I think it’s easier to have to position that absolute free speech is the best solution if you are not part of a minority group who is the target of hate speech. (Not saying you aren’t)
The definition is tricky and if such law should exist it should have a good margin from being used for arbitrary “I was offended” type of offenses.
I don’t think prison, as you suggested, is a reasonable consequence either.
The repercussion to bad speech and ideas is inherent to the current paradigm of the internet: downvotes and ostracization.
Maybe they will wind up on their own forum saying despicable shit, but they were probably going to do that anyway. Bad ideas love a vacuum away from prying eyes and outsiders.
Yeah, fair, definition can be hard. But to give an example that I think is pretty clear cut: people standing outside of a mosque/synagogue/church arguing that those [certain people] deserve to be dead or put in labor camp.
You could argue that those are just words, and be correct, but for the individuals that are targeted it’s not just words. They know for a fact that those words and ideologies do turn in to actions.
I think it’s easier to have to position that absolute free speech is the best solution if you are not part of a minority group who is the target of hate speech.
Stuff like “gay people are unnatural and should be corrected” and “drag queens/trans people/[insert bogeyman here] are pedophiles coming for our children” and “n***ers oughta be whipped”
My point is that it’s a moving target that will be abused. The government should not and thankfully cannot regulate speech based on the grounds of “hate”. Hate is also not illegal. (At least in the US)
For example, Christians are taught to love the sinner but hate the sin. Homosexuality, drag queens, transgenderism are sins in Christianity. With your new law Christians are now censored because their worldview disagrees with yours.
Whoever has the right to define that term has immense power and that power will be abused just like the other labels in the meme.
They aren’t censored for believing those things are sinful. They’re being punished for trying to enforce their views on what a person should be on people who aren’t them. The minute I start having to care about what the Christian sitting next to me thinks is sinful because he might hurt me if I don’t, he loses the right to free speech, you get me?
While not pacifistic Christianity is non-violent. If someone claims to be a Christian and beats up a homosexual for “no reason” then they are sinning. This, also, is completely irrelevant to the argument I was making.
Everyone tries to enforce their views. You, I assume, want to enforce your world view of radical tolerance for [issue here] at the expense of someone elses ability to criticize it. Your neighbor might want to define hate speech as anything that violates Sharia law.
What we have now (which is no restriction on hate speech) is actually the best policy.
You, I assume, want to enforce your world view of radical tolerance for [issue here] at the expense of someone elses ability to criticize it
If that’s how you want to define the opinion that people shouldn’t be thrown in jail for providing abortions or gender affirming care, or that Tucker Carlson shouldn’t be allowed to go on TV and tell his followers that all drag queens are pedophiles, then so be it.
Sin is whatever. You can believe that all gays are going to go to turbo-hell, you can tell all your facebook friends, you can say you feel pity for us, I don’t care. As long as I’m allowed to live my life however I want, and you don’t come into my face and tell me not to, we’re good. But your right to swing your arms stops at my face. As soon as you start codifying your opinions into law, or advocating for violence against people who hold different beliefs than youlive their lives in a way contrary to your religion (which strangely only seems to come from people who self-identify as being on the right), we’re gonna have a problem.
This is (mostly) a different point and I’m not going to engage with it. Suffice it to say that hate speech isn’t a slippery slope it’s the bottom of the mountain. If such a policy is ever enacted it will be abused and used to persecute people.
Of course I have. Because it was declassified. And that means it’s no longer a conspiracy theory.
Also, if someone posts something online you think is dumb, do you really think it should just be deleted? Do you think that helps anyone?
Tell me with a straight face that you have never even thought about blocking a single other social media user. Tell me you think troll comments like “What’s a major turn off when dating?” “If she’s black” should not be removed by moderators.
Every ounce of energy a person spends watching their back, making sure their fellow man isn’t out to get them, hardening their armor against the thousands of people trying to find a chink, find the one thing they can say that gets them to have a mental breakdown just because they think it’s funny watching them have a mental breakdown, is an ounce of energy they don’t spend creating, caring for each other, making the life of their fellow man just that little bit better, and unapologetically being themselves.
But if you’re so insistent that words on a screen can’t affect you unless you let them, Mr. Forumite, I guess you won’t mind if I end this conversation by telling you to go to the hardware store and buy a rope and a bucket, providing exhaustive instructions for how to tie a noose, and telling you to end your worthless life before you ruin anyone else’s, because your parents clearly never loved you and there’s no way anyone else who’s sane ever will.
