define hate speeches

U.S. Government Accountability Office

Online Extremism is a Growing Problem, But What’s Being Done About It?

A hate crime occurs nearly every hour in the U.S. It’s a growing problem that’s been fueled by hate-filled internet posts on social media and other internet platforms. Many of us have seen news headlines about extremist attacks that were fueled by online hate speech—such as the mass shootings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015; a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019; and a nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 2022.

In a new report , we looked at the connection between hate crimes and online hate speech, and how internet-based companies and law enforcement are combatting these problems. Today’s WatchBlog post looks at our work.

What do we know about the connection between online hate and extremist acts?

Online hate speech is widespread. It includes prejudiced comments about race, national origin, ethnicity, gender, gender identification, religion, disability, or sexual orientation. Research indicated up to a third of internet users have experienced hate speech online. That number is even higher when looking at just the online gaming community—where about 50% have experienced hate speech.

Those who post hateful or extremist speech online may do so in an effort to spread their ideologies.

Extremist attacks—such as those in Charleston, El Paso, and Colorado Springs—illustrate how exposure to hate speech online may have contributed to the attackers’ biases against people based on race, national origin, and sexual orientation. Additionally, these attacks showed how the internet has offered the perpetrators of such attacks a vehicle for disseminating hateful materials—such as manifestos containing disparaging and racist rhetoric prior to the attacks. The perpetrators of these three attacks were convicted of, or pled guilty to, federal or state hate crimes.

In response to the rise of hate crimes, the FBI has elevated such acts to its highest-level national threat priority. FBI’s designation placed hate crimes at the same priority level as preventing domestic violent extremism. But the government and others are also taking steps to respond to online hate crimes specifically.

What’s being done to combat online hate?

In our new report , we looked at how internet companies and the federal government are trying to combat online hate crimes.

We looked at six companies that run online forums and platforms—including social media, livestreaming, and crowdfunding platforms—that are tackling this issue in different ways. Each company has its own definition of content that violates the platform’s terms of use. But every definition prohibited hateful content related to disability, ethnicity, race, and religion.

We also found that each company had a different way of flagging hateful posts. All of the companies used algorithms, to varying degrees, to flag content and remove it. Some also relied on users to identify harmful content.

We also reviewed what the federal government is doing to address hate crimes that may be linked to online hate speech. For example, federal law enforcement agencies have used online hate posts as evidence during prosecutions of those who commit domestic violent extremism incidents and other hate crimes.

The Department of Justice is also collecting data from law enforcement agencies and the public about hate crimes to better understand their prevalence. One way it does this is through an annual national survey of about 150,000 households, which asks questions about potentially underreported crimes like hate crimes. While the survey can help estimate the prevalence of hate crimes, it doesn’t ask specifically about online hate crimes. Having this information could greatly inform federal law enforcement’s efforts, including putting resources where they are needed most.

Because of this, we recommended that the Department of Justice consider methods to collect information in the annual survey about hate crimes that occur on the internet.

Learn more about our work about the connection between online hate speech and violent extremism by reading our new report .

• GAO’s fact-based, nonpartisan information helps Congress and federal agencies improve government. The WatchBlog lets us contextualize GAO’s work a little more for the public. Check out more of our posts at  GAO.gov/blog .

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6 Major U.S. Supreme Court Hate Speech Cases

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The American Bar Association defines hate speech as "speech that offends, threatens, or insults groups, based on race , color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, or other traits." While Supreme Court justices have acknowledged the offensive nature of such speech in recent cases like  Matal v. Tam (2017) , they have been reluctant to impose broad restrictions on it.

Instead, the Supreme Court has chosen to impose narrowly tailored limits on speech that is regarded as hateful. In  Beauharnais v. Illinois (1942) , Justice Frank Murphy outlined instances where speech may be curtailed, including "lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous and the insulting or 'fighting' words — those which by their very utterances inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." 

Later cases before the high court would deal with the rights of individuals and organizations to express messages or gestures many would consider patently offensive—if not intentionally hateful—to members of a given racial, religious, gender, or other population.

Terminiello v. Chicago (1949)

Arthur Terminiello was a defrocked Catholic priest whose anti-Semitic views, regularly expressed in newspapers and on the radio, gave him a small but vocal following in the 1930s and '40s. In February of 1946, he spoke to a Catholic organization in Chicago. In his remarks, he repeatedly attacked Jews and Communists and liberals, inciting the crowd. Some scuffles broke out between audience members and protesters outside, and Terminiello was arrested under a law banning riotous speech, but the Supreme Court overturned his conviction.

[F]reedom of Speech," Justice William O. Douglas wrote for the 5-4 majority, is "protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to reduce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest ... There is no room under our Constitution for a more restrictive view."

Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969)

No organization has been more aggressively or justifiably pursued on the grounds of hate speech than the Ku Klux Klan , but the arrest of an Ohio Klansman named Clarence Brandenburg on criminal syndicalism charges, based on a KKK speech that recommended overthrowing the government, was overturned.

Writing for the unanimous Court, Justice William Brennan argued that "The constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."

National Socialist Party v. Skokie (1977)

When the National Socialist Party of America, better known as Nazis, was declined a permit to speak in Chicago, the organizers sought a permit from the suburban city of Skokie, where one-sixth of the town's population was made up of families that had survived the Holocaust. County authorities attempted to block the Nazi march in court, citing a city ban on wearing Nazi uniforms and displaying swastikas. 

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower ruling that the Skokie ban was unconstitutional. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, where the justices declined to hear the case, in essence allowing the lower court's ruling to become law. After the verdict, the city of Chicago granted the Nazis three permits to march; the Nazis, in turn, decided to cancel their plans to march in Skokie.

R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992)

In 1990, a St. Paul, Minn., teen burned a makeshift cross on the lawn of an African-American couple. He was subsequently arrested and charged under the city's Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance, which banned symbols that "[arouses] anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender."

