While I agree with you, "hate speech" is a controversial topic outside the USA (and even inside the USA).

Nobody should be locked up for speech (threats and similar notwithstanding). Many people chanting "free speech" these days seem to mean "consequence-free speech", such as "nobody should adjust their opinion of me no matter what I say", or "everyone should be forced to carry my words and see my words no matter what I say". That's not free speech, that's compelled listening and controlled public opinion, and other such tools that only the most authoritarian governments would consider.

> such as "nobody should adjust their opinion of me no matter what I say", or "everyone should be forced to carry my words and see my words no matter what I say".

More like "I should not be fired, refused service, and kicked out of teams/events due to my speech/opinions".

Do you agree with this or not?

I don’t agree with that. All those are voluntary associations, and freedom of association is at least as important as freedom of speech.

What I do think is that being fired should not be a death sentence; that there should be a mechanism, possibly the Government in our current society, by which one can continue living with food and a roof over one’s head even if people refuse to associate with that person. Generally speaking, I don’t think there should be an entity which can prevent you from feeding and housing yourself in the first place, though.

> freedom of association is at least as important as freedom of speech.

In that case, do you believe that it should be legal to fire/refuse service/kick out of teams and events someone due to their gender, religion, or sexual orientation?

The fact of the matter is that all this happens, legal or not. I’ve not had work in years, in the first instances because of illegal discrimination. I’ve been assaulted for being in the “wrong” spaces. People care so intensely much about freedom of association that they’ll break the law and use violence in order to maintain it.

So what should we do, given that enforcing association by law doesn’t work?

My solution is in anarchism; stop preventing me from living my own life (through a capitalist society enforced by the state, police and prisons) and I’ll stop forcing myself on yours.

Absolutely not. Freedom of association is no less important. You don't have a right to force others to put up with you.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

People make and break friendships, or make any number of other associations, based on any factors they want, such as common interests and opinions, aligned goals and values, or just a common idea of fun and enjoyment. People have a right to decide who is welcome and who isn't, by any number of factors (modulo the interaction of protected classes with services offered to the public).

"Obnoxious" is not a protected class, nor should it be. You have a right to not be arrested for your words or opinions or expression. You are not entitled to (for instance) other people's business, patronage, custom, service, friendship, or any other kind of association. You do not have the right to control other people's reactions to you.

It doesn't matter if we're talking about a hobby group, a sports team, a software project, a company, or a social network. "I don't enjoy being around this person" is more than reason enough to stop associating with someone, let alone more critical reasons such as "I don't want to be around someone who wants to deprive me of my rights as a person" or "this person is driving other people away".

See also the Geek Social Fallacies: http://plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html

And to turn that around, you're free to associate with people who feel differently, and others are free to judge you based on those associations too.

In that case please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22240363

> I don't enjoy being around this person" is more than reason enough to stop associating with someone

So I should be able refuse to sell bread to someone with green hair, right? Or if they have a specific skin deformation.

Now, what if all shops in an area refuse to sell food to people with these characteristics?

> let alone more critical reasons such as "I don't want to be around someone who wants to deprive me of my rights as a person"

In that case I will be able to pretty much ban anyone I want as the vast majority of people think that certain victimless crimes should be illegal (and thus they deprive me of my rights as a person), right?

The lovely thing is that there's no symmetry required here. Excluding someone because they're intolerant/obnoxious/etc is very different than excluding someone because of who they are. It's perfectly consistent to consider it morally wrong to exclude someone because of who they are, and simultaneously consider it not wrong to exclude someone because of their prejudice. Those exclusions are not equivalent, and do not need to be treated as such.

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

If you are looking to argue against that, feel free to do it with someone else.

Bringing up someone's employer in the middle of a flamewar is a really bad idea. Maybe you just sincerely became more interested in whether ME will be open-sourced, but a general reader (let alone the person you've just been in a flamewar with) could easily read this in a much nastier way; so please don't go there.

Also, please don't do this sort of flamewar on HN to begin with. It's tedious, predictable, and nasty. We're trying for a quite different sort of forum here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

> Bringing up someone's employer in the middle of a flamewar is a really bad idea

Guess I should have sent an email instead. In general I expect my posts to be understood as they are.

