Hate speech

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Hate speech is defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as "public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group based on something such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation".[1] Hate speech is "usually thought to include communications of animosity or disparagement of an individual or a group on account of a group characteristic such as race, colour, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation".[2] A legal definition of hate speech varies from country to country.


Hate speech laws[edit]

A majority of developed democracies have laws that restrict hate speech, including Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, South Africa, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.[11] The United States does not have hate speech laws, since the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that laws criminalizing hate speech violate the guarantee to freedom of speech contained in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.[9]

Laws against hate speech can be divided into two types: those intended to preserve public order and those intended to protect human dignity. The laws designed to protect public order require that a higher threshold be violated, so they are not often enforced. For example, a 1992 study found that only one person was prosecuted in Northern Ireland in the preceding 21 years for violating a law against incitement to religious violence. The laws meant to protect human dignity have a much lower threshold for violation, so those in Canada, Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands tend to be more frequently enforced.[12]

The global nature of the internet makes it difficult to set limits or boundaries to cyberspace.[13][citation needed] The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) states that "any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence shall be prohibited by law".[14] The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) prohibits all incitement to racism.[15] Concerning the debate over how freedom of speech applies to the Internet, conferences concerning such sites have been sponsored by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.[16] "Direct and public incitement to commit genocide" is prohibited by the 1948 Genocide Convention.[17]

State-sanctioned hate speech[edit]

A few states, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Rwanda Hutu factions, and actors in the Yugoslav Wars have been described as spreading official hate speech or incitement to genocide.[18][19]


Virgin SIM card in Poland with the slogan of the campaign against hate speech "Words have power, use them wisely"



Companies that have hate speech policies include Facebook and YouTube. In 2018 a post containing a section of the United States Declaration of Independence that labels Native Americans "merciless Indian savages" was labeled hate speech by Facebook and removed from its site.[23] In 2019, video-sharing platform YouTube demonetized channels, such as U.S. radio host Jesse Lee Peterson, under their hate speech policy.[24]


Several activists and scholars have criticized the practice of limiting hate speech. Civil liberties activist Nadine Strossen says that, while efforts to censor hate speech have the goal of protecting the most vulnerable, they are ineffective and may have the opposite effect: disadvantaged and ethnic minorities being charged with violating laws against hate speech.[25] Kim Holmes, Vice President of the conservative Heritage Foundation and a critic of hate speech theory, has argued that it "assumes bad faith on the part of people regardless of their stated intentions" and that it "obliterates the ethical responsibility of the individual".[26] Rebecca Ruth Gould, a professor of Islamic and Comparative Literature at the University of Birmingham, argues that laws against hate speech constitute viewpoint discrimination (prohibited by First Amendment jurisprudence in the United States) as the legal system punishes some viewpoints but not others,[27] however other scholars such as Gideon Elford argue instead that "insofar as hate speech regulation targets the consequences of speech that are contingently connected with the substance of what is expressed then it is viewpoint discriminatory in only an indirect sense."[28] John Bennett argues that restricting hate speech relies on questionable conceptual and empirical foundations[29] and is reminiscent of efforts by totalitarian regimes to control the thoughts of their citizens.[30]

Michael Conklin argues that there are positive benefits to hate speech that are often overlooked. He contends that allowing hate speech provides a more accurate view of the human condition, provides opportunities to change people's minds, and identifies certain people that may need to be avoided in certain circumstances.[31] According to one psychological research study, a high degree of psychopathy is "a significant predictor" for involvement in online hate activity, while none of the other 7 criteria examined were found to have statistical significance.[32]

Political philosopher Jeffrey W. Howard considers the popular framing of hate speech as "free speech vs. other political values" as a mischaracterization. He refers to this as the "balancing model", and says it seeks to weigh the benefit of free speech against other values such as dignity and equality for historically marginalized groups. Instead, he believes that the crux of debate should be whether or not freedom of expression is inclusive of hate speech.[11] Research indicates that when people support censoring hate speech, they are motivated more by concerns about the effects the speech has on others than they are about its effects on themselves.[33] Women are somewhat more likely than men to support censoring hate speech due to greater perceived harm of hate speech, which researchers believe may be due to gender differences in empathy towards targets of hate speech.[34]

See also[edit]