After the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld the legality of the ordinance, the plaintiff appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the city had overstepped its bounds with the breadth of the law. In a unanimous ruling written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court held that the ordinance was excessively broad.

Scalia, citing the Terminiello case, wrote that "displays containing abusive invective, no matter how vicious or severe, are permissible unless they are addressed to one of the specified disfavored topics."

Virginia v. Black (2003)

Eleven years after the St. Paul case, the U.S. Supreme Court revisited the issue of cross-burning after three people were arrested separately for violating a similar Virginia ban.

In a 5-4 ruling written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor , the Supreme Court held that while cross-burning may constitute illegal intimidation in some cases, a ban on the public burning of crosses would violate the First Amendment .

"[A] State may choose to prohibit only those forms of intimidation," O'Connor wrote, "that are most likely to inspire fear of bodily harm." As a caveat, the justices noted, such acts can be prosecuted if the intent is proven, something not done in this case.

Snyder v. Phelps (2011)

The Rev. Fred Phelps, the founder of the Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church, made a career out of being reprehensible to many people. Phelps and his followers came to national prominence in 1998 by picketing the funeral of Matthew Shepard, displaying signs the used slurs directed at homosexuals. In the wake of 9/11, church members began demonstrating at military funerals, using similarly incendiary rhetoric.

In 2006, members of the church demonstrated at the funeral of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed in Iraq. Snyder's family sued Westboro and Phelps for intentional infliction of emotional distress, and the case began making its way through the legal system.

In an 8-1 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Westboro's right to picket. While acknowledging that Westboro's "contribution to public discourse may be negligible," Chief Justice John Roberts' ruling rested in existing U.S. hate speech precedent: "Simply put, the church members had the right to be where they were." 

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Hate Speech

Hate speech is a concept that many people find intuitively easy to grasp, while at the same time many others deny it is even a coherent concept. A majority of developed, democratic nations have enacted hate speech legislation—with the contemporary United States being a notable outlier—and so implicitly maintain that it is coherent, and that its conceptual lines can be drawn distinctly enough. Nonetheless, the concept of hate speech does indeed raise many difficult questions: What does the ‘hate’ in hate speech refer to? Can hate speech be directed at dominant groups, or is it by definition targeted at oppressed or marginalized communities? Is hate speech always ‘speech’? What is the harm or harms of hate speech? And, perhaps most challenging of all, what can or should be done to counteract hate speech?

In part because of these complexities, hate speech has spawned a vast and interdisciplinary literature. Legal scholars, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, political theorists, historians, and other academics have each approached the topic with exceeding interest. In this current article, however, we cannot hope to cover how these many disciplines have engaged with the concept of hate speech. Here, we will focus most explicitly on how hate speech has been taken up within philosophy, with particular emphasis on issues such as: how to define hate speech; what are the plausible harms of hate speech; how an account of hate speech might include both overt expressions of hate (e.g., the vitriolic use of slurs) as well as more covert, implicit utterances (e.g., dogwhistles); the relationship between hate speech and silencing; and what might we do to counteract hate speech.

1.1 The Harms of Hate Speech

2. religious hatred and anti-semitism, 3.2 dogwhistles and coded language, 4. pornography, hate speech, and silencing, 5.1 the case for bans, 5.2 objections to bans, and some responses, 5.3 the supported counterspeech alternative, other internet resources, related entries, 1. what is hate speech.

The term ‘hate speech’ is more than a descriptive concept used to identify a specific class of expressions. It also functions as an evaluative term judging its referent negatively and as a candidate for censure. Thus, defining this category carries serious implications. What is it that designates hate speech as a distinctive class of speech? Some claim the term ‘hate speech’ itself is misleading because it wrongly suggests “virulent dislike of a person for any reason” as a defining feature (Gelber 2017, 619). That is not, however, the way in which the term is understood among most legal theorists and philosophers. Perhaps it would be useful to start with some examples.

Bhikhu Parekh (2012) lists the following instances as examples different countries have either punished or sought to punish as hate speech:

• Shouting “[N-words] go home,” making monkey noises, and chanting racist slogans at soccer matches.
• “Islam out of Britain. Protect the British people.”
• “Arabs out of France.”
• “Serve your country, burn down a mosque.”
• “Blacks are inherently inferior, lecherous, predisposed to criminal activities, and should not be allowed to move into respectable areas.”
• “Jews are conspiratorial, devious, treacherous, sadistic, child killers, and subversive; want to take over the country; and should be carefully watched.”
• Distribution by a political party of leaflets addressed to “white fellow citizens” saying that, if it came to power, it would remove all Surinamese, Turks, and other “undesired aliens” from the Netherlands.
• A poster of a woman in a burka with text that reads: “Who knows what they have under their sinister and ugly looking clothes: stolen goods, guns, bombs even?”
• Speech that either denies or trivializes the holocaust or other crimes against humanity.

Robert Post’s four bases for defining hate speech might help us organize the features of Parekh’s list:

In law, we have to define hate speech carefully to designate the forms of the speech that will receive distinctive legal treatment. This is no easy task. Roughly speaking, we can define hate speech in terms of the harms it will cause—physical contingent harms like violence or discrimination; or we can define hate speech in terms of its intrinsic properties—the kinds of words it uses; or we can define hate speech in terms of its connection to principles of dignity; or we can define hate speech in terms of the ideas it conveys. Each of these definitions has advantages and disadvantages. Each intersects with the first amendment theory in a different way. In the end, any definition that we adopt must be justified on the ground that it will achieve the results we wish to achieve. (Herz and Molnar 2012, 31)

The four definitional bases are in terms of: (1) harm, (2) content, (3) intrinsic properties, i.e., the type of words used, and (4) dignity. One could also attempt a hybrid definition by combining the ways mentioned. But, as is made clear in Post’s remarks, definitions of this sort are relative to the interests of the definer; “We must evaluate the status of ‘hate speech’ so defined in order to determine whether it achieves what we wish to accomplish and whether the harms of the definition will outweigh its advantages” (Herz and Molnar 2012, 31). The upshot is a rejection of a univocal definition that captures “the essence” of hate speech as a phenomenon.