> Also, please don't do this sort of flamewar on HN to begin with

If you told me what exactly I said in the post that I should try to avoid from now I would appreciate it. I did not post anything with the intention of being flamewar-y, rather my posts were just sincere questions.

Many people calling for free speech are undisturbed by a leader that calls the press "the enemy of the people" and leads rally where the press is screamed at and intimidated and where chants to lock up political opponents are common.

Hate speech is free speech.

The whole point of free speech laws is to protect controversial opinions.

Good or bad, because the bad of censorship is often much worse than the bad of free speech.

That "hate speech is free speech" is not an opinion shared by many countries in Europe, nor even by many philosophers of law or legal scholars in the U.S. - it is true that 1A covers "hate speech", but whether it should be that way is a matter of intense debate.

I agree that hate speech is often the bad side of free speech. What I disagree on is who should decide what hate speech is.

Taking away the right for someone to speak their mind is too much power for one individual or group, and is ripe for abuse, so it's better to not do it at all.

>What I disagree on is who should decide what hate speech is.

It is a risky business, but so are many others: food and drug regulation, road regulation, flight regulation etc. - the case must be made why freedom of speech is such a special right as opposed to any other action, such as selling food, driving cars, or building planes.

>Taking away the right for someone to speak their mind is too much power for one individual or group

We already do this globally, with copyright law, or less controversially, laws against threats, assault and child pornography. This at least shows that there is some scope, and unless that scope is a dogma, it should be open for questioning - either in broadening or narrowing.

Indeed, that's a power you'd have to be comfortable having in the hands of your opponents. Because at some point it will be and then they'll be the ones defining what speech is restricted.

If you want, you can think of it as a continuation of laws that cover other crimes.

If I describe to you exactly how you might go about murdering someone, and they get murdered, I'm likely to be a suspect, and if you're charged, I'll be charged as an accessory. If I rouse a group of people into flipping over cars, breaking windows, and hurling rocks at the police, I'll be charged with incitement. If I yell fire in a crowded theater... I can't recall what the charge is but it's not good (endangerment?). If I con the police into arresting you for something you didn't do, I can be charged for that as well (and you probably ought to also sue me for civil penalties).

If all of that is criminal, then it's not much of a stretch to include escalation to hate crimes as a prosecutable offense. Grooming people toward these activities might be a grey area, but it's a grey area, not an unassailable one.

> If I describe to you exactly how you might go about murdering someone, and they get murdered, I'm likely to be a suspect, and if you're charged, I'll be charged as an accessory.

IANAL, but this doesn't sound quite right. I think they need to be able to show mens rea on your part, that is, that you actually believed the person might commit murder and deliberately helped them.

if you agree with my nitpick, then all of your examples show a clear intention to incite others to do specific material harm.

on the other hand, if someone says "X group doesn't deserve to live", it's hard to say whether they are deliberately inciting violence. if X is saints fans, you might reasonably assume the person is joking. if X is a marginalized group, it's still hard to say whether it's an incitement of violence or a gross opinion that lacks actual intent to incite violence. if it were easy to show that it was a deliberate incitement of violence, then it would already be illegal under current laws.

> If I describe to you exactly how you might go about murdering someone, and they get murdered, I'm likely to be a suspect,

False, see Anarchist's cookbook and similar cases such as MIT's lockpicking guide

> If I rouse a group of people into flipping over cars, breaking windows, and hurling rocks at the police, I'll be charged with incitement

Incitement is a crime. It requires specific, actionable intent. "Screw the police" is not incitement, "go hang group X" is.

> If I yell fire in a crowded theater

Not a crime

> If I con the police into arresting you for something you didn't do

That's making a false statement to police

> If all of that is criminal, then it's not much of a stretch to include escalation to hate crimes as a prosecutable offense

Thank goodness it's not

What do you mean by "free speech" if not that which is protected by the first amendment? I have seen statements like "hate speech is not free speech" quite often (as opposed to "hate speech _should not be_ free speech"), so I get the impression it is common to argue the law does not already protect it.

