Absolutely not true. I provided a link to the exact wording of the Canadian hate speech laws, and given the clear wording and the precedents that have been set regarding how these laws are interpreted, there is no way on earth that such a sign would be considered “hate speech” here. It might be considered rude or even offensive, but that’s not against the law. But something that, for instance, called for genocide of any racial or religious group and advocated killing them all would risk running afoul of the law. There is a vast and clear difference between those two, and no, there is no “slippery slope” here.
How so? Which specific clause of the law means saying an ethnically Indian woman is “brown on the outside but white on the inside” not “inciting hatred against a protected group”
Because merely being insulting is not “inciting hatred”. If you don’t understand the clear difference between that stupid sign and the counterexample I gave of actual hate speech, I don’t know what else to tell you.
Here’s a brief discussion of how police deal with it. As the article notes, prosecution under hate speech laws (s.318 and 319 of the Criminal Code) can be complex and difficult. Merely holding a sign bearing a racial insult ain’t gonna cut it.
That’s an article by one police force about how they may or may not enforce the law. Where in the text of the law, is the clause that says insulting someone ethnically Indian by saying they are “brown on the outside and white on the inside” does not count as 'inciting hate against an identifiable group"?
Correct. I won’t get into the specifics of hate speech and human rights in Canada (I could, and have lectured on it before in academic settings), but one important element is that a hate speech prosecution under the Criminal Code can only go forward if the Attorney-General of Canada approves it. That, in addition to the caselaw that further defines the crime, means that the cop on the beat, on his or her initiative, cannot arrest somebody for simply holding a sign that says, “___ Suck!” or for speaking the same in public or for publishing the same in media.
(Fill in the blank with the group of your choice.)
“Inciting hatred” as defined by Canadian caselaw basically boils down to, “Let’s round up all the ___ , and kill them all, as soon as possible.” Anything short of that, no matter how insulting or deprecating it may be, is not, legally-speaking, hate speech.
The example of “insulting someone ethnically Indian by saying they are ‘brown on the outside and white on the inside’” does not incite hate under the Canadian legal definition. Insults are not hate speech.
But it doesn’t have to incite violence. It has to be intended to stir up hatred, or likely to do so considering the circumstances. And for race in particular, it doesn’t have to be threatening or abusive, but merely insulting.
And many other European countries have similar laws, that have also been used to prosecute people for silly reasons. That’s exactly why we’re objecting to them.
Yeah, he could potentially face jail time if he said that in England.
The proposed Online Harms Act would significantly broaden what kind of speech is prosecutable, as well as allow people to be legally punished without actually committing a crime.
It’s been dropped for now, but may be revived. This would be unconstitutional in the US, but whatever Canada’s current laws say, they could be made broader and more draconian in the future. Speech was far freer in the UK once, too.
That’s a skewed misrepresentation of what that Act was primarily intended to accomplish, which was in fact intending to promote more responsible accountability of social media, something that I opined about at some length in the “cancel culture” thread:
Bill C-63 was a legislative and regulatory framework to reduce seven types of harmful content on social media platforms: content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, intimate content communicated without consent, content used to bully a child, content that induces a child to harm themselves, content that foments hatred, content that incites violence, and content that incites violent extremism or terrorism. The bill would have required social media operators to follow four duties: the duty to act responsibly, the duty to protect children, the duty to make certain content inaccessible, and the duty to keep records. It would have established a Digital Safety Office, including a Digital Safety Commission and a Digital Safety Ombudsperson.
Canada’s Online Harms Bill is Dead (Again): Three Questions to Consider for the Next Round | TechPolicy.Press
Not to mention that in your link this was all narrated from the perspective of Conor Friedersdorf, a paranoid libertarian trying to create clickbait.
Exactly right, and that was mentioned in the link that I cited. That’s part of the reason why there is a substantial burden to prosecuting hate speech. The idea that hate speech laws imply an oppressive police state where anyone can be arrested on the spot for saying arbitrary Bad Things is laughable conservative/libertarian raving paranoia.
I don’t think the UK act was intended to lead to people getting arrested for quoting Bible verses or for posting rap lyrics on Instagram, either. Friedersdorf is hardly the only person warning about this bill, and you haven’t shown he’s wrong about anything he said, either.
And this is a strawman. The main issue with hate speech laws is the chilling effect, just as with cancel culture.
Is it an insult? Or is it an accusation of being a traitor to the race? And death, often judicially mandated, is the historical punishment for traitors.
Except that it does not, contrary to bleatings from right-wing sources. For instance, in Canada, the far-right vehemently anti-Muslim online journal Rebel News, co-founded by alt-right lunatic Ezra Levant, is very much alive and well. I wish it could be shut down, but we have free speech here. Hate speech laws are irrelevant in this context.
