the use of lethal force by police should be a very rare exception. But I think we do need tools of last resort.
I want this particular tool of last resort in the hands of the courts though, and not applied automatically on a massive scale by corporations trying to stay in the good graces of governments.