SirEDCaLot

Disclaimer- in this reply I may use some offensive statements as examples, none of which I agree with. To summarize my actual views- I consider myself liberal-libertarian-- I believe the married gay couple should have guns to protect their pot farm and legally adopted children from harm, knowing that single payer healthcare will prevent them from going bankrupt if one gets hurt. I don't care which bathroom you use as long as you wash your hands. And I think government should be out of the marriage game, there should be a one size fits all civil union for any couple/throuple/quadruple who want to legally entangle themselves (and it should not say 'marriage' anywhere on it). If you want to get married go to a church, if you want to be legally entangled with your partner go to the government.

In that case, what is the line between “simply” hate speech and actual radicalization to terroristic acts and/or conspiracy to terroristic acts and/or incitement to terroristic acts?

There's two lines. The line I'm more concerned with (and you should be too), is where's the line between 'simply' a controversial opinion, and 'actual' hate speech. If platforms are required by law to ban 'hate speech' then where does that line get drawn and by whom? And how do you differentiate between a controversial but honest opinion, and a prejudiced and hateful statement, when the two share the same position?

For example, is 'gay people freak me out' an opinion or hate speech? What about 'I don't think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because it could harm the children'? What about 'I don't think gay people should be allowed to marry because marriage is supposed to be a man and a woman'? Are those opinions or hate speech? Is there a difference between 'I don't think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because it might harm the children' and 'I don't think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because fuck the gays'?

Depending on how you define 'hate speech', it might require platforms to themselves remove anything even vaguely anti-gay.

I have no problem with any private platform choosing to adopt whatever rules they want. I have a BIG problem with government-mandated censorship of controversial opinions (and I think you should also).

As for the two lines, let's do a spectrum--- again, this is presented as an example, I do not agree with any of the following statements.

1. I don't like gay people.
2. I don't think gay people should be allowed to adopt children because it would harm the children.
3. I don't think gay people should be allowed to marry because it's bad for society.
4. I don't think gay people should be allowed to marry or adopt because I hate gay people.
5. I don't think gay people should have the same rights as straight people.
6. I don't think gay people should have traditional civil rights.
7. I don't think we should tolerate gay people in our society.
8. I think we should send a message to gay people that they're not welcome.
9. I think we should round up the gay people and kick them out of town.
10. I think gay people are a cancer on society that should be excised.
11. I can understand why someone would want to get rid of gay people.
12. I think it's reasonable to want to get rid of gay people.
13. I want to hurt gay people and you should too.
14. I want to help get rid of gay people by any means necessary.
15. It's time to take up arms against the gay people infiltrating our society.
16. I'm going to get my gun and go shoot some gay people.
17. You all should get your guns and go shoot some gay people.
18. We're meeting at 8pm at (place) to pass out guns, then we're going to (gay nightclub) to shoot gay people. Come join us!

Where do YOU draw the line in there?
For me I'd say the line between opinion and hatred is between 3 and 4, and the line between hate speech and criminal incitement is between 12 and 13.

The problem though is if 'ban hate speech' is codified into law, if platforms are REQUIRED to police it, then ALL of this becomes essentially illegal to say, essentially starting with #1. And while it's sad that anyone would say any of this, that basically makes it illegal to express ANY dislike of gay people because of the murkiness of the line between unfortunate opinion and hate speech.

Perhaps it’s not easy to decide where the line of legality should go though, which is why this topic is controversial.

It's not easy. Especially when you need to determine what's a controversial opinion and what's hate speech.

For example (and this is NOT anything I agree with)-- if one said 'I don't believe gay people should be allowed to adopt children, because science shows both male and female influences are more helpful when applied together for a child's development' what is that? Is that hate speech because it advocates taking rights away from gay people? Is it an opinion stated with the goal of protecting children?

Does it become illegal to express almost any position that isn't pro-gay?

It's a VERY slippery slope.

Certain speech is criminal like inciting violence. If someone said 'I'm going to buy a gun and kill gay people, and you all should kill gay people too' that is a specific statement of criminal intent and also inciting violence. That will get you cops knocking on your door (and rightly so).
You can apply a 'test' to that- does it show specific intent to commit a crime? Does it encourage others to commit crimes? Yes on both.

