Varieties of censorship: Hate speech, pornography, and the First Amendment

Reviewed by: Speaking back: The free speech versus hate speech debate by Katharine Gelber Mousa A. Btoosh Speaking back: The free speech versus hate speech debate. By Katharine Gelber. (Discourse approaches to politics, society and culture 1.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. xiv, 177. ISBN 1588111881. $59 (Hb). Gelber presents a new hate speech policy whereby victims of hate speech can speak back whenever such speech occurs. Throughout the book (which consists of six chapters, with abstract, introduction, conclusion, notes, references, and appendices), G argues convincingly that her ‘speaking back’ policy is better than the punitive hate speech legislation used in New South Wales, Australia, and some other Western countries. In the introduction (1–11), she provides a rationale for her study by stating the deficiencies of the hate speech laws and the inconsistencies between the goals of securing free speech and ameliorating the negative effects of hate speech. Such deficiencies and inconsistencies, according to G, justify the urgent need for a new balanced proposal. The introduction also presents an overview of the rest of the book. The first chapter, ‘The problem: An example of racial antivilification laws in practice, 1989–1998’ (13–27), familiarizes the reader with the reasons behind the legislation of the New South Wales’s racial antivilification law, the structure of the legislation, and three empirical problems resulted from its application. The second chapter, ‘Expanding speech liberties: A capabilities approach’ (29–47), sheds light on two proposals that differ in their assessments of free speech, hate speech, and speech policy. The first represents the current deficient major arguments in defense of free speech, which emphasize the quantity of speech: the more the better. The second represents G’s view, which aims to empower people to respond to hate speech rather than to be silenced by it. Another area of difference between G and defenders of free speech appears in the third chapter, ‘Speech as conduct’ (49–68), which analyzes speech conceptions within the framework of speech act theory and communicative action theory. Unlike many free speech adherents, G argues that hate speech is a kind of conduct and that any proposed distinction between speech and conduct is highly challengeable. The fourth chapter, ‘Hate speech as harmful conduct: The phenomenology of hate-speech-acts’ (69–91), presents an analysis of a number of hate speech utterances in terms of the validity claims model by which it has become feasible to identify and understand hate-speech-acts. Trying to investigate whether the weaknesses in the application of hate speech policy is universal or just a state-specific issue, G, in the fifth chapter entitled ‘Australia, the UK and the USA compared’ (93–115), adopts a com parative method, whereby she investigates hate speech policies in all three countries. The final chapter, ‘A policy of speaking back’ (117–34), deals with the core value of the book, G’s ‘capabilities-oriented hate speech policy’ which provides the institutional, material, and educational assistance that victims need to respond to hate speech. In brief, this policy suggests that hate speech should not be banned, but rather be answered. This book makes an important contribution to the field of discourse studies, providing a consolidated hate speech policy whereby the goals of both securing free speech and ameliorating the negative effects of hate speech are achieved simultaneously. Mousa A. Btoosh University of Texas, Arlington Copyright © 2003 Linguistic Society of America