"Free speech" is an abstract liberal legal concept, it is not tied to any particular law. Even under countries which do implement "free speech" as a constitutional right, their legal systems have declared that some restrictions can be implemented: threats and child porn are two big ones. 1A enshrines a particular conception of freedom of speech, but it is not equal to freedom of speech in abstract (unless you want to claim that freedom of speech was only invented and only truly implemented in the U.S.)

My question was not rhetorical. If someone doesn't mean constitutional law, _then what do they mean_? You seem to be simply arguing there is no universal concept of freedom. Is that the answer then? Because we have a precedent for redefining words in various ways already, we can choose to add whatever else we desire to the list? I rather assumed it had something to do with redefining "hate speech" (e.g. as violence or something) not redefining freedom.

In this case it was a direct call for violence which is already spreading in this context.

Three lines from the play were highlighted.

>“The government is telling Muslims to leave India and go away.” In reply, the other child says, “Amma, Modi is saying show documents of your father and grandfather otherwise he is telling us to leave the country.” At this point, another child is heard saying, “Hit them with slippers if anybody asks for documents.”

The last one is directed at survey workers who have been (mis)targeted recently.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/thiruvananthapuram/....

>Following instances of workers, engaged to conduct Poshan Abhiyan survey, facing hostile behaviour, the state government had issued an ad explaining that the survey had nothing to do with Census and NPR.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/jaipur/two-women-mi....

>In Kota, the woman attacked was a surveyor from the National Economic Census department collecting data for the National Economics Census 2019- 2020 in Brijdham area. Nazeeran Bano was let off only after she was able to convince the crowd that she, too, was a Muslim, like them. The police later arrested one person for the attack.

https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/west-bengal-woman-s-ho....

>The house of a 20-year-old woman was set on fire by a mob in West Bengal's Birbhum district on Wednesday, following rumours that she was collecting data for the proposed nationwide NRC.

>Chumki Khatun and her family are now under police protection after the incident happened in Gourbazar village in Mallarpur police station area, officials said.

I don't support sedition charges, but there should be a penalty for (1) promoting (even petty) violence against government workers and (2) getting your children to express this promotion.

umm, what to do think about FB, Twitter's crackdown against hate speech?

What are the arguments for censoring hate speech? Not saying you are either for or against censorship, just trying to understand the other side

Free speech is important because speech has consequences. If speech didn't matter, then it wouldn't be a right worth enshrining. One has to grapple with the fact that speech has power regardless of whether they think it is an inviolable, unrestricted right. If it has power, it has the power to be abusive.

We already have a wide body of law covering inciting others to commit crimes on our behalf or at our behest. I can't stand around working up a bunch of drunk college kids to flip over cars expect to not be implicated in the subsequent crimes, and that's just property damage.

If I'm talking about a minority student instead... it'd be pretty fucked up that a piece of insured property has more protection under the law than a fellow human being.

Especially since if you were in a car accident and bleeding out, the EMTs are allowed to engage in destruction of property in order to save your life. They can damage the car, shred your clothing. They're trained to do this without even thinking (and wasting heartbeats).

I think that if in your hypothetical you were _directly_ inciting violence against a minority student (so, "let's go fuck up X" "let's go fuck up students with Y characteristic"), you'd also definitely (and uncontroversially) be implicated.

Where it gets harder is what most people seem to want "hate speech" provisions to cover are much more diffuse forms of incitement, if you can even call it that. When you can't make a direct causal mapping between speech and crime, you start having problems. If you didn't personally direct drunk college students to flip cars, but instead had previously posted online somewhere that flipping cars while drunk is fun, it's a lot harder to say that absent your speech, the illegal act would not have occurred. Say a large number of commentators talked up how fun car-flipping is. Does each now possess 1/nth of the criminal liability for incitement? Do we know the actors read a given post? Even if we do, can we quantity the degree to which a given post influenced their actions?

Obviously IANAL, but in my lay experience it seems that the sort of incitement liability we have is limited to no-brainer cases where it's quite obvious that the speech was the primary motivating factor for the subsequent criminal action. Anything further quickly gets into an enormous can of worms of unknowables.

I think the term of art is the imminence of the incited lawless action. Without imminence, causality is difficult, and you open the door to all kinds of crazy contributory claims - are the authors of the Anarchist's Cookbook liable for every bombing to occur following its publication?

