Free speech, like all marketplace activities, benefits those who are currently life’s winners, reinforcing their advantage while enabling them to say to themselves that they won fair and square. Perhaps only the threat of serious social disruption will shake the current complacency, so that in twenty or fifty years we will look upon hate speech rules with the same equanimity with which we now view defamation, forgery, obscenity, copyright, and dozens of other exceptions to the free speech principle, and wonder why in the late twentieth century we resisted them so strongly.
Richard Delgado and David H. Yun. “Pressure Valves and Bloodied Chickens: An Analysis of Paternalistic Objections to Hate Speech Regulation.” 82 Cal. L. Rev. 871 (1994)
Twenty years later, hate speech rules are still discussed in a similar manner. The paternalistic arguments opposing rules against racist hate speech Delgado and Yun emphasize in this essay (hate speech allows people to blow off steam harmlessly; laws will be mainly applied against minorities; free speech is minorities’ best friend; talking back (more speech) is the best/only way to respond to racist speech) are still often thrown at people who want to act against hateful speech. While free speech is certainly the most central element of democracy, the hate speech problem remains. The Internet only amplifies the problem. What will change in the next 30 years?
Thoughts?