Reviewed by: HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship by Nadine Strossen Richard Ashby Wilson (bio) Nadine Strossen, HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship (Oxford University Press 2018), ISBN: 9780190859121, 232 pages. Hate is trending. The sitting president of the United States regularly mobilizes his political constituency by vilifying Mexican immigrants as “criminals and rapists” who “infest” America, and by promoting a “zero tolerance” policy at the border that punitively separates children from their parents, including persons applying for asylum. There has been a resurgence in white nationalist ideology globally both in mainstream electoral politics and in ugly scenes on the streets of Charlottesville, Dresden, and Warsaw. In the United Kingdom, hate crimes spiked after the Brexit referendum and in the USA, there has been a steady rise in hate crimes against African-Americans, Muslims, immigrants and members of the LGBT community. Given this current paroxysm of populism, isn’t it high time we re-evaluated our commitment to freedom of expression and start contemplating new legislation to regulate discriminatory speech that targets vulnerable minorities? In HATE: Why We Should Resist it with Free Speech, Not Censorship, Nadine Strossen, former national President of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), offers a resounding defense of free speech and rejects attempts to suppress or ban speech that is constitutionally protected under the First Amendment. Free speech is the lifeblood of democratic deliberation, argues Strossen, and much hate speech in the United States, while offensive, is protected speech and should remain so. Current US law only suppresses speech that intentionally advocates imminent lawless action that is likely to occur, and even then, the regulation of speech must occur in a way that is consistent with the viewpoint (or content) neutrality principle which inhibits the state from disfavoring some opinions simply because they are disagreeable. Strossen starts with the observation that there is no clear and consistent definition of “hate speech,” which she puts in scare quotations throughout the book. Hate speech is not a term of legal art and it is simply wrong to assert, as some liberal politicians have, that “hate speech is not free speech.” In Strossen’s view, “the terms ‘hate speech’ and ‘hate crimes’ are simply deployed to demonize views people find offensive and to call for punishing a broad swathe of expression, including political discourse that is integral to our democracy.”1 Reviewing hate speech laws in the US and globally, Strossen concludes that it is simply not possible to draft hate speech laws that are not unduly vague, overbroad and counter-productive.2 Germany, France, and other European countries convict hundreds of defendants a year for offences as capacious as “incitement to hatred,” and Strossen documents a number of cases that seem disproportionately chilling of political [End Page 213] speech. They include the 2014 arrest of a British politician for publicly reading a Winston Churchill quote from 1899 that denounced the treatment of women in Muslim countries, and the conviction of a Danish man in 2016 who criticized “the ideology of Islam” on Facebook, and posted the statement, “Islam wants to abuse democracy in order to get rid of democracy.”3 She reminds us also of the long and repressive history of government censorship in the United States, including how, in the 1830s, Southern states banned abolitionist speech on the grounds that it had the potential to incite violence and rebellion. She observes that the Republican National Committee and some state legislatures have included the Black Lives Matter movement in resolutions condemning hate speech. HATE addresses the lively and fairly acrimonious campus hate speech debate currently taking place in the United States, and Strossen counsels faculty and students to confront provocative speakers at universities with “counterspeech” and vigorous opposing arguments, rather than to silence them with heckling and censorious campus hate speech codes.4 She points out that all the campus speech codes challenged in the courts by the ACLU have been struck down on First Amendment grounds and recommends that universities permit all speech that the government does not itself censor.5 Strossen does not countenance the view that merely being exposed to denigrating speech is in...

In recent times, South Africa has been witnessing insurgence of offensive and hate speech along racial and ethnic dispositions on Twitter. Popular among the South African languages used is English. Although, machine learning has been successfully used to detect offensive and hate speech in several English contexts, the distinctiveness of South African tweets and the similarities among offensive, hate and free speeches require domain-specific English corpus and techniques to detect the offensive and hate speech. Thus, we developed an English corpus from South African tweets and evaluated different machine learning techniques to detect offensive and hate speech. Character n-gram, word n-gram, negative sentiment, syntactic-based features and their hybrid were extracted and analyzed using hyper-parameter optimization, ensemble and multi-tier meta-learning models of support vector machine, logistic regression, random forest, gradient boosting algorithms. The results showed that optimized support vector machine with character n-gram performed best in detection of hate speech with true positive rate of 0.894, while optimized gradient boosting with word n-gram performed best in detection of hate speech with true positive rate of 0.867. However, their performances in detection of other threatening classes were poor. Multi-tier meta-learning models achieved the most consistent and balanced classification performance with true positive rates of 0.858 and 0.887 for hate speech and offensive speech, respectively as well as true positive rate of 0.646 for free speech and overall accuracy of 0.671. The error analysis showed that multi-tier meta-learning model could reduce the misclassification error rate of the optimized models by 34.26%.

