Furthermore, overt hate speech isn't necessarily the problem for society. It matters more for society what beliefs someone holds than what they are willing to express. The Soviet Union is an example of that - people outwardly expressed agreement with the government, but secretly were against it.
Making it harder to cross that first line absolutely matters in making it harder for them to cross the line of becoming an active danger to others.
Considering how hate speech is a very flimsy term, I don't think that this always follows. I do believe that there's likely a correlation, but I doubt it's strong. Some will say that claiming that there are only 2 genders is hate speech, others that claiming that abortion is murder is hate speech. Not to mention that there are many cases where something clearly not hate speech is labeled as hate speech.
In the UK a teenager was arrested for quoting rap song lyrics on an Instagram profile page. This was labeled a hate crime by the prosecutor.[0] Do you think that this makes her more likely to engage in hateful behavior?
Bullies at school often get away with their bullying, because they bully in ways that are not overtly noticeable. They will use terms that aren't offensive to make fun of and hurt others.
Everyone thinks hateful thoughts in brief moments of anger, but very few people ever act on those thoughts or express them. Their whole recruitment process was to get someone to move from just thinking thoughts to acting on them, usually by spreading the message to others. Once you cross that line from thinking to action, the bright line divider is gone--it's all just a matter of degrees of action.
What beliefs people hold in their heads is the result of a multitude of factors and upbringing and it's really beyond our ability and probably not a good idea to think we can somehow turn every racist into a non-racist with sufficient facts and thoughts and prayer or personal coaching.
What we can do is intervene when it comes to racists acting on their racism, be that in the form of public speech acts or even violence, that is to say when they participate in public life, for example on internet platforms.
>The Soviet Union is an example of that - people outwardly expressed agreement with the government, but secretly were against it.
And what happened to the Soviet Union when all those people were able to express their dissent? Nothing good. If you're saying that racists are going to be as empowered by lack of supression as dissidents were in the Soviet Union I'm not sure you're making a great case for ignoring their propaganda.
Don’t get me wrong: they can do as they please. I just don’t personally prefer to live in the world where Reddit is deciding what is hate, what is acceptable, etc.
It seems plausible that they stem from the same or similar social, psychological, and/or moral defects.
Fat shaming is also normal in many Asian countries where they have some of the lowest obesity rates and the longest lifespans in the world.
Well yes, at least partially. Studies of bans on hate communities on reddit have shown effectiveness not only in reducing the total hate, but also, and this is important, changing the behaviour of individual users who were active in the hate communities as they moved towards more moderate, diverse communities.
[...] "What they found was encouraging for this strategy of reducing unwanted activity on a site like Reddit:
Post-ban, hate speech by the same users was reduced by as much as 80-90 percent. Members of banned communities left Reddit at significantly higher rates than control groups. Migration was common, both to similar subreddits (i.e. overtly racist ones) and tangentially related ones (r/The_Donald). However, within those communities, hate speech did not reliably increase, although there were slight bumps as the invaders encountered and tested new rules and moderators. All in all, the researchers conclude, the ban was quite effective at what it set out to do:
For the definition of “work” framed by our research questions, the ban worked for Reddit. It succeeded at both a user level and a community level. Through the banning of subreddits which engaged in racism and fat-shaming, Reddit was able to reduce the prevalence of such behavior on the site." [...]
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/11/study-finds-reddits-contro...