It is important to note that many definitions of hate speech will not fall squarely within the categories Post outlines. For instance, the UN’s International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination identifies hate speech both in terms of its content and its harmful consequences. Most definitions tend to characterize hate speech in multiple ways.

Harm-based definitions conceive of hate speech in terms of the harms to which targets are subjected. Things like discrimination or linguistic violence are candidates, though some (Gelber, 2017) argue that hate speech can harm one’s ability to participate in democratic deliberation. Susan Brison (1998a) offers a disjunctive definition that centers on a kind of abuse to targets. She defines hate speech as “speech that vilifies individuals or groups on the basis of such characteristics as race, sex, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation, which (1) constitutes face-to-face vilification, (2) creates a hostile or intimidating environment, or (3) is a kind of group libel” (313). ‘Harm’ as used by Brison refers to what Joel Feinberg describes “as a wrongful setback to (or invasion of) someone’s interests” (Brison, 1998b, 42).

Perhaps an immediate reaction to disjunctive definitions of the sort Brison offers is skepticism about the definitiveness of the purported list. When we go to test the definition’s application, we invariably find contestable inclusions and exclusions. Recall the examples from Parekh at the start of this section. Something like “Arabs out of France” might be included as an instance of hate speech on Brison’s account on the grounds that it creates a hostile or intimidating environment. Should statements that communicate a similar message in a less abrasive manner also be included? Suppose “Only French Nationals should occupy France” is roughly equivalent content-wise to “Arabs out of France.” If the former is indeed a less abrasive presentation though communicating the same content as the latter, what are we to make of its status? Many will find the statement odious; many will not. And since it is certainly not a face-to-face vilification or form of group libel, classifying it as hate speech will depend on how likely it is to create an intimidating or hostile environment.

The previous objection might entice one to opt for a content-based view. Content-based views define hate speech as that which “expresses, encourages, stirs up, or incites hatred against a group of individuals distinguished by a particular feature or set of features such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, and sexual orientation” (Parekh, 2012, 40). This version makes it easier to conceive of semantically equivalent statements that differ in manner of presentation as instances of hate speech.

Content-based accounts face the challenge of determining which contents meet this standard. If the content that distinguishes hate speech from other types of speech must express, encourage, or incite hatred towards groups or individuals based on certain features, then the proponent of this view will need an account of expression. Is the speech in view that which signals the presence of a particular mental state in the speaker (i.e., hate) or that which is likely to prime feelings of animosity in a specific audience?

Another issue facing content-based approaches concerns distinguishing between speech that “respects ‘the decencies of controversy’” and that “which is outrageous and therefore hate inducing” (Post, 2009, 128). The ability to express a wide range of views, even contentious ones, is a cherished aspect of democratic societies. Failure to observe this distinction would broaden the scope of what counts as hate speech perhaps too much. In order to make this distinction, one could follow Post in tying it to “ambient social norms” that distinguish outrageous and respectful behavior. One challenge though is in determining the content of those social norms. For instance, a minority group whose opinions have little impact on the makeup of norms are unjustifiably excluded from influencing the shape of their society’s civility norms.

Definitions of hate speech based on intrinsic properties generally refer to those that emphasize the type of the speech uttered. What is at issue is the use of speech widely known to instigate offense or insult among a majority of society. Explicitly derogatory expressions like slurs are paradigmatic examples of this type of view. In general, the type of speech identified on this account is inherently derogatory, discriminatory, or vilifying.

Though attractive at first glance, classifying hate speech along these lines might prove to fall short in two ways. First, defining hate speech in this way might be too constricting. Some of the examples in our initial list would seem not to count as hate speech since they arguably lack the intrinsic features. “Arabs out of France,” for example, does not contain explicitly slurring terms. And second, this definition might prove too expansive. In cases where slurs are reappropriated by members of the target group or where artists incorporate them into a creative work, it would appear odd to count these as instances of hate speech. The concern is tied specifically to locating the issue in the terms themselves, as opposed to the use to which the terms are put.

Perhaps a final challenge to intrinsic property views can be derived from the work of Judith Butler (1997). On Butler’s account, hate speech is a kind of performative that is “always delivered twice-removed, that is, through a theory of the speech act that has its own performative power” (96). More specifically, “[w]hat hate speech does … is to constitute the subject in a subordinate position” (19). Butler locates the trouble with hate speech in its perlocutionary effects, a concept introduced by J.L. Austin that refers to the effects a speech act can have on its audience. An example of a perlocutionary effect is feeling amused at a joke or frightened from the telling of a ghost story. Unlike with intrinsic property definitions, Butler shifts focus to the nature of the acts performed rather than the terms in use. (For a critical look at Butler’s account, see Schwartzman (2002).)

Lastly, dignity-based conceptions focus primarily on the role of harms to the dignity of targets of hate speech. For instance, both Steven Heyman (2008) and Jeremy Waldron (2014) appeal to dignity in their accounts. Broadly speaking, hate speech on this kind of conception amounts to speech that undermines its target’s “basic social standing, the basis of [their] recognition as social equals and as bearers of human rights and constitutional entitlements” (Waldron, 2014, 59). This conception of hate speech will also include characterizations in terms of group defamation or group libel. Section 130 of Germany’s penal code is an example of legislation that incorporates a dignity-based conception of hate speech, prohibiting “attacks on human dignity by insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming part of the population” (see Waldron, 2014, 8).

Worries about application follow dignity-based conceptions as well. Firstly, there may be questions about how we, in particular instances, are to distinguish between false statements about a group as a whole and those about a particular member of a group (Brown, 2017a). Presumably, only the former is consistent with an understanding of hate speech as a group-based phenomenon. Secondly, an implication of the view appears to be that it expands the range of things that would count as hate speech. Any speech that calls into question the basic standing of certain groups falls under this notion, which may make it more difficult to distinguish between contentious political speech and hate speech.

