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by jakelazaroff 2792 days ago
The problem is that, although plenty of speech that is not a call for violence still causes harm, many free speech zealots (and hateful people, in bad faith) refuse to recognize it as such and consider it "spreading ideas".

Consider: "blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us" aren't credible and specific calls for violence, but if I encounter an angry group of people chanting them I'm going to feel unsafe, and I'm certainly not going to do or say anything that makes me read as Jewish. This is literally the conduct on Gab that people are defending!

Unfortunately, hate speech creates a zero-sum situation: you have to choose whether to suppress the hate speech, or the people it targets. There's no way to choose both, and supporting Gab here just tells me that my speech doesn't matter. The law defines this narrowly because law must be black and white, but there's no reason we as a society can't see the (really, really, really dark) shades of gray here.

1 comments

> Unfortunately, hate speech creates a zero-sum situation: you have to choose whether to suppress the hate speech, or the people it targets. There's no way to choose both

No, you can choose both (suppress both Nazis and Jews), just not neither.

Yes, you're right; I phrased that incorrectly.