The development of automated hate speech detection research has not yet detailed the actor who is the source of hatred, even though the forms of hate speech intervention for perpetrators and supporters are different. Previous research on this topic has paid much attention to the action component in the form of sentimental words. However, it has yet to pay attention to the actor component that can differentiate legal hate speech from illegal hate speech and transforms hateful or offensive speech into free speech, thus dealing with misclassification, as reported in a previous study. This research proposes a framework for the automated detection of hate speech that provides an actor and action component to solve the problem of such errors and meets the need for comprehensive interventions. This study shows how to apply the framework in a rule-based approach by considering the actor component in predicting hate speech and differentiating it from others. The prediction process is called actor-oriented automated hate speech detection.

PurposeHate speech in recent times has become a troubling development. It has different meanings to different people in different cultures. The anonymity and ubiquity of the social media provides a breeding ground for hate speech and makes combating it seems like a lost battle. However, what may constitute a hate speech in a cultural or religious neutral society may not be perceived as such in a polarized multi-cultural and multi-religious society like Nigeria. Defining hate speech, therefore, may be contextual. Hate speech in Nigeria may be perceived along ethnic, religious and political boundaries. The purpose of this paper is to check for the presence of hate speech in social media platforms like Twitter, and to what degree is hate speech permissible, if available? It also intends to find out what monitoring mechanisms the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have put in place to combat hate speech. Lexalytics is a term coined by the authors from the words lexical analytics for the purpose of opinion mining unstructured texts like tweets.Design/methodology/approachThis research developed a Python software called polarized opinions sentiment analyzer (POSA), adopting an ego social network analytics technique in which an individual’s behavior is mined and described. POSA uses a customized Python N-Gram dictionary of local context-based terms that may be considered as hate terms. It then applied the Twitter API to stream tweets from popular and trending Nigerian Twitter handles in politics, ethnicity, religion, social activism, racism, etc., and filtered the tweets against the custom dictionary using unsupervised classification of the texts as either positive or negative sentiments. The outcome is visualized using tables, pie charts and word clouds. A similar implementation was also carried out using R-Studio codes and both results are compared and a t-test was applied to determine if there was a significant difference in the results. The research methodology can be classified as both qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative in terms of data classification, and quantitative in terms of being able to identify the results as either negative or positive from the computation of text to vector.FindingsThe findings from two sets of experiments on POSA and R are as follows: in the first experiment, the POSA software found that the Twitter handles analyzed contained between 33 and 55 percent hate contents, while the R results show hate contents ranging from 38 to 62 percent. Performing a t-test on both positive and negative scores for both POSA and R-studio, results reveal p-values of 0.389 and 0.289, respectively, on an α value of 0.05, implying that there is no significant difference in the results from POSA and R. During the second experiment performed on 11 local handles with 1,207 tweets, the authors deduce as follows: that the percentage of hate contents classified by POSA is 40 percent, while the percentage of hate contents classified by R is 51 percent. That the accuracy of hate speech classification predicted by POSA is 87 percent, while free speech is 86 percent. And the accuracy of hate speech classification predicted by R is 65 percent, while free speech is 74 percent. This study reveals that neither Twitter nor Facebook has an automated monitoring system for hate speech, and no benchmark is set to decide the level of hate contents allowed in a text. The monitoring is rather done by humans whose assessment is usually subjective and sometimes inconsistent.Research limitations/implicationsThis study establishes the fact that hate speech is on the increase on social media. It also shows that hate mongers can actually be pinned down, with the contents of their messages. The POSA system can be used as a plug-in by Twitter to detect and stop hate speech on its platform. The study was limited to public Twitter handles only. N-grams are effective features for word-sense disambiguation, but when using N-grams, the feature vector could take on enormous proportions and in turn increasing sparsity of the feature vectors.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study show that if urgent measures are not taken to combat hate speech there could be dare consequences, especially in highly polarized societies that are always heated up along religious and ethnic sentiments. On daily basis tempers are flaring in the social media over comments made by participants. This study has also demonstrated that it is possible to implement a technology that can track and terminate hate speech in a micro-blog like Twitter. This can also be extended to other social media platforms.Social implicationsThis study will help to promote a more positive society, ensuring the social media is positively utilized to the benefit of mankind.Originality/valueThe findings can be used by social media companies to monitor user behaviors, and pin hate crimes to specific persons. Governments and law enforcement bodies can also use the POSA application to track down hate peddlers.