Perhaps a lesson to draw from the profusion of disjunctive definitions is a general skepticism about a definitive description of hate speech. We might concur with Alexander Brown that ‘hate speech’ is an equivocal term denoting a family of meanings (Brown 2017b, 562). According to Brown, ‘hate speech’ isn’t just a term with contested meanings, but rather, it is “systematically ambiguous; which is to say, it carries a multiplicity of different meanings” (2017b, 564). Because the expression is what is typically referred to as an essentially contested term, the hunt for a univocal or universal definition is futile.

The harms that have been attributed to hate speech comprise a long and varied list, ranging from the immediate psychological harms experienced in the moment by the person(s) targeted by an instance of hate speech, to much more long-term impacts that affect not only those targeted but whole communities, and even the strength of an entire nation.

A distinction between “assaultive hate speech” and “propagandistic hate speech” is helpful when discussing these harms (Langton 2012; 2018a; see also Gelber and McNamara (2016) who discuss “face-to-face encounters” and “incidences of general circulation”). Hate speech yelled at an individual on the street, or from a passing car, is a face-to-face encounter, and an assaultive speech act. This is, moreover, most often inter-group hate speech, where the speaker(s) are, for example, white, and the targets are non-white. On the other hand, propagandistic hate speech is often intra-group speech, spoken by members of one group to fellow ingroup members (e.g., a white person to other white people). The newsletter of the KKK, therefore, would fit into this category.

While this distinction is helpful to keep in mind, it should also not be overstated. Summarizing the results of their study which surveyed the experiences of the victims of hate speech, Katharine Gelber and Luke McNamara conclude that “the distinction between face-to-face encounters and general circulation hate speech is not always clear in the everyday experiences of racism endured by targets” (2016, 326). Any one instance of hate speech might fall into both categories. For example, it may occur in its first instance as an assaultive speech act, and then reports of the event may then take on a propagandistic aspect, as it is spread among the community. Similarly, even if an instance of hate speech is intended as a piece of propaganda, it may, when encountered by a member of the community it disparages, be akin to assaultive speech.

Still, this distinction helps reveal the wide range of the types of speech acts that are plausibly harmful, and also offers insight into how they harm. For example, Waldron (2014) focuses mainly on hate speech in its propagandistic mode, which he argues undermines the public assurance of equal social standing that members of non-dominant communities are entitled to—in his terms, their assurance of dignity. On this view, public hate speech—e.g., flyers that read ‘Muslims Out!’—is “an environmental threat to social peace, a sort of slow-acting poison, accumulating here and there, word by word” (2014, 4). Its harm is therefore one that attacks the broader society, and not just individuals targeted by hate speech.

On the other hand, the essays in the classic Words that Wound tend to focus more on what its authors term “assaultive speech,” that is, “words that are used as weapons to ambush, terrorize, wound, humiliate, and degrade” (Matsuda et al. 1993, 1). This leads them to focus more on hate speech’s ability to produce “direct, immediate, and substantial injury” (Lawrence, 1993, 57), such as “immediate mental or emotional distress” (Delgado, 1993, 93–94). On this approach, the most evident harms of hate speech are psychological. These psychological injuries scale up, however, when hate speech is endemic, and so result in the types of community or social harms highlighted by authors like Waldron. For this reason, the distinction between these approaches may be thought of as more a matter of emphasis.

This relationship between individual harms and broader social harms is also evident once we acknowledge the long-term effects of hate speech on victims, in addition to its more immediate impacts (Delgado and Stefancic, 2004, 14). Victims of hate speech may first experience “psychological symptoms and emotional distress” like heightened stress and fear in the immediate aftermath of assaultive hate speech, but they may also experience far-ranging consequences if they “modify their behavior and demeanor” to avoid receiving further hate messages, limiting their ability to participate fully in society (Matsuda, 1993, 24). Gelber and McNamara’s interview subjects confirm this complex web of effects that hate speech may cause, highlighting how “harms are often enduring and not ephemeral” (2016, 336). In this way, hate speech is both an immediate attack on one’s health and dignity, along with a threat to their community’s position in society. The cumulative effect of hate speech events, therefore, is a collection of harms located both in individuals and communities, which blurs the distinction between assaultive and propagandistic hate speech events.

Constitutive and Consequential Harms

Another distinction which is similarly helpful, but also fraught, is the distinction between constitutive and consequential harms—that is, harms that occur in the saying of some utterance of hate speech, and those that are its downstream results (see Maitra and McGowan, 2012, 6). This distinction draws on the speech act theory of J.L. Austin (1962) and has served an important role in the examination of hate speech from feminist philosophers of language (see, e.g., Langton, 1993; 2012; Maitra and McGowan, 2012; Maitra, 2012; McGowan, 2004; 2009; 2012; 2019; and others). Constitutive harms are those that correspond to what Austin called the illocutionary act , the act performed in saying X , while consequential harms correspond to perlocutionary effects , the results brought about by saying X . Most (though not all) of the harms surveyed above comprise consequential harms, as items such as psychological injury, feelings of fear, and societal withdrawal all most naturally fall into the perlocutionary effects category.

However, philosophers have also drawn attention to how hate speech can injure in a different way by indirectly affecting the positions of the social groups targeted by hate in a social hierarchy. That is, “by fixing facts about the distribution of social power, including facts about who has this power, and who lacks it” hate speech harms in a way not captured in the above account of individual injuries and their cumulative effects (Maitra and McGowan, 2012, 7). This is an immediate harm that occurs in the saying of the speech act, which (given appropriate circumstances and uptake) produces a shift in the normative landscape. It is in this way that an instance of hate speech may not only cause the injuries surveyed above but may also, for example, rank Indigenous Peoples as inferior, legitimate discriminatory behavior towards them (perhaps via incitement), or potentially silence them. (We return to the notion of silencing as an illocutionary harm of hate speech in Section 4 below.)

