As the OP mentioned, many countries, including democratic ones, do have laws around hate speech. Wikipedia has a few words about it in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_France#The...

You also have laws against defamation that consider it illegal to defame people based on race and other criteria (since the 19th century in France).

The last such law in France was just cancelled for being unconstitutional.

And in practice they are impossible to enforce for a platform like Facebook, since in the end it's a judge who has to decide what is, and what is not hate speech.

In practice, enforcement is selective and the sentences are never formally enforced since it would create de-facto political prisoners, which gives a bad image to a democratic country.

So I'm not sure they're a good example.

Okay, let me be more specific. Define it for me in US law.

The great thing about not defining it in law is that anyone is free to use their own definition when deciding who they support, who they give money and patronage to, and who they host the content of.

Hate speech isn't a legal construct in the US. It is, however, a social construct. This is a social issue. Nobody is taking Facebook to court over this.

In addition, freedom of speech IS NOT the right to be heard. This ignorant censorship argument is getting old and is immensely ignorant. I can walk away from some idiot spouting racist vitriol, just as much as Verizon can walk away from a platform that is infested with racist vitriol. They can continue to spout or host that vitriol, but nobody has to listen and nobody had to do business with them.

Facebook can continue to host this garbage, exactly like anybody is free to boycott them for that. If they lose all the business then the market and society has spoken.