There are many protests currently going on around the "free speech" vs "hate speech" debate. Generally there are different sides in the debate on both the left and the right. On the left you have Antifa which is a group which is set up specifically to confront and stop fascists. On the right you have some actual fascists and white supremacist racists who like to call themselves identitarians.
To make it known and clear, I do not support fascist policies. It does not matter to me which side or tribe the policy is coming from or whether we call it left or right or up or down or blue or red or whatever else. The simple fact is, there are policies on all sides in all tribes which are fascist policies and there are policies which are anti-fascist policies. Free speech is a principle which is anti-fascist because if we look at the history of free speech under any dictatorship, totalitarian or fascist regime, it is always suppressed.
Fascism is about promoting conformity to a group identity and about requiring the service of the citizen to the state. So to put it in a simple to understand way, under fascism the citizen exists to serve the state. Free speech protects individual liberty and while there has to be some balance between protecting individual liberty and the right to life of other people, we have to in my opinion be very careful about giving up liberty under the context of fear, hysteria, anger, or any other popular emotionally driven situation.
When emotions are driving the agenda such as fear, disgust, anger, then often people will give up their liberty so as to feel better in the moment without understanding the long term consequences both strategic and personal. Free speech can be abused and is abused, but so are bans, so is law, so is the mechanisms of the state. So when people are upset that Nazis are saying stuff which is spreading racist propaganda and growing fascism to the point of demanding a ban on the speech then a question I would ask is what would actual Nazi's do to communists who expressed their opinions?
The truth is, whomever or whatever is in power has control of the ban hammer. The ban hammer is almost always abused by whomever has control of it at the time. For this specific reason I would recommend we avoid using the ban hammer, and put a focus on ways to enable the kind of speech we want while discouraging the kind we don't want. For example when it comes to private companies, private property, your personal property, your home, your sphere of influence, then you do have every right to ban any kind of speech you want. Nazis can be banned from your platform, can be not welcome in your home, as there is no reason why you have to be nice to people who speak hatefully toward you.
At the same time the answer is not to use the government to ban speech nation wide specifically because that is a game which strategically only empowers the government itself. Whomever and whatever happens to be in control of the government is usually going to be the most authoritarian tribe of the day, but there is no guarantee that the speech being banned today in 2017 will not evolve into a different set of words, under a different standard, with different feelings associated. Using the government to police speech with the full force of law and police in my opinion will lead to a future dystopia.
The reasons listed below and this is to contribute to a debate as I don't have the answers:
- Obscene or hate speech is determined by community standards which are not static and which change over time.
- Because the standards change over time, the very definition of what is or isn't hate speech is not fixed.
- Because the definition of what is and is not hate speech is not fixed, it's not clear if what you say today is going to or is not going to offend someone in a future time where your speech is reinterpreted.
- Because speech is being saved for all eternity on the Internet to be continuously reinterpreted by future generations and cultures, we have no way of knowing really what we are saying. It is obvious right now that racists are spreading hate but it's not entirely clear whether some innocuous looking speech can be reinterpreted 10 years down the line to be hate speech.
A good example would be to look at Pizzagate. It is very possible that Pizzagate is a real conspiracy or it is possible that it's simply innocuous speech which has been reinterpreted to look like a conspiracy. It is just as possible that hate can evolve into innocuous looking speech which then reinterprets and drags in many conversations which might not even truly be involved. It is this and also the possibility that emojis and other memes being shared can be interpreted in the future as hate speech and banned, and there appears to be no clear end to it.
At what point would the people who support banning words for example decide there is no more hate? Since all words originate at the point of thoughts and the technology may evolve into a brain to computer interface then at what point does policing speech as words become policing thoughts as electrical impulses? Is that not more scary than what Hitler himself wanted to do with racial purity?