One reason to direct our attention towards the constitutive harms of hate speech is its potential to productively advance the debate over the legitimacy of potential restrictions. Mary Kate McGowan (2009) has made this case most explicitly. “Rather than focus on what a certain category of speech causes,” she writes, we ought to be “interested in what such speech actually does, in and of itself” (2009, 389–90). The idea here is that by focusing only on the harms caused by hate speech, we are inevitably drawn into a debate about balancing the costs and benefits of permitting or regulating speech, which often leads to an impasse. Alternatively, turning our attention to the acts hate speech constitutes can reveal features that help us avoid question of balancing harms, and opens the door to regulation. On this approach, some instances of hate speech can be seen to constitute acts of (verbal) discrimination, and should be considered analogous to other acts of discrimination—like posting a ‘Whites Only’ sign up at a hotel—that US law recognizes as illegal. As a speech act, hate speech can enact discriminatory rules in much the same way the physical sign does, and so ought to similarly be restricted (McGowan, 2012). This argument proceeds by a development of Austin’s notion of “exercitives,” which are speech acts that enact rules in a given domain, and is one example of the fruitful use of speech act theory to the philosophy of hate speech.

At the same time, however, it’s worth acknowledging that the distinction that this analysis relies on—between illocutionary acts and perlocutionary effects—is one that some argue is untenable (for one example, see Kukla, 2014). As illocutionary acts are indeterminate or incomplete without some form of audience uptake, it is difficult to articulate precisely how we ought to distinguish a speech act’s effects from its inherent qualities. Furthermore, the testimonials of victims of hate speech “suggests that there is a close and complex relationship between constitutive and consequential harms, and the harms are experienced cumulatively” (Gelber and McNamara 2016, 336–37). As such, any attempt to draw too neat of a distinction between these two types of harm risks misrepresenting victims’ experiences, and might tie the attempt to restrict hate speech unhelpfully to a philosophically contested distinction.

As a result, some caution must be applied when marking too stark of a contrast between these harms. Much like the distinction between assaultive and propagandistic hate speech, then, we can consider the distinction between consequential and constitutive harms to be analytically helpful in exploring the variety of harms attributable to hate speech, while recognizing that it is at the same time an abstraction from the on-the-ground realities of hate speech.

Religious belief is sometimes the source of putative cases of hate speech, and sometimes its target. In both cases, assessing the conceptual addition of religion to hate speech is a difficult task. Speech rooted in religious conviction is sometimes subjected to scrutiny to determine whether instances should count as hate speech or not. For instance, the Westboro Baptist Church’s demonstrations often make use of slurs and other explicitly defamatory language. This is an extreme case, which can be accommodated by extant hate speech legislation. Other cases, however, involve religious leaders making contentious statements—for instance, questioning the legitimacy or recognition of LGBT+ individuals, while claiming these are statements of love, not hate. Questions about religious speech of this sort concern whether it is simply contentious speech liberal democratic societies must tolerate or speech that runs afoul of deeply held norms that ought to be proscribed.

Some wonder whether religious sensibilities should be afforded special protection from offense. Amnon Reichman (2009), for instance, notes that some Israeli scholars have argued that providing special protection for religious beliefs is a good idea “so as not to push [religious] believers into having to choose between the authority of the state and the authority of their religion (namely, the authority of God)” (338). This relies on an assumption that religion is an institutionalized normative regime in competition with a legal regime where clashes over religious beliefs threaten the social fabric of society. It is in turn prudent to mitigate such clashes in order to avoid situations of unrest like the incidents involving comedic cartoons of Mohammed in the Dutch newspaper Jyllands-Posten and the French publication Charlie Hebdo .

It is not clear, however, that religious beliefs warrant special protection over other forms of belief that may be just as strongly held. Clashes over deeply held political beliefs can pose a similar threat to the social fabric as religious beliefs. Thus, there is no reason to think the same concern should not apply quite broadly. Providing certain types of speech special protection on these grounds would threaten to introduce quite repressive legislation on speech in general.

Holocaust denial, denial of the Armenian Genocide, and the denial of other crimes against humanity have also been the subject of special legislation, especially in Europe. As Michael Whine (2009) notes, 16 European states, as well as Israel, have criminalized Holocaust denial (543). In these contexts, at least one rationale for banning speech that denies or trivializes the Holocaust concerns its role in inciting hatred (Altman, 2012). One possible justification for such legislation rests on claims about what denial speech is. According to Martin Imbleau (2011), denial speech poses as an historical endeavor but is really propaganda. The denier’s aim is to “eradicate the awareness of the truth that prevents the resurgence of past criminal ideologies” (2011, 238). But if this is the rationale, it potentially opens up justifications for much broader application since similar claims might be made of other forms of propaganda. (For a general overview on Holocaust denial, see Robert Wistrich (2012) and Behrens et. al (2017).)

3. Slurs, Code Words, and Dogwhistles

As Parekh, Brison, and others have noted, hate speech can be expressed both explicitly and subtly. We can identify a few different expression-types that map onto the explicit and subtle instances, i.e., slurs , code words , and dogwhistles . The subtler forms may fall outside the scope of narrower conceptions of hate speech.

Perhaps the type of expression most often cited as the paradigm case of hate speech is slurs. Slurs are typically characterized as a type of insult that targets race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ability, politics, immigrant status, geographic region, and other categories. Much of the literature on slurs focuses primarily on the semantic and pragmatic properties of this linguistic class, with the expectation that such analyses also provide an account of how they in fact derogate their targets. There are, of course, competing accounts, some of which may be better suited than others for the purposes of legal and ordinary concepts of hate speech.