Hate speech touches on contested issues of dignity, free expression, liberty and democracy. It can thus be argued that there is a conflict between the right to freely advocate however distasteful the idea may be and the right to be free from prejudice and discrimination. In some circumstances, speech is restrained and the right to non-discrimination is preferred over free speech. Hate speech has been used invariably to mean expression which is abusive, insulting, intimidating, harassing or which incites violence, hatred, discrimination against group identified by characteristics such as race, religion, place of birth, residence, region, language, caste, community, sexual orientation or personal convictions. The methodology adopted in this paper was doctrinal. Both primary and secondary sources were employed in carrying out this paper. The finding of the paper is that asides from Nigeria, various countries of the world have adopted some measures to deal with hate speech and other related issues. While some countries have clearly defined laws, some others find it quite unnecessary to create laws that seek to regulate hate speech as it is perceived as an infringement to the fundamental human rights of freedom of expression. This paper recommended that the existing Cyber Crimes Act and the Anti-Terrorism Act, among other pre-existing regulations cover many of the offences the new bill seek to address rather than waste valuable resources on the enactment of fresh laws to enable effective implementation and avoid a situation of plurality of laws. Perhaps one of the most effective ways of combating hate speech would be to marginalize purveyors of such speeches. In the U.K., while far-right, fascist parties like the British National Party and the racist ideas they support are not banned, mainstream British politician avoid associating openly with members of such parties. In Nigeria, on the other hand, offensive and hate speech mongers are often seen as regional and ethnic heroes.

It is said that politicians’ hate speech or hate speech in political election tend to cause more serious impact on society. They are more influential to society and there is often an increased tension in political election. In this sense, some insist that strict regulation is needed to address politicians’ hate speech or hate speech in political election. However, we have to pay attention to the fact that on the one hand hate speech regulation is need for politicians, but on the other hand freedom of speech for politicians and free speech in political elections is extremely important. This article tries to sort out this dilemma between regulation and non-regulation for for politician and free speech in political elections. Firstly, incitement to hatred is also applied to polticians but most of them could skillfully evade legal regulation and I am afraid prosecuting politicians leads to political oppression by selectively prosecuting some of the political enemies. Another option is to deal with hate speech by the National Election Commission. This institution plays an important role in tackiling hate speech by informing politicians of the harm of hate speech.

