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by chrisco255 332 days ago
Sorry if you ban speech to the right of center then you don't have freedom of speech. "hate" is a loaded term, poorly defined. To me, it might seem you hate everyone right of center, while you think there's some clear line where speech crosses such that it can be labeled far right and a ministry of truth can slap a fine down to halt this "dangerous" speech. Meanwhile, is the "danger" equally regulated across the political spectrum and covering far-left speech as well? Of course OP didn't even bother to balance the concern about far right speech with equal concern about far left speech. You can be certain that such biases exist in any institution in which you might construct to attempt to regulate and that it would be absolutely impossible to obtain a perfect and permanent balance between the factions. Inevitably the balance of power would shift in favor of one faction or another and the more likely outcome is that the faction would use its monopoly over "truth" or "hate" to redefine even valid and factual criticism to be hate speech. Perhaps your country has already hit that tipping point and you can't even save it because you lack the liberty to do so?
2 comments

Your country is demanding access to all social media of incoming visitors, jailing students for alleged antisemitism, putting hundreds on administrative leave for signing a letter about how cuts are making their job impossible, shaking money off the pockets of media companies and law firms under threat of retribution, and using medical records to arrest undocumented immigrants.
God how I hate these sorts of "far-right" VS "far-left" points.

First, the far-left is _nowhere near_ as far as the far-right is (in fact, I don't think there's _any_ significant far-left representation in France: neither the Communist Party nor the France Insoumise are far-left, they're just left).

Second, you make it sound like there's a bias towards the left, which is a ridiculous point that has no ground in reality: France is _heavily_ biased towards the right. The internal and international politics are deeply right-wing and getting _more_ right-wing by the year, most successful politicians are on the right, even the so-called left-wing governments have been doing centrist or right-wing politics since 1995: the left is _weak_ in France despite popular support. So "your country has already hit that tipping point and you can't even save it because you lack the liberty to do so" is laughable: the _people in power_ are regularly indulging in hate speech.

Third, you make it sound like the hate speech law is biased to protect the left, when the reality is that hate speech almost exclusively exists on the far-right so _obviously_ it's going to affect the right more. Let's talk about concrete examples:

You'll often hear from the far-right that people of colour are fundamentally inferior to white people. That someone of a particular ethnicity is a "savage", or is uncultured. That muslims are terrorists, jews are conspiring. There's so many examples. That's all horrific hate speech that's forbidden in France. Please do give concrete examples of far-left hate speech that you hear these days that is remotely comparable, because I cannot think of any. Maybe "kill all billionaires"? Which by the way _is_ illegal, it's incitation to violence.

So yeah, some speech at the far right (not "right of center") is forbidden in France. You seem to think that's a limitation of freedom, but the minorities feel _way_ more free for it (although they're still not having a great time, hate speech still happens).