Is There Too Much Freedom in Hate Speech?

Myles Jay Wortman

 

mw535617@ohio.edu

As Americans living in society today, many of us haven't experienced a time where our country was as divided as it is today. While experiencing a global pandemic, a racial injustice uprising, and the most consequential presidential election of our lives, it's absolutely no surprise that the internet and social media is more combative than ever. I mean our president addresses the nation through tweets instead of the press, right?

The nation has gone far past the point of simple disagreement and maybe civil discussion. The danger with hate speech is that it's far more than name calling and hurt feelings, this rhetoric leads to dangerous biases and discrimination-based violence. Since 2016, opposing views have led to a spike in violence and the use of derogatory terms. 

Many of us can acknowledge that within our country's legislation, free speech serves as a blanket of protection for hateful rhetoric against any type of punishment. This comes at no surprise from a governmental standpoint, but there's still not much punishment present for hate speech on many social media platforms. Only recently has twitter implemented a ban on "dehumanizing remarks based on age, disability, and disease". Yes. A leading social media platform that has been running since 2006 has just now condemned ableism and ageism on it's site. In 2020. No matter how long it has taken for these measures to take place on social media, it is very telling how social media has condemned hate speech before our country's legislation has. It becomes even more challenging to expect such a change when even the leader of this country has a tendency to spew the same hateful rhetoric that many are trying to restrict.

Picture source: blogspot.com

So what do we do and where do we go from here? How do you restrict speech, ideas, expression? There's so many people in this world that cling to the first amendment so hard because they feel as though the restriction of speech is the restriction of self. In order to make progress, I feel it's important to note that the speech within itself is not what's being restricted, it's the impact of the harmful ideologies that's meant to be condemned. The harm, the violence, and the dangerous implications of such rhetoric are to be prohibited because the cost of hate speech has been people's lives in many cases.

It's time to disarm hate and to see hate speech and it's harmful rhetoric as the weapon against society that it is and always has been.