But how do you 'test' someone saying they don't think gay people should be allowed to adopt? How do you tell from a few words if they have a hate-filled heart, or if they legitimately think gay people can't provide a loving home? You can't.

For the record- I'm using LGBT as an example. I personally liberal-libertarian--- I believe married gay couples should have guns to defend their adopted children and pot farms from criminals, with single payer healthcare to keep them alive if they get hurt. I'm against almost any effort to take away anyone's rights.

So I'll fight for the asshat's right to say 'fuck the gays' just as hard as I'll fight for the LGBT person's right to marry, adopt, and use whatever bathroom they want (provided they wash their hands).

A better question is where is the line between 'simply' a controversial opinion and actual hate speech?
Because if a platform is required by law to ban hate speech, that's going to sweep up a lot of controversial opinions along with it.

Is it 'hate speech' to express any negative opinion about an oppressed group? And if not, where do you draw THAT line?

(if you want an answer to your original question I wrote one out but it's somewhat long....)

Antitrust laws prevent companies from acting in a way to squeeze off competition. Small companies are also prevented from squeezing off competition. Anticompetitive practices are illegal regardless of your size.

For the record, I personally think everything you said is truly repugnant. Although I'd point out the first one I've seen applied to Trump voters, frequently, in mainstream discussions on 'civilized' platforms, with little or no moderator response. So apparently it's okay to be prejudiced and discriminatory as long as it's against someone others don't like.

That said, my problem is not the banning of these statements. Most platforms quite reasonably would ban such things, and I have no problem with that.

What I have a problem with is the government REQUIRING a platform ban certain speech. I don't care if it's the most vile horrible hate filled shit. It should be up to the platform, not the government, to decide what speech is acceptable or not.

Because if government gets to decide what private citizens are allowed to discuss on privately-owned forums, that's a very slippery slope.

And I still say it's counterproductive.

That's absolutely the one! Truly great American. We could all learn a thing or two from him.

On the censorship thing, maybe it is okay if an online messaging website bans certain content, like pro-suicide content, or pro-terrorism content, etc. You could call that censorship but you could also call it safety.

I think that should go either way and I have no problem if a platform decides to ban that kind of stuff. I certainly have no desire to consume such material.

I have a BIG problem when the government decides that platforms are required to ban things. Even if they're things I don't myself want to read.

It's a slippery slope.

This is actually a real problem more so in this case than most. There's an awful lot of satellites in low Earth orbit, altitude of a few hundred to several hundred kilometers. Atmospheric drag still exists here a little bit, and thus space junk will reenter and burn up in years or decades.

This satellite was in geostationary orbit, at an altitude of about 36,000 km. Debris up there can take hundreds of years to come down. Geostationary is a special altitude where the satellite orbits at exactly the same rate as the Earth spins. That means that a fixed dish on Earth will always point at the satellite without needing to move or track. So there's just one narrow orbital ring around the equator for that. That ring is not a place we want space junk to be, because if it gets too hazardous for satellites in GEO that basically removes our capability as a species to use fixed satellite dishes for anything. And that problem won't go away for centuries.

In concept I agree with him on that. I support your right to say awful shit, but I am not going to spread that message to others. Where Elon lost the plot was thinking of Twitter as a public square. It's a nice thought, but it requires the whole platform to be 100% neutral and unbiased. So it's all good to call Twitter the public square, but that's a lot harder to take seriously when the guy in charge of policing the square is heavily biased.

how can we protect people without this censorship?

We don't, nor should we try to.
Protecting people's feelings from offense is not a valid activity in a free society. The second you start down the road of 'we must regulate this guy's words and actions to protect that guy's feelings' we become a nanny state full of people with paper thin skins. We accept that one consequence of free speech is that sometimes people will say things that are hurtful. We do that because the alternative is getting rid of free speech.

Hate must be addressed at its root.

I could not agree more. Fighting hatred with hatred only breeds more hatred. But that seems to be the standard strategy today, it's okay to not just refuse to tolerate intolerance, but to be actively intolerant of those who themselves seem intolerant. It is just fighting bad with bad and the result is more bad.