Hate speech can have harmful physiological effects on those it targets.

Very true; I'm reminded of the funny example used in debates on these matters, in which a legal professor is saying he'd rather have somebody break his left leg than to publish something alleging sexual misconduct with a student, and further, there are absolutely non-physical harms which can cause just as much, if not more, pain and anguish than physical harms. In this view, the idea that speech should be able to contain any content by law is about as ridiculous as saying that actions in general should be able to contain any content. The first amendment in the US is on a very shaky metaphysical model which does not accord with what we know about the brain or trauma.

>physiological effects

I think you mean psychological.

I would recommend papers by Susan Brison for the censorship case (and an argument as to why she thinks the First Amendment is baseless), and Rae Langton's case for why pro-free speech liberals can (or even should) support a restriction on hate speech and pornography, based on their own principles.

I don't think it is that controversial in the US. There is a small, vocal minority that is against free speech but the overwhelming majority of Americans do not see things that way.

I think that's true up to a point.

I think Americans support Free speech, but Hate speech, especially when violence is involved, elicits a far different response.

Just ask any poor woman who has had her son arrested for mouthing off in some CounterStrike session about something he's gonna do at school. Just mouthing off trying to look big and all of a sudden police are at his door the next day.

Basically, in the US, you get free speech up to the point where they think your kid is going to shoot up a school full of kids or church full of little old ladies. At that point, there will be guys knocking at your door. I understand the motivation of law enforcement there, I get the point of "terroristic threat" laws. I just don't know if we've calibrated the application of the laws correctly.

But the point is, that this "overwhelming majority of Americans" you were speaking of would tell me to get lost, and tell the police "Good job! Better safe than sorry with these school shooters."

Hate speech is different from speech inciting violence, which is already illegal in the US.

Hate speech is not well defined, something that would be considered offensive in the Silicon Valley might be considered a compliment in New York.

There’s a big difference between hate speech and threats of violence. It’s never been legal to falsely yell “fire” in a theatre, much like credible threats of violence are also illegal. Hate speech is more like “group X is bad because XYZ”. Even saying “I wish they were all gone from this earth” is different from “I’m going to do something about them.”

Speaking of which, this hit the news today:

https://www.heraldmailmedia.com/news/nation/he-says-his-mass...

excerpt:

The case promises to have widespread implications beyond Puy’s felony prosecution. It’s become the first major test of a law strengthened partly in response to the tragedy at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High.

At issue: Just what makes a written threat illegal? And are all young people and others who make fake threats about mass shootings — it happens on a fairly regular basis — in serious trouble?

Yeah.

I just tell the young people I work with to not even go there. If someone tries to goad you into something, just don't say it, it's too risky right now. I mean, a prosecution is some chance at getting the laws relaxed I suppose? But the judges and potentially even the jurors all have kids sitting in those classrooms too. So I just don't see it as a particularly fair way to assess the appropriateness of certain laws.

I really believe the various legislatures, in the end, will need to try to recalibrate some of this. (Though I realize that's not likely to happen either. I just think it's slightly more likely than relying on courts that have repeatedly held that yelling fire in a crowded theater, or talking about bombs at airports is not protected speech.)

> relying on courts that have repeatedly held that yelling fire in a crowded theater

That phrase was used in a court case to (successfully) justify censoring someone protesting the draft during WWI [1]. We should be skeptical of any limitations on free speech because they will be abused to stifle legitimate speech.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the...

>>While I agree with you, "hate speech" is a controversial topic outside the USA (and even inside the USA).

>I don't think it is that controversial in the US. There is a small, vocal minority that is against free speech but the overwhelming majority of Americans do not see things that way.

Looks like you're conflating free speech with hate speech? The parent mentioned "hate speech", but you're talking about "free speech".

Restricting hate speech restricts free speech, they are the same issue. You only have to look back a few years to understand why this is important. What we consider acceptable has changed vastly over time, if we don't have the freedom to discuss topics against the status quo we won't progress as a society.

Hate speech is free speech. No man is fit to play the censor. Unless it's a direct, actionable call to violence, it's free speech.

Hate speech is 100% protected in the US.