Preface List of Court Cases 1. Introduction to Freedom of Expression and the American Legal System The Nature of Freedom of Speech How Free Expression Rights Are Determined Justifications and Critiques of Freedom of Expression Conclusion 2. Historical Perspectives on Freedom of Expression Free Expression in World Cultures Freedom of Expression in America: 1600-1917 Conclusion 3. Incitement to Illegal Conduct and True Threats The Clear and Present Danger Test The Gitlow Decision Protects Freedom of Speech From State Abridgement Freedom of Speech for Communists: Clear and Present Danger? Brandenburg v. Ohio: Strengthening Protection of Speech The Brandenburg Rule and Contemporary Communication Distinguishing Incitement From True Threats Conclusion 4. National Security and Freedom of Expression A National Security Exception to the Constitution? Government Efforts to Limit Free Expression in Wartime Government Practices That Keep Information Secret Government Surveillance of Its Citizens Conclusion 5. Fighting Words and the Categorical Exceptions Doctrines The Categorical Exceptions and Fighting Words Doctrines Are Announced in Chaplinsky The Fighting Words Definition is Refined in Terminiello The Definition of Fighting Words is Narrowed R.A.V. v. City of St.Paul: Fighting Words and Categorical Exceptions Doctrines Live On Conclusion 6. Hate Speech The Problem of Hate Speech Do Speech Codes Violate the First Amendment? Thinking Critically About Hate Speech Regulation Conclusion 7. Defamation: First Amendment Issues New York Times v. Sullivan: The Actual Malice Rule The New York Times Rule: Application of the Actual Malice Test The New York Times Rule: Proof of Actual Malice Beyond New York Times v. Sullivan: Additional First Amendment Protections Has the Actual Malice Rule Served Its Purpose? Conclusion 8. Obscenity and Child Pornography Obscenity Not Protected by the First Amendment 1957-1973: The Supreme Court Struggles With Meaning of Obscenity Court Majority Agrees on Obscenity Does Context Influence Constitutional Protection? Critical Thinking About Obscenity Distinguishing Obscenity From Child Pornography Conclusion 9. Time, Place, and Manner Restrictions Historical Developments The Modern Time, Place, and Manner Test The Forums Held in Trust for Public Expression Time, Place, or Manner Rules: Noteworthy Controversies Conclusion 10. Symbolic Expression The Benefits of Symbolic Expression The Definitions of Symbolic Expression The Test for Constitutional Protection of Symbolic Expression Restrictions Related to Suppression: The Flag Burning Issue Conclusion 11. Technology and the First Amendment Medium-Specific Restrictions on Expression: Early History Theories Used to Justify Broadcast Regulation Regulation of Internet Communication Conclusion 12. Privacy and Free Speech Privacy and the Search for Penumbral Rights The Right to Privacy in One's Self The Right to Privacy Within the Home Balancing a Right to Persuade With a Right to Privacy in Public Spaces Outside the Home The Right to Informational Privacy Conclusion 13. Access to Information A Right of Access to Government Information Journalists' Privilege Access to Judicial Proceedings Conclusion 14. Copyright and the First Amendment Copyright Law in the United States Copyright Law and the First Amendment Copyright and New Technology Conclusion 15. International and Comparative Perspectives on Freedom of Expression The Global Freedom of Expression Landscape Cultural Values and Free Expression Rights Judicial Decisions on Freedom of Expression Twenty-First Century Technology and International Freedom of Expression Conclusion Index About the Authors

This chapter distinguishes between open-mindedness, an epistemic virtue, and free speech, a political principle. It argues that open-mindedness is truth oriented. The principle of free speech in the United States, on the other hand, applies to speech that is false and misleading as well as to claims that are true. Free speech is not sacrosanct, however; there are exceptions such as defamation and libel and misleading advertising. Should hate speech join the exceptions to free speech? If so, how should hate speech be defined? This issue is particularly pressing in universities that are working to expand inclusion of groups often subject to hate speech while endorsing open-mindedness and free speech, and academic freedom. The chapter draws on Jeremy Waldron’s distinction between offenses to the dignity of persons and being offended to attempt an account of hate speech. Nevertheless, if hate speech laws are not in the offing, as seems likely, how should universities deal with hate speech on their campuses? What can universities legitimately do to encourage the virtue of an open-minded pursuit of truth while rejecting hate speech and abiding by the principle of free speech?

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) revolution heralding the emergence and dominance of social media has always been viewed as a turning point in free speech and communication. Indeed, the social media ordinarily represents the freedom of all people to speech and information. But then, there is also the side of the social media that has been often ignored; that it serves as platform for all and sundry to express themselves with little, if any regulation or legal consequences. This as a result has led to global explosion of hate speech and fake news. Hate speech normally lead to tension and holds in it, the potential for national or even international crisis of untold proportions. It also has the likelihood to scare people away from expressing themselves for fear of hate-filled responses and becoming a source of fake news. Using doctrinal as well as comparative methodologies, this paper appraises the trend between states of passing laws or proposing laws to regulate hate speech and fake news; it also appraises the contents of such laws from different countries with the aim of identifying how they may be used to suppress free speech under the guise of regulating hate speech and fake news. It argues that the alarming trend of hate speech and fake news presented an opportunity for leaders across the globe to curb free speech. The paper concludes that the advancement in ICT helped in a great deal to advance free speech; it may as well, because of the spread of hate speech and fake news, lead to a reverse of that success story.