Before delving into competing accounts, it is good to put a working definition of ‘slur’ on the table. Typically, slurs are understood as conventionalized ways of demeaning and derogating individuals or groups of individuals and are contrasted with a co-referring neutral counterpart (Jeshion, 2013a; 2013b; Camp, 2013; Cepollaro, 2015). For instance, the following differ in regard to offense but are otherwise taken to make similar claims,

For many, (3.1) is regarded as offensive whereas (3.2) is simply a descriptive statement. The expression ‘cracker’ in (3.1) is a slur, while ‘white people’ in (3.2) is its purported neutral counterpart.

Though there seems to be widespread consensus that slurs have or could have neutral counterparts, not everyone shares this sentiment. Lauren Ashwell (2016), for example, denies that neutral counterparts (which she refers to as ‘neutral correlates’) play an essential role in identifying slurs. Ashwell claims that gendered slurs like ‘bitch,’ ‘slut,’ and ‘sissy’ derogate in ways similar to racial and ethnic slurs like ‘n***er,’ ‘k*ke,’ ‘cracker,’ and ‘sp*c,’ yet lack neutral counterparts. As a result, a definition need not include reference to neutral counterparts. In fact, making neutral counterparts central to defining slurs renders one incapable of accounting for terms that function similarly to slurs yet lack this purportedly central feature.

Ashwell makes a compelling case for the claim that gendered slurs lack neutral counterparts. Her larger claim that counterparts’ inessentiality for defining slurs has implications for pragmatic and semantic accounts that are also worth taking seriously. According to Ashwell, both sorts of accounts depend on the existence of neutral counterparts in their explanations of slurs.

Existing pragmatic accounts of slurs’ derogating capabilities are in particular trouble, for they tend to hold that a slur’s semantic contribution to a sentence is identical to the contribution that its neutral correlate would have had if it were used instead. This kind of account also leaves open the possibility that the slur could be sanitized—cleansed of its derogatory aspect—without semantic meaning change. … Existing semantic accounts, however, are not much better off—they are also structured to require the existence of a neutral correlate. (2016, 229)

For Ashwell, pragmatic and semantic accounts of slurs structurally require neutral counterparts, and so simply cannot jettison them. One response proponents of these kinds of accounts could give is that the gendered insults Ashwell highlights might exhibit properties that call their status as slurs into question. It could be open to these theorists to suggest that the terms they have identified as a matter of fact do carry neutral counterparts, that this is part of what distinguishes them as a class. And while the expressions Ashwell identifies seem to pattern in some ways like slurs, they also exhibit features that make them dissimilar. Thus, there is no need to wedge all insulting expressions into one class; there is room to expand our classifications in a way that preserves clarity.

Another important issue about slurs is their power to offend. Part of what makes them prime candidates for paradigmatic instances of hate speech is a widespread belief in their offensive potency. Indeed, much of the literature on slurs simply assumes they are offensive without offering much (if any) defense of that claim. It is not always clear whether the reader is supposed to understand offense as the provocation of a disliked mental state or as the violation of widely-accepted public norms.

Renée Bolinger (2017) discusses three ways to understand the claim that slurs are offensive:

• An audience actually took offense at a slurring utterance;
• The utterance warranted offense;
• Whether or not offense was warranted, it was rational for the audience to take offense.

The sense of ‘offense’ in (1) tracks how audiences actually respond at the moment of utterance. This could not be the sense in which offense is understood for at least two reasons. First, doing so would make the claim ‘slurs are offensive’ too strong. Since we would be tracking cases of actual offense, we would be focusing on particular uses of slurs, explaining what makes those utterances offensive rather than explicating the offensiveness of a linguistic class. As a result, the most natural interpretation of the claim would be that slurring utterances are invariably offensive, i.e., the use of slurs always provokes disliked mental states.

This, of course, raises a couple of questions. To begin with, does the strong claim deny the existence of non-offensive slur uses? Given things like linguistic reappropriation, some instances of indirect reports, and even instances of direct reports—especially by members of the slur’s targeted group—in which it is possible to utter slurs without provoking a disliked mental state in the speaker’s audience, the claim is obviously false. Further, there are also questions about who constitutes the audience . Is the relevant audience the one intended by the speaker? Everyone who witnesses the utterance? Only those who are present in the utterance situation? Because the claim must now be understood to be about particular slur utterances rather than the linguistic type, the claim must reflect the diversity of reactions provoked by different tokenings of slurs. A second reason is related to the questions about the audience: does everyone in the audience have to be offended, or is it sufficient if one, some, or a few are? What is the scope of the claim with respect to offended reactions? The answers to these questions will likely render the strong version of the claim untenable and weaker versions suspect. Thus, it is probably not the sense of ‘offense’ one should start with.

The sense expressed in (2) concerns moral justification for taking offense. Bolinger identifies three grounds for warranted offense at an utterance: intention, inappropriateness, and associations. A speaker may intend to offend, often doing so with expressions that are taboo, and thus considered inappropriate. Vulgar expletives like ‘fuck,’ ‘dick,’ or ‘shithead’ are typically viewed as inappropriate terms, at least in certain “polite” settings. Some expressions, like slurs, are not only inappropriate, but also carry associated attitudes and/or practices that amplify their offense. The swastika and confederate flag, for example, are both deeply associated with oppressive and genocidal practices towards Jewish people and African Americans, respectively.

This sense of offense still concerns one’s response to something, though it is not simply about how one reacts but one’s warrant to do so: “An utterance may warrant, but fail to actually generate offense merely because either there is no hearer, or the hearer fails to find the utterance offensive (perhaps because she shares the offensive attitude, fails to take it seriously, or misinterprets the utterance)” (Bolinger, 2017, 441). Bolinger notes that the associational offense category in particular is the one that is often the subject of hate crime legislation (ibid., 442). Such terms are often backed by formal social institutions, “adequately visible practices,” or a combination of both.

In (3), Bolinger uses ‘rational’ or ‘license’ to refer to the epistemic justification an audience has in taking offense at a slurring utterance. Here a gap opens up between what an audience member may be warranted in taking offense at as opposed to when it may be rational to do so. For instance, if a non-native speaker used a slur to refer to someone and we come to find out they were ignorant of the expression’s status as a slur, the target would still have been rational to take offense even if unwarranted. Undoubtedly, any of the three senses discussed may factor into an explanation of a given slur’s offense. However, theories of slurs are more appropriately aimed at capturing warranted and rational offense.