So you believe that, since there are a large number of people who can be easily manipulated by words into believing or doing certain things, and there likely always will be, words may as well inherently have power and we should be careful with how we use them, but you simultaneously believe that the solution to this is just to make everyone grow thicker skin?
For the record, though, I don’t believe anyone should kill themselves, or anything that I said about you personally in the second paragraph. Quite the opposite, in fact. I only said that to make the point that “just words on a screen” can do horrible things to the right people, which I’m glad you seem to understand.
If everyone were trying to spread knowledge and understand each other all the time, the world would be a much safer and much better place by most standards.
The fact that this is not the case is why forums need moderation. Very rarely, I find, do people engage in good faith when a more emotionally satisfying alternative is available. People troll. People argue in bad faith. People deliberately try to get each other riled up and post misinformation (by which I mean statements that can be disproved by a single Google search) in the hopes that those who see it will be too lazy to check. People take one of those misinformation posts saying something they already agree with as irrefutable proof that it is true and refuse to listen to reason.
I agree that whether any given post constitutes some of the above is much more often than not a matter of personal opinion, and that therefore people who can be trusted to decide accurately every single time are rare indeed if they truly exist at all. That said, anyone who’s ever browsed 4chan for a while can plainly see that removing nothing does much more harm than good, especially in forums that discuss topics commonly frequented by people who are vulnerable and therefore easy to manipulate (forums discussing trans issues immediately come to mind).
I personally would MUCH rather use a forum moderated by an imperfect human whose heart is in the right place than a forum with no moderators whatsoever. The beautiful thing about the Internet, though, is that we do not all have to agree on which is best. Some forums are moderated, some are not, and we can use one or the other or both as we choose.
I’m just going to throw in a bit at the end of this thread here, as I find the conversation fascinating.
This is how fascism starts. “We have to control speech for your own good” becomes “hateful speech comes from [insert group]” becomes “we have to stop them.”
We are all being weaponized by the internet. Free speech is important. You don’t fight fascism with more fascism, you fight it with better ideas.
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But hate speech is never good, is it?
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I think it’s easier to have to position that absolute free speech is the best solution if you are not part of a minority group who is the target of hate speech. (Not saying you aren’t)
The definition is tricky and if such law should exist it should have a good margin from being used for arbitrary “I was offended” type of offenses.
I don’t think prison, as you suggested, is a reasonable consequence either.
The repercussion to bad speech and ideas is inherent to the current paradigm of the internet: downvotes and ostracization.
Maybe they will wind up on their own forum saying despicable shit, but they were probably going to do that anyway. Bad ideas love a vacuum away from prying eyes and outsiders.
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Yes, absolutely. We should all be concerned with the source of our ideas and even our memes, as dumb of a concept as that is.
What is hate speech?
Yeah, fair, definition can be hard. But to give an example that I think is pretty clear cut: people standing outside of a mosque/synagogue/church arguing that those [certain people] deserve to be dead or put in labor camp.
You could argue that those are just words, and be correct, but for the individuals that are targeted it’s not just words. They know for a fact that those words and ideologies do turn in to actions.
I think it’s easier to have to position that absolute free speech is the best solution if you are not part of a minority group who is the target of hate speech.
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Stuff like “gay people are unnatural and should be corrected” and “drag queens/trans people/[insert bogeyman here] are pedophiles coming for our children” and “n***ers oughta be whipped”
My point is that it’s a moving target that will be abused. The government should not and thankfully cannot regulate speech based on the grounds of “hate”. Hate is also not illegal. (At least in the US)
For example, Christians are taught to love the sinner but hate the sin. Homosexuality, drag queens, transgenderism are sins in Christianity. With your new law Christians are now censored because their worldview disagrees with yours.
Whoever has the right to define that term has immense power and that power will be abused just like the other labels in the meme.
They aren’t censored for believing those things are sinful. They’re being punished for trying to enforce their views on what a person should be on people who aren’t them. The minute I start having to care about what the Christian sitting next to me thinks is sinful because he might hurt me if I don’t, he loses the right to free speech, you get me?
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As long as I get to tell him just as calmly to fuck off and leave me alone, and he does, we’re good.