  1. ^ "hate speech". dictionary.cambridge.org.
  3. ^ "Herz, Michael and Peter Molnar, eds. 2012. The content and context of hate speech. Cambridge University Press" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 13 July 2018. Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  4. ^ "Criminal Justice Act 2003". www.legislation.gov.uk. Retrieved 3 January 2017.
  5. ^ An Activist's Guide to The Yogyakarta Principles (PDF) (Report). 14 November 2010. p. 125. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 January 2017.
  6. ^ Kinney, Terry A. (2008). Hate Speech and Ethnophaulisms. The International Encyclopedia of Communication. doi:10.1002/9781405186407.wbiech004. ISBN 9781405186407.
  7. ^ "CNN's Chris Cuomo: First Amendment doesn't cover hate speech". Archived from the original on 24 July 2019. Retrieved 12 April 2016.
  8. ^ Stone, Geoffrey R. (1994). "Hate Speech and the U.S. Constitution." Archived 27 April 2018 at the Wayback Machine East European Constitutional Review, vol. 3, pp. 78-82.
  9. ^ a b Volokh, Eugene (5 May 2015). "No, there's no "hate speech" exception to the First Amendment". The Washington Post. Retrieved 25 June 2017.
  11. ^ a b Howard, Jeffrey W. (2019). "Free Speech and Hate Speech". Annual Review of Political Science. 22: 93–109. doi:10.1146/annurev-polisci-051517-012343.
  12. ^ Bell, Jeannine (Summer 2009). "Restraining the heartless: racist speech and minority rights". Indiana Law Journal. 84: 963–79. Retrieved 21 February 2021.
  13. ^ Laub, Zachary. "Hate Speech on Social Media: Global Comparisons". The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Retrieved 19 June 2020.
  14. ^ International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Article 20
  15. ^ Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Article 4
  16. ^ Report of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on the use of the Internet for purposes of incitement to racial hatred, racist propaganda and xenophobia, and on ways of promoting international cooperation in this area[permanent dead link], Preparatory Committee for the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance, United Nations, 27 April 2001
  17. ^ "Incitement to Genocide in International Law". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 9 May 2020.
  18. ^ Cotler, Irwin (2012). "State-Sanctioned Incitement to Genocide". The Content and Context of Hate Speech: 430–455. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139042871.030.
  19. ^ Dozier, Kimberly (10 February 2020). "Saudi Arabia Rebuffs Trump Administration's Requests to Stop Teaching Hate Speech in Schools". Time.
  20. ^ Hern, Alex (31 May 2016). "Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft sign EU hate speech code". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 June 2016.
  21. ^ Sara C Nelson (28 May 2013). "#FBrape: Will Facebook Heed Open Letter Protesting 'Endorsement of Rape & Domestic Violence'?". The Huffington Post UK. Retrieved 29 May 2013.
  22. ^ Rory Carroll (29 May 2013). "Facebook gives way to campaign against hate speech on its pages". The Guardian UK. Retrieved 29 May 2013.
  23. ^ "Facebook labels declaration of independence as 'hate speech'". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 March 2021.
  24. ^ Re, Gregg (5 June 2019). "YouTube ends monetization of conservative commentator Steven Crowder's channel, several others after left-wing outrage". Fox News. Retrieved 11 March 2021.
  25. ^ Strossen, Nadine (14 December 2018). "Minorities suffer the most from hate-speech laws". Spiked. Retrieved 5 November 2019.
  26. ^ Holmes, Kim (22 October 2018). "The Origins of "Hate Speech"". heritage.org. The Heritage Foundation.
  27. ^ Gould, Rebecca Ruth (15 November 2018). "Is the 'Hate'in Hate Speech the 'Hate'in Hate Crime? Waldron and Dworkin on Political Legitimacy". Jurisprudence. SSRN 3284999.
  28. ^ Elford, Gideon. "Legitimacy, Hate Speech, and Viewpoint Discrimination." Journal of Moral Philosophy 1, no. aop (2020): 1-26.
  29. ^ Bennett, John T. "The Harm in Hate Speech: A Critique of the Empirical and Legal Bases of Hate Speech Regulation." Hastings Const. LQ 43 (2015): 445.
  30. ^ Bennett, John. "The Totalitarian Ideological Origins of Hate Speech Regulation." Cap. UL Rev. 46 (2018): 23.
  31. ^ Conklin, Michael (2020). "The Overlooked Benefits of 'Hate Speech': Not Just the Lesser of Two Evils". Rochester, NY. SSRN 3604244.
  32. ^ Sorokowski, Piotr; Kowal, Marta; Zdybek, Przemysław; Oleszkiewicz, Anna (27 March 2020). "Are Online Haters Psychopaths? Psychological Predictors of Online Hating Behavior". Frontiers in Psychology. 11: 553. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00553. ISSN 1664-1078. PMC 7121332. PMID 32292374.
  33. ^ Guo, Lei; Johnson, Brett G. (April 2020). "Third-Person Effect and Hate Speech Censorship on Facebook". Social Media + Society. 6 (2). doi:10.1177/2056305120923003.
  34. ^ Downs, Daniel M., and Gloria Cowan. "Predicting the importance of freedom of speech and the perceived harm of hate speech." Journal of applied social psychology 42, no. 6 (2012): 1353-1375.

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