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>Hate speech is generally understood as sexist/racist/homophobic speech

That may be your definition but it is not the definition and certainly is not close to being the "generally understood" definition.

All words are made up but definitions should not change with the wind. What is happening with hate speech is that it has morphed into "speech that a minority group found offensive." This is not a workable definition because what you find offensive is not what I find offensive. The most broadly accepted definition based on the laws I see on wikipedia is "speech that encourages imminent violence."

The only reason we are even discussing this is because people have begged online platforms to police speech. The inevitable conclusion when you police speech is this problem we are discussing right now. You ultimately just devolve into tyranny of the majority where dissenting thoughts are silenced.

>You may disagree with the definition, but that's what people are talking about.

Just because you don't want there to be nuance doesn't make the nuance go away.




Wikipedia's definition is actually broader than what you quoted.

> Hate speech is defined by 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". 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, color, national origin, sex, disability, religion, or sexual orientation".

If I may clarify, the key part of the definition is "based on something such as [a core characteristic of a person that has no relationship to the hate] such as race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation". So hating someone for doing something is not hate speech. Hating someone for what they "are" (at their "core", if there's such a thing) is hate speech.

This isn't about finding things offensive (although clearly hate speech is found offensive by most people).

I disagree strongly about whether policing speech inevitably devolves into censorship. We already police speech, for example calls to violence in the US, with no visible devolution. We also police where you can physically be, without limiting your ability to go about your life with no undue policing. The slippery slope argument without supporting evidence is lazy.


Under that definition, would you agree that this article titled "Why can’t we hate men?" is hate speech?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-cant-we-hate-men...

If so, what do you think should be done about it?


I don't think that article can be classified as hate speech using any reasonable definition. What I get from it is a disdain toward men for their behavior, particularly as it pertains to power and violence in a particular social/political context. I don't read it as, "I hate you because you have a penis," although there are certainly people who think that way (a very small minority as far as I can tell). As a person with a penis, I certainly don't get a feeling of personal animus from the article nor am I threatened by it.




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