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While not pacifistic Christianity is non-violent. If someone claims to be a Christian and beats up a homosexual for “no reason” then they are sinning. This, also, is completely irrelevant to the argument I was making.
Everyone tries to enforce their views. You, I assume, want to enforce your world view of radical tolerance for [issue here] at the expense of someone elses ability to criticize it. Your neighbor might want to define hate speech as anything that violates Sharia law.
What we have now (which is no restriction on hate speech) is actually the best policy.
If that’s how you want to define the opinion that people shouldn’t be thrown in jail for providing abortions or gender affirming care, or that Tucker Carlson shouldn’t be allowed to go on TV and tell his followers that all drag queens are pedophiles, then so be it.
Sin is whatever. You can believe that all gays are going to go to turbo-hell, you can tell all your facebook friends, you can say you feel pity for us, I don’t care. As long as I’m allowed to live my life however I want, and you don’t come into my face and tell me not to, we’re good. But your right to swing your arms stops at my face. As soon as you start codifying your opinions into law, or advocating for violence against people who
hold different beliefs than youlive their lives in a way contrary to your religion (which strangely only seems to come from people who self-identify as being on the right), we’re gonna have a problem.This is (mostly) a different point and I’m not going to engage with it. Suffice it to say that hate speech isn’t a slippery slope it’s the bottom of the mountain. If such a policy is ever enacted it will be abused and used to persecute people.
Of course I have. Because it was declassified. And that means it’s no longer a conspiracy theory.
Tell me with a straight face that you have never even thought about blocking a single other social media user. Tell me you think troll comments like “What’s a major turn off when dating?” “If she’s black” should not be removed by moderators.
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Every ounce of energy a person spends watching their back, making sure their fellow man isn’t out to get them, hardening their armor against the thousands of people trying to find a chink, find the one thing they can say that gets them to have a mental breakdown just because they think it’s funny watching them have a mental breakdown, is an ounce of energy they don’t spend creating, caring for each other, making the life of their fellow man just that little bit better, and unapologetically being themselves.
But if you’re so insistent that words on a screen can’t affect you unless you let them, Mr. Forumite, I guess you won’t mind if I end this conversation by telling you to go to the hardware store and buy a rope and a bucket, providing exhaustive instructions for how to tie a noose, and telling you to end your worthless life before you ruin anyone else’s, because your parents clearly never loved you and there’s no way anyone else who’s sane ever will.
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So you believe that, since there are a large number of people who can be easily manipulated by words into believing or doing certain things, and there likely always will be, words may as well inherently have power and we should be careful with how we use them, but you simultaneously believe that the solution to this is just to make everyone grow thicker skin?
For the record, though, I don’t believe anyone should kill themselves, or anything that I said about you personally in the second paragraph. Quite the opposite, in fact. I only said that to make the point that “just words on a screen” can do horrible things to the right people, which I’m glad you seem to understand.
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The fact that this is not the case is why forums need moderation. Very rarely, I find, do people engage in good faith when a more emotionally satisfying alternative is available. People troll. People argue in bad faith. People deliberately try to get each other riled up and post misinformation (by which I mean statements that can be disproved by a single Google search) in the hopes that those who see it will be too lazy to check. People take one of those misinformation posts saying something they already agree with as irrefutable proof that it is true and refuse to listen to reason.
I agree that whether any given post constitutes some of the above is much more often than not a matter of personal opinion, and that therefore people who can be trusted to decide accurately every single time are rare indeed if they truly exist at all. That said, anyone who’s ever browsed 4chan for a while can plainly see that removing nothing does much more harm than good, especially in forums that discuss topics commonly frequented by people who are vulnerable and therefore easy to manipulate (forums discussing trans issues immediately come to mind).
I personally would MUCH rather use a forum moderated by an imperfect human whose heart is in the right place than a forum with no moderators whatsoever. The beautiful thing about the Internet, though, is that we do not all have to agree on which is best. Some forums are moderated, some are not, and we can use one or the other or both as we choose.
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I’m just going to throw in a bit at the end of this thread here, as I find the conversation fascinating.
This is how fascism starts. “We have to control speech for your own good” becomes “hateful speech comes from [insert group]” becomes “we have to stop them.”
We are all being weaponized by the internet. Free speech is important. You don’t fight fascism with more fascism, you fight it with better ideas.
deleted by creator