The way we fight the roots of hatred is with open discourse. The people who have hate in their hearts, we do not isolate them, we do not wall them off from society, we do not practice and encourage intolerance against them. We show them a better way. We make ourselves examples of doing better, not just against the people they don't like, but against the people we don't like.

We try to build bridges and encourage communication. For all the people who say immigrants are lazy lawbreakers, we show them immigrants who are the hardest working motherfuckers there are and pay their taxes. For the people who think black people are a problem, we introduce them to black people who break their stereotypes.

For the overwhelming majority of people who have hate in their hearts and intolerance and prejudice, those feelings are based on stereotypes.
People don't join the KKK because they start in a mixed culture and then conclude black people are a problem. They join the KKK because they have stereotypes they see reinforced in media and TV.

There was a famous Black dude whose name I don't remember, but he of his own volition managed to deprogram a whole bunch of KKK members. All he did was sit down and fucking talk to them. That's it. Like sit down at the bar next to them and start a conversation. Many of the KKK members had never encountered a respectable well-spoken black person before (let alone one willing to talk to them) and were completely blown away because it broke the stereotype of a black person that they joined the KKK to fight against.
A good number of them ended up leaving the KKK and giving this man their robes on the way out. So there's this friendly black dude who has a big box of KKK robes that were given to him by ex-members he deprogrammed.

That is how we fight hate. We fight hate with love, we fight intolerance with tolerance and open arms, we fight stereotypes with exposition, we fight ignorance with knowledge.

Otherwise it's like we are saying there's too much stupidity in society so we're going to prevent people with lower IQs from attempting school. It doesn't work.

There's a big difference between hate speech and revenge porn.

A person has rights to their likeness and image. That's why anybody who goes in front of a camera, be it a porn star or a model or an actor, signs a 'model release' giving the photographer authorization to publicize and sell their images. Without that simple one page contract, nothing in the photo shoot can be published. Porn actors do that. And in fact, they usually do it on video, where the actor holds up their driver's license and says 'my name is blah blah I am a pornographic actor and I am consenting to have sex on camera today and authorize this production company to publicize and sell the resulting video' or something like that. Revenge porn victims have made no such agreement, and while the penalties are stronger because of the harm it causes them, the legal basis for having any penalty at all is simply that they did not consent to having their likeness and image publicized.

Hate speech has no such issue. It may be harmful to a person or group, but if you remove the very broad 'hatred' label, it becomes just an opinion that would otherwise be protected speech.

The other problem is that what considers hatred is very much subjective. For example, if I say wanting to own a gun is evidence of mental illness, a lot of people on Lemmy will agree with that and I will probably get upvotes. If I say wanting to use the bathroom of other than your biological genetic sex is evidence of mental illness, I will probably get banned. What is the difference between the two? Supporting LGBT rights is popular, supporting the second amendment is not. So you create the situation where the only difference between a valid opinion and an invalid one is whether or not it's accepted mainstream, and that's a bad way to go.

Also, in a free country, it is generally considered that expressing an opinion which may be detrimental to others is not in itself considered bad. If I say that people over 80 years old should require a yearly driving test, that's a valid position for me to have and nobody will call me ageist for saying it. If I say that Donald Trump should be arrested rather than elected, that is directly detrimental to a person but it would get me upvotes here. If I said that being Republican is evidence of mental illness, that is directly prejudicial against an entire group which has many different reasons for believing as they do, and it would probably get me upvotes also.

My point is, hate speech as a concept is difficult to define and when you try to ban it with censorship you are just starting down a slippery slope that will have the opposite of the desired effect. You legitimize the counterculture and do nothing to stop the real problem, the actual hatred.

You are addressing the wrong problem. You're focusing on the symptom rather than the disease.

Fighting hate speech rather than hatred itself only strengthens the hatred. As soon as you say "you mustn't say that" you validate the hatred and give it power. Look at any counterculture, positive or negative. Trying to suppress it only validates it, gives it legitimacy as being important enough for the establishment to want to suppress, and if the people who might support the hatred already don't like the people who would suppress the hate speech, you've just poured fuel on the fire.

The problem to be fixed isn't hate speech, it's hatred. It's a tougher problem to solve, but a much more important one that you will actually get a productive effect by solving it.