The Hate Speech Diversion

Striking a Balance: Freedom of Expression and the Prohibition of Hate Speech and Offensive Remarks

PurposeThe Hon’ble Supreme Court of India, in a landmark judgment, scrapped a draconian law [Section 66 (A)] that gave the police absolute power to put behind bars anybody who was found posting offensive or annoying comments online. This paper aims to examine the take of people on the “Free Speech via Social Media” issue and their attitude towards the way sensitive messages/information are posted, shared and forwarded on social media, especially, Facebook.Design/methodology/approachThe research was carried out on a sample of 200 social media users, all picked up randomly, from five Indian states/Union Territories. Data were collected through a questionnaire, and users were contacted through e-mail. Data collected were analyzed through the Kolmogorov–Smirnov (K-S)Ztest.FindingsThe findings indicate that hate posts/messages are on the rise, and more and more users are joining in. Besides, prosecution happens only when the aggrieved party is influential or powerful.Practical implicationsThe findings of this research give a strong insight into the social media behaviour of users in relation to hate contents/posts. The study establishes the fact that Indian people are in favour of free speech, but with a sense of restraint and responsibility. The work could form the basis for future research on various aspects of hate speech on social media. Researchers could study the trials and prosecutions that have happened over the past few years and whether punishment has acted as a deterrent.Originality/valueThe research is likely to be important for those involved in work on freedom of speech or hate speech through social media. Social networking sites such as Facebook would also get some insights into users’ perception towards free and hate speech mechanism on social media.

The emergence of digital platforms has greatly increased the scope of free expression by enabling instantaneous cross-border opinion sharing. Article 19[1](a) of the Indian Constitution, which states that "everyone has right to express their own thoughts freely through various means such as printing, media, publishing, writings, signs etc., but they come with reasonable restrictions under Article 19[2] to maintain decency, social order and peace, security of state, friendly relations with international states, etc." In any case, the distinction between free expression and disparaging speech has become more hazy due to the proliferation of hate speech on digital platforms that incites violence, discrimination, or disrupts public order. Legal obscurity has resulted from selective enforcement and the lack of a precise legal definition of disparaging speech on the internet in India. Even with laws like the Information Technology Act of 2000, the Indian Penal Code (now known as the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023), and others, controlling hate speech online continues to be a difficult task. This study examines the tension between limiting online hate speech and defending free expression, highlighting the necessity of clear legal regulations, technological responsibility, and striking a balance between constitutional rights and social harmony on digital platforms.

“Islamophobia” in the western world is not only considered as a fear and disliking towards Muslims but also a concept that involves the complete erasure of Muslims by western society. The international media is considered a major collaborator in keeping Islamophobia the most prevalent issue in the western culture by directly attacking Muslim sentiments through state-based hate speeches or indirectly by projecting only the negative news of Muslims. Holland’s Mohammad Cartoon Competition once again processed a continuing conflict between the right of free speech and hate speech. The aim of this article is to analyse the Muhammad Cartoon Competition 2018 and Geert Wilders comments in the light of Holland’s hate speech provisions. The Holland cartoon contest will also be examined in light of past examples of racial and religious discrimination in Holland’s media against Islam in the name of free speech. The study intends to answer whether the Mohammad Cartoon Contest organized by Geert Wilders and his comments constitute hate speech according to the Dutch penal codes of Article 137c and 137d? The study uses the Methodology of Content analysis and an analysis of the Mohammad Cartoon Contest, Geert Wilder’s comments regarding it were made. In addition, a comparative analysis of the past cases of these legal violations in Holland was made in the study to draw up the results. Findings of the analysis suggest that most of the Geert Wilders comments and his organized cartoon contest qualify as hate speech according to all the clauses of article 137c and 137d of hate speech. However, keeping in consideration the previous trials against Geert Wilders and him not being convicted renders Dutch hate speech laws questionable. This brings us to conclude that there is a dire need to clarify and amend Holland’s hate speech laws. Keywords: Islamophobia, caricatures, international media, hate speech, freedom of speech, Muslims, Holland.