We’ve got a very lengthy thread about the benefits and efficacy of free speech that’s been running for months:
If you have an actual novel case to make for how free speech protects us from naziism, lots of people here would be interested to hear it.
I think we all agree that death threats cross a line (and certainly law agrees with that). I think we all agree incitement to violence crosses a line (and, again, that’s what the law says).
Many of us find it insane that somehow chanting nazi slogans while you march with torches doesn’t cross that line (despite the fact that nazis are an explicitly genocidal group, and, last I checked, genocide was involved both violence and death).
Beyond that, there’s a question of non-genocidal, non-murderous hate speech.
First of all, some of this is simply coded instructions to attack people. Once you establish a clear pattern that whenever person A mentions a woman that woman immediately gets death and rape threats, it starts to look like they are directing those actions. Sort of like a mob boss ordering someone flowers in a cheesy movie.
Secondly, we have a problem with what people have called “stochastic terrorism”. You know there are a certain number of unhinged people out there who will take action, so you say things that play to those people. The people who promoted pizzagate created the situation where a person went into a pizza parlour with a shotgun. The people who promote crisis actor conspiracy theories create situations like this:
Where people went to the site of a mass shooting and told the pastor of the church that his murdered daughter never existed.
Now on one hand, that pastor wasn’t physically injured and the guys vandalizing the church were arrested, so maybe you don’t think the damage done by the speech was sufficient to warrant an kind of response. Or maybe you don’t think the link was sufficient between the speech of the person promoting “crisis actor” conspiracies and the people who acted on them. But to flip that around, I could also point out that there is absolutely no benefit to a “public debate” about whether or not that man’s daughter was murdered in his church.
Everyone agrees there are limits on free speech. From reasons like the prevention of violence to reasons like protecting private profit (check out copyrights!). If you want to say we need to protect free speech, I think you need to have a coherent explanation of what you think the limits of it are, otherwise we’d just be talking in circles.