Apologies if this was already linked, but perhaps it might help the discussion to inject some data. Here’s the freedom of expression-index, which at least tries to measure the effective freedom to express yourself, as well as the freedom of the press as a forum of public expression. The US comes in at place 35 if I haven’t miscounted, with a rating of 0.89, after Canada and most of Europe (Portugal and the Netherlands receive the same score). Denmark tops the list at 0.98, France has 0.96, Germany and Canada 0.94, while the UK scrapes only marginally ahead at 0.91. So at least as this particular metric is concerned, there doesn’t seem to be much of a free speech problem in Europe. Although I haven’t reviewed the methodology, so I’m just offering this here for debate.
I haven’t reviewed the detailed methodology either, but this bit goes a long way to explaining the low rating of the US:
This index, produced by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), combines information on freedom of discussion, freedom of academic and cultural expression, media censorship, media self-censorship, media bias, harassment of journalists, and the existence of critical and different perspectives in print and broadcast media.
IOW, among comparable democracies, the US has some of the strongest de jure protections of free speech, but also some of the most severe de facto prohibitions of unpopular speech in terms of social, professional, or media consequences.
we’re seeing this all around us right now in the reckless threats and censorship coming out of Donald Trump, and we saw it in the 50s with the equally corrupt and reckless Joe McCarthy, whose “Red scare” campaign destroyed careers and ruined lives based on the targets allegedly being “communist sympathizers”. Today we see Trump threatening academic institutions, threatening television networks, defunding public broadcasting, and attacking anyone and anything whose speech he doesn’t like.
Free speech is worthless if it causes you to lose your job, get ostracized by the community, and condemned by the media. Free speech is not just a statement on a piece of paper, it’s also, crucially, a social construct and a system of values.
That’s clearly nonsense. You not protected from the indirect or non-governmental consequences of your free speech in the UK or Europe, just as much as the US. You can lose your job or suffer other social consequences from exercising your free of expression. In fact there are a whole raft of unofficial-ish ways to control free speech in those countries (like this and that) that don’t cross the line into outright criminalization of free speech.
But that’s in addition to the actual explicit legal infringements discussed in this thread. The UK Constitution doesn’t protect you from social consequences of exercising your right to free speech and doesn’t protect you from being sent to prison for exercising your right to free speech (by say calling the PM a coconut, or saying nice things about ISIS or Palestine Action). The US Constitution doesn’t protect you from social consequences of exercising your right to free speech but does protect you from going to prison for exercising your right to free speech. So it is objectively better at protecting free speech.
Finding a rando on the Internet who says differently isn’t an argument against this fact, even if the rando in question works at a university, and puts their claims in an authoritative sounding numbered list form. I can find a very authoritative sounding numbered list that claims the prequel trilogy are the best star wars films, it doesn’t make it so.
Really? What countries in Europe are currently clamping down on respected mainstream media, colleges, and universities, and forcing them into political alignment with the reigning power at risk of severe consequences? What countries in Europe are deporting legal residents for exercising their right to free speech? What countries in Europe are shutting down public broadcasting because the reigning power doesn’t like the news they broadcast?
The current administration in the US is not only doing those things, it’s doing it with the complete impunity of an authoritarian regime.
You aren’t paying attention to the news on the other side of the pond much are you?
Ummm… isn’t that the exact opposite of what’s happening in the US? You object to universities being required to support free speech? In the US, Trump is attempting to censor universities’ speech.
Speaking of which, I just saw that NASA climate reports are now being censored, not only contrary to the Constitution, but contrary to statutory law governing the availability of the results of publicly funded research. Free speech, FTW! 
Not at all, on paper Trump is doing exactly what that law is intended to do (It was written by the last tory government to combat the alleged prejudice against conservative views in universities). Trump is allegedly just very upset about Jewish and Christian freedom of expression In universities (pro-Israeli Jewish and conservative Christian freedom of expression, for some reason he’s not been very concerned with what happens to Palestinian Christians or liberal Jewish people), and so he’s pressuring universities with the threat of withdraw funding into admitting how prejudiced they’ve been against Jewish and Christian viewpoints.
Of course fortunately for Americans unlike the UK Trump is constrained by the first amendment so he can’t just (as the tories did) just pass a law forcing people to say the things he wanted them to say. So he had to just use financial pressure and rely on the cravenness of university authorities.
That ‘rando on the internet’ is a university institute collating expert evaluations across the world:
The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project publishes data and research on democracy and human rights.It relies on evaluations by around 3,500 country experts and supplementary work by its own researchers to assess political institutions and the protection of rights.The project is managed by the V-Dem Institute, based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
Or see the wikipedia article. Do with that what you will, but trying to ad hominem the source isn’t doing your argument any favors.
So a rando who works at a university. Oh his list must be true. It has numbers in it!
The only reason that this sort of thing works, regardless of who wrote it or how it was written, is because a critical mass of people choose to obey it and follow it. Regardless of how free of loop-holes, or “wishy washy” components, the moment that people choose not to use it properly is the moment that that democracy is in trouble. And this is what has happened in the US.