Consider again the following pair of statements:

The most straightforward explanation of the difference between (3.1) and (3.2) is that ‘cracker’ differs in some semantic respect from ‘white people’. Two of the most well-known versions of this approach are from Chris Hom (2008) and Elisabeth Camp (2013). On Hom’s account, ‘cracker’ as opposed to ‘white people,’ contains derogatory content. Slurs’ derogatory content is determined by the social institutions that undergird them, which consists of two components: an ideology and a set of practices . Hom defines an ideology as “a set of (usually) negative beliefs about a particular group of people” (431). As for the set of practices, these are racist practices that “can range from impolite social treatment to genocide” (ibid.). The two components combine to produce slurs’ semantic content, which contains a normative claim about the way individuals ought to be treated, because of possessing certain characteristics in virtue of being a member of an identifiable social group. (For alternative accounts of the relationship between slurs and ideology, see Kukla (2018) and Swanson (2015, Other Internet Resources).)

The pair of sentences in the example used here is illustrative of an observation many will have noticed when considering different examples. The slur in (3.1) is typically experienced as less offensive than ones that target members of marginalized groups. Language users recognize variation in offensive potency among slurs, some being more offensive than others. Hom refers to this as derogatory variation . Difference in the virulence of those backing racist institutions explains variation in offense on Hom’s account. Thus, ‘cracker’ is less offensive than slurs like ‘n***er,’ ‘sp*c,’ and ‘f*g’ because the racist and homophobic institutions backing them are much more virulent. (One might also wonder if there is any racist institution backing slurs for members of dominant groups at all.)

One objection raised against Hom’s view is that the semantic content he proposes of slurs is overwrought (Jeshion, 2013b). Robin Jeshion argues that Hom’s view “attributes highly specific sets of ideologies and modes of treating the group, yet it is doubtful that anything so semantically rich and well defined is semantically encoded in the slur” (318). That is, it is doubtful the racist means anything this racialized. Jeshion denies that slurs express anything as robust as Hom claims.

Camp offers an alternative semantic account in which slurs bear a close relationship to a perspective , which are “open-ended ways of thinking, feeling, and more generally engaging with the world and certain parts thereof” (2013, 335–336). According to Camp, a speaker’s slur use “signals a commitment to an overarching perspective on the targeted group as a whole” (ibid., 337). The perspective is a negative one that highlights certain characteristics or properties specifically associated with particular groups, ones that are presumed to warrant certain affective and evaluative responses.

What makes slurring perspectives a semantic feature for Camp is that they do not “merely signal … allegiance to a certain perspective,” but do so “in an overt and nondefeasible way, precisely in virtue of employing that expression” (ibid., 340). The use of a slur inserts a willful and noncancelable way of thinking about the target into a conversation. This is codified in the expression itself, and not something audiences “figure out” through the use of pragmatic mechanisms. This appears to be bolstered by the fact that one typically cannot erase a slur’s derogation by following up with a statement intending to do so, e.g.,

The tension of the contrast is one an audience might generally think finds its source in the meaning of the slur itself, rather than from features that emerge from the way language is used in a particular context. Further, as we saw in Jeshion’s objection to Hom’s view, the information slurs manage to convey isn’t very specific. This point is consistent with the open-ended nature of the perspectives Camp associates with slurs.

Though Camp’s account represents a marked improvement, critics still see shortcomings they believe should give us pause. Geoff Nunberg (2018), for instance, argues that Camp’s characterization of perspectives is too vague to capture the more specific colorings of slurs for specific groups: “Whatever distinguishes redskin from injun or nigger from coon , it’s more precise and richer than simply a disposition to think about the referents in certain ways” (Nunberg, 2018, 260–261). According to Nunberg, what is central for how slurs work is not the perspective the user employs to think about their target, but the allegiance it signals to a group or community disposed to think negatively of the target.

To take an obvious case, when you call a woman a shiksa you’re not just allying yourself with a disposition to think about gentile women in certain ways, but with the people who have that disposition. That group affiliation is primary and prior to the perspective it evokes: you can use shiksa appropriately without having any specific views of gentile women at all, but not without identifying with Jews. (ibid., 261)

For some theorists, the accounts offered by Hom and Camp leave out what they regard as an important aspect of slurring, namely, the role attitudinal expression plays in their derogatory power. These views agree that the difference between slurs and their purported counterparts is located in the realm of semantics; the previous accounts just leave out an important aspect. Jeshion (2013a) identifies three components of slurs’ semantics: (i) a truth-conditional component, (ii) an expressivist component, and (iii) an identifying component. The truth-conditional component of slurs corresponds to the same group referenced by its purported neutral counterpart. The expressivist component captures slurs’ ability to express contempt towards members of socially relevant groups in virtue of their group membership. Finally, the identifying component ascribes a property to the group that is seen as central to its identity. Mark Richard (2010) also proposes a view in which negative attitudes are included in the explanation of what slurs express. Jeshion and Richard’s accounts are typically referred to as expressivist views.

One issue expressivist views have been thought to have trouble with is derogatory variation . Derogatory variation refers to the sociolinguistic datum that slurs vary in their offensive potency. If we represent degrees of offense on a scale, slurs like ‘n***er’ and ‘k*ke’ are higher up on the scale than slurs like ‘cracker’ and ‘wop.’ Expressivist views have typically attributed one sort of attitude to slurs— contempt —which seems inadequate to capture the complexity of their offense profiles. For instance, consider co-referring slurs that vary in offense. Expressivist accounts appear to lack the resources to account for this variation. Thus, expressivism fails as an account of slurs for this reason.

