Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by chrisco255 2797 days ago
Speech isn't "dangerous". You know what you do about people that say stupid things: you call them out on it. The answer to hate speech is more speech.
5 comments

> Speech isn't "dangerous". You know what you do about people that say stupid things: you call them out on it. The answer to hate speech is more speech.

This worked to marvelous effect when legitimate, unique net neutrality concerns were buried under an avalanche of duplicate anti-net-neutrality letters sent on behalf of people who were very much deceased.

The solution to this challenge likely needs a much more nuanced approach to it than just burying hate speech in more speech, because look how well that turned out.

Time bears us many more examples where your proposal was successfully inverted to hideous ends. The loudest have a very pervasive tendency to win.

Your example has nothing to do with hate speech. Your example is fraudulent speech.
In the end, what does hate speech do other than to defraud an audience into an unjustified view of a subject?

It's a relevant analogy. You're free to dispute it, but we might all benefit if you invest some effort explaining why this and other examples aren't relevant.

Unless of course you're the side of the debate that was opposed to Net Neutrality. Then free speech worked out quite well, didn't it?
This is a good example of why free speech is necessary. I've always considered myself a strong supporter of "net neutrality". Yet there were instances in the last 5 Years where the policies or positions labeled by many, particularly in the media, as net neutrality were not those that I would support. It was only as a result of robust debate and the free expression of contrarian views that I was exposed to critical facts exposing the misleading use of the phrase "net neutrality."
Like many tools, speech can be dangerous because speech can be useful.
Do you have evidence for this statement? What if you're wrong? There's evidence that you're wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Calling out something that one could refer to as "hate speech" isn't tolerating the behavior, it is criticizing it.
That's a wikipedia link, not evidence.
speech is dangerous. hate speech promotes and incites violence.
We already have laws that deal with explicitly inciting people to violence.

So called "hate speech" generally is not an explicit endorsement of violence.

Wrong. Hate speech, at least in the US, has no formal definition. All it takes for something to be considered hate speech is to call it hate speech.

Incitements of violence are already prohibited by law.

To the extent that speech is dangerous, it's pretty easy to pivot to defending it on 2nd Amendment grounds, in addition to the 1st. (Relevant: https://xkcd.com/504/)
Speech can absolutely be dangerous. Much of the run-up to the Holocaust was in dehumanizing and characterizing the Jews as money-sucking leeches bleeding Germany dry.
WW2 era Germans were dangerous. Speech didn't kill anyone.
Much of the run up to the Holocaust was in establishing and propagandizing an authoritarian worldview while silencing the opposition with whatever tools were available.