Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door

Re:Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door by strken on Sunday October 09, 2022 @04:24PM (#33144961)

That's only simple because you picked two made-up examples to illustrate the point. What if someone says transgender kids shouldn't have access to puberty blockers? What if they say they shouldn't have access without their parents' permission? What if they say most children desist? What if they say that because most children desist, adult transgender people are not legitimate?

When you really think about the middle ground, the examples get very murky. They are not simple.

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Re:Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door by P5fRxh5kUvp2th on Sunday October 09, 2022 @05:10PM (#33145377)

The poster actually understands your point or they would have used examples that fall more into the grey area.

They used extreme examples precisely because they wanted to avoid the challenge that will necessarily come otherwise.

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Re:Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door by theprincess on Monday October 10, 2022 @04:00PM (#33155801)

I didn't use those cases as examples because they are not incitements. They could be construed as attempts at good faith debates. If someone says that most trans kids desist for instance, I'd point them at a study [1] that shows otherwise and we can go from there. The cases I'm talking about are quite different.

For example spreading false rumors that children's hospitals are giving sex changes to young children and saying that "somebody needs to put a stop to these evil monsters mutilating children" [2][3] is definitely incitement. Calling teachers that mention the fact that they are in a gay marriage "groomers" which implies that they are child molesters is also incitement. That's not good faith debate. It's smearing people in the hopes that someone will harm them.

1. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/150/2/e20210...

> We found that an average of 5 years after their initial social transition, 7.3% of youth had retransitioned at least once. At the end of this period, most youth identified as binary transgender youth (94%), including 1.3% who retransitioned to another identity before returning to their binary transgender identity. A total of 2.5% of youth identified as cisgender and 3.5% as nonbinary. Later cisgender identities were more common among youth whose initial social transition occurred before age 6 years; their retransitions often occurred before age 10 years.

2. https://tennesseestar.com/2022/10/03/matt-walsh-announces-ra...

3. https://www.losangelesblade.com/2022/03/28/gubernatorial-say...

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Re:Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door by strken on Friday October 14, 2022 @10:49AM (#33204275)

That's really the point, though. To help us understand what you're arguing for, you need to give real examples of things you disagree with and that make you uncomfortable (e.g. desisting) that are nevertheless acceptable speech, and things which cross the line and aren't acceptable.

You didn't give us examples from either side of the line to show us where the line is, you gave one example that's totally fine ("X is a jerk" isn't going to get anyone arrested in the US) and one that's a direct incitement to violence. The examples are miles apart and the line could be anywhere between them.

The Matt Walsh example doesn't really help either. If I said "someone needs to put a stop to these evil monsters pumping carbon into the atmosphere" in the context of protesting a new coal mine, pretty much everyone would understand there was an implied "...by turning up to my legal protest next Tuesday and waving some placards around" on the end. Saying the owners needed to be lined up and shot may or may not be incitement, but again that's a pretty extreme example, and it still doesn't look simple.

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