> In a nutshell: hate speech causes people to commit suicide.
Can you elaborate on how we establish a causal relationship between hate speech and suicide? Let alone specifically hateful comments on YouTube? This doesn't seem corroborated by the suicide rates in the US over time. Rates were just as high (and in fact, higher in some years) in pre-internet days [1].
This claim is made even more questionable when taken in conjunction the previous comments' emphasis on its impact on minorities. Minorities in the US actually have substantially lower suicide rates than Whites [2].
Minorities are most often the targets of hate speech. Which is why LGTBQ youth are often bullied both IRL and online and they commit suicide. And yes, it is a crime. But this thread is talking about deleting comments; not about law enforcement.
This thread is about hate speech and the ambiguous subjective definitions that have lead to this unending censorship problem.
If the core agreement is that it's about hate against a group, then saying "minority" is nothing more than just a shortcut for a certain group and doesn't really add anything to the discussion of what is hate speech.
There are studies dating back to the 70s that suggest publishing headlines about suicide causes people to commit suicide. Headlines about murder-suicides similarly caused an uptick in murder suicides.
> Abstract: Fatal crashes of private, business, and corporate-executive airplanes have increased after publicized murder-suicides. The more publicity given to muder-suicide, the more crashes occurred. The increase in plane crashes occurred primarily in states where murder-suicides were publicized. These findings suggest that murder-suicide stories trigger subsequent murder-suicides, some of which are disguised as airplane accidents.
There have been some studies which found similar correlations with fatal car 'accidents.'
It's easy to speculate that comments discussing suicide, such as yours or mine, might also plausibly cause suicides. Perhaps that's something for you to consider.
I've seen a few cases where people have committed suicide after suffering online hate, and to be honest, I don't think that this hate made a radical difference – rather, it was something that triggered an individual who already was in a very dark place.
Sacrificing free speech for their sake of like doing a nation-wide ban on peanuts to help people with allergies: it will prevent quit a lot of accidental deaths, too. Except that peanuts are not essential for a functioning democracy.
In many peoples' opinion, life is more valuable than pure freedom, therefore we should take away (some) freedom in order to save lives.
To be clear, I am not in the camp that believes that, but I try to understand their point of view.