We allow generalized hate speech because we believe that the appropriate counter to speech is speech.
In the world of corporate mass media where money is a microphone, unfortunately this belief is just idealist faith. Overall, good ideas and speech alone hasn’t prevailed, and harmful speech has done more than counter-speech could hope to fix.
Good question. It’s especially a tough one in the real world, where the people who have the power to censor are typically the ones who shouldn’t have it.
I personally don’t think there are any hard-and-fast definitions of what should be censored and what shouldn’t. It depends heavily on content and context. There’s a big difference between, hypothetically, a historian discussing Nazi ideology in a research paper, and between a politician discussing it in the presidential debate. One of those has legitimate value to society, the other is anti-social, politically delusional and harmful to citizens. Same with some forms of climate denialism - there is a valid point in permitting counterviews to consensus in the scientific method, but there is also a point where mass media is outright lying for the sake of self-enrichment at the expense of the entire planet’s population.
who should be the one deciding
One aspect of this is that communities often decide, to some degree, what is acceptable to say through social mores. This obviously isn’t foolproof and can be manipulated, but tends to be better than having just one person at the head of a network deciding.
It is a tough question, because everyone has biases. You shouldn’t have any one person or group in control of this.
That all said, my comment was meant more meant as a critique of the environment, where the owning class (that is, the ruling class) own and control the vast majority of the mass media and social media platforms. The worldview I’ve seen around which suggests their speech is comparable to the speech of you and me is naive. That’s a big part of why nonsense is now common sense, because the ruling class and their propaganda can pervade society despite so much of it being either illogical misinformation or outright bullshit.
In the world of corporate mass media where money is a microphone, unfortunately this belief is just idealist faith. Overall, good ideas and speech alone hasn’t prevailed, and harmful speech has done more than counter-speech could hope to fix.
Then who should be the one deciding what gets censored and how?
Good question. It’s especially a tough one in the real world, where the people who have the power to censor are typically the ones who shouldn’t have it.
I personally don’t think there are any hard-and-fast definitions of what should be censored and what shouldn’t. It depends heavily on content and context. There’s a big difference between, hypothetically, a historian discussing Nazi ideology in a research paper, and between a politician discussing it in the presidential debate. One of those has legitimate value to society, the other is anti-social, politically delusional and harmful to citizens. Same with some forms of climate denialism - there is a valid point in permitting counterviews to consensus in the scientific method, but there is also a point where mass media is outright lying for the sake of self-enrichment at the expense of the entire planet’s population.
One aspect of this is that communities often decide, to some degree, what is acceptable to say through social mores. This obviously isn’t foolproof and can be manipulated, but tends to be better than having just one person at the head of a network deciding.
It is a tough question, because everyone has biases. You shouldn’t have any one person or group in control of this.
That all said, my comment was meant more meant as a critique of the environment, where the owning class (that is, the ruling class) own and control the vast majority of the mass media and social media platforms. The worldview I’ve seen around which suggests their speech is comparable to the speech of you and me is naive. That’s a big part of why nonsense is now common sense, because the ruling class and their propaganda can pervade society despite so much of it being either illogical misinformation or outright bullshit.