Should Hate Speech be Censored?

Should the US government censor hate speech? Nadine Strossen, Professor of Law at New York Law School and author of HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, explains why free speech is enshrined in US law and why censoring hate speech does more harm than good.
Hate speech is not a legal term of art.
Naturally, in everyday speech people use words that could be “hate speech” by others.
Stereotyped ideas on other people’s race, gender, sexual orientation, or class may amount to being labelled as hate speech.
Even words such as Trump, Black Lives Matter, Gay, Muslim, etc are attacked as hate speech in some social and other contexts.
Freedom of speech is greatly protected as a constitutional right in most countries.
In other countries freedom of speech is unknown.
Some speeches can be targeted and even criminalised.
The best argument in favour of regulating hate speech is when it satisfies the emergency principle: when it causes directly a specific imminent, serious harm and there is no other way to prevent that harm.
The best argument against regulating hate speech is that it does more harm than good.
Censorship is completely inconsistence with individual liberty, equality, and, indeed, democracy itself.
It does more harm than good to the very causes that advocates of censorship hope to advance.
Freedom of speech is essential to our democratic self-government.
We the People “cannot hold government officials accountable unless we are able to exercise robust freedom of speech, including the freedom to strongly criticise government officials and government policies.”

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The views expressed in the article are the author’s and are not necessarily shared by the members of the Foundation.

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