Jeshion (2013a) attempts to answer this objection by arguing that her expressivist view “is only incompatible with versions of derogatory variation that stipulate that the variation derives from the semantics” (243). Jeshion maintains that focusing on slurring terms rather than particular utterances of those terms causes us to reflect on various factors at play that contribute to their power to offend. In effect, such focusing obscures the various factors brought to bear on judgments of offensiveness. Thus, Jeshion claims we ought to think our intuitive judgments about varying offense support the following thesis:

Derogatory Variation-Utterance : Utterances of different slurring terms engender different degrees of intensity of offensiveness. (2013a, 244)

Jeshion argues that this thesis is compatible with her account because weaponized uses of slurs are offensive for several reasons: semantic, pragmatic, sociocultural, and historical. As a result, there should be no expectation that a semantic view like hers need explain derogatory variation semantically.

Inferentialism describes slurs in terms of the kinds of inferences they license. Proponents of this kind of view include Robert Brandom (1994), Michael Dummett (1993), Lynne Tirrell (1999) and Daniel Whiting (2008). Tirrell, for instance, remarks that the “meaning of a word or expression is a matter of its various actual and possible sentential roles” (1999, 46). In characterizing the meaning of the now-outdated slur ‘boche,’ Dummett remarks,

The condition for applying the term to someone is that he is of German nationality; the consequences of its application are that he is barbarous and more prone to cruelty than other Europeans. We should envisage the connections in both directions as sufficiently tight as to be involved in the very meaning of the word: neither could be severed without altering its meaning. (1993, 454)

On Dummett’s account, to know the meaning of ‘boche’ is to make the inference from the referent being German to his being barbarous and more prone to cruelty than other Europeans.

Inferentialism also has its challenges. Timothy Williamson (2009), for example, opposes inferentialism by charging that it has difficulty explaining how non-bigots, who are not disposed to draw negative inferences, still understand their use. “We find racist and xenophobic abuse offensive because we understand it, not because we fail to do so” (257). We should note the inferentialist is not without resources to respond to Williamson’s charge. For example, Brandom’s (1994) inferentialism determines understanding in terms of grasping the broad network of inferential connections in which an expression is situated. An important implication is thought to be that different speakers will understand the expression similarly while associating it with different inferential roles, escaping Williamson’s charge that one must be disposed to draw slurring inferences to understand the term (see Steinberger and Murzi, 2017). However, Brandom’s view is itself controversial (For further objections to inferentialism, see Anderson and Lepore (2013b); Hornsby (2001).)

The last view we mention here is a stark alternative to the previous accounts, opting for a socioculturally-driven explanation. According to Luvell Anderson and Ernie Lepore, slurs are prohibited expressions whose tokenings provoke offense from those who value and respect their prohibitions: “What’s clear is that no matter what its history, no matter what it means or communicates, no matter who introduces it, regardless of its past associations, once relevant individuals declare a word a slur, it becomes one ” (2013a, 39). The prohibition is meant to apply not only to uses but mentions of expressions as well, including direct and indirect reports.

One objection raised against prohibitionism comes from Camp (2018). Camp asserts that though the view is simple and powerful, “it threatens to work too well” by failing to account for some complexities. In particular, Camp claims “slur’s truth-assessibility and projective behavior are more variable than [prohibitionism] predicts” (2018, 33). She believes, for instance, that it is sometimes easy to “quarantine” a slur’s offensiveness within a report like,

John thinks that the s**cs will have taken over the whole neighborhood in another couple years. But of course, I think it’s great that we’re developing such a vibrant Latino community.

The offense of the slur in this statement is judged to be relativized to John rather than the person reporting it.

Which view of slurs one adopts has implications for how one conceives of their harm. For instance, adopting a content-based view of slurs may encourage one to adopt a content-based definition of hate speech, which suggests that the harm produced is in the message being communicated. Adopting an expressivist view, on the other hand, could lead one to lean more towards an intrinsic property account. (For further alternative accounts to the ones mentioned in this section, see Popa-Wyatt & Wyatt (2017), Bach (2018), Croom (2011), Kirk-Giannini (2019), and Neufeld (2019).)

In addition to slurs, which are explicitly derogatory, researchers have also focused on more implicit forms of derogatory communication. Tali Mendelberg (2001), Ian Haney Lopez (2015), Jennifer Saul (2018) and Justin Khoo (2017) detail the use of racially coded language— dogwhistles— to access existing racial resentment while making surreptitious racial appeals. Saul provides a useful set of distinctions for thinking about dogwhistles: they can be explicit or implicit , and further, intentional or unintentional . Saul uses the work of linguist Kimberly Witten to define an overt intentional dogwhistle as,

a speech act designed, with intent, to allow two plausible interpretations, with one interpretation being a private, coded message targeted for a subset of the general audience, and concealed in such a way that this general audience is unaware of the existence of the second, coded interpretation. (2018, 362)

Saul illustrates this kind of dogwhistle with an example from George W. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech:

The phrase ‘wonder-working power’ is meant as an overt intentional dogwhistle for Evangelical Christians. According to Saul, there are two possible messages Evangelicals can take away from Bush’s utterance. The first message is simply a translation:

Yes there’s power, the power of Christ, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people. (362)

The second message is that Bush identifies with them, that he speaks their language. Saul thinks both are instances of overt intentional dogwhistles.

A covert dogwhistle, according to Saul, is “a dogwhistle that people fail to consciously recognize” (2018, 365). She is particularly interested in how covert intentional dogwhistles work in tandem with what psychologists have referred to as racial resentment , a belief system that is measured by the degree to which participants agree to the following four claims:

• Blacks no longer face much discrimination;
• Their disadvantage mainly reflects their poor work ethic;
• They are demanding too much too fast;
• They have gotten more than they deserve. (2018, 364 quoting Tesler & Sears 2010, 18)

According to Mendelberg, racial resentment remains widespread among white Americans even though explicitly racist appeals have come to be viewed as outside the bounds of acceptable political speech. (At least, that seemed to be the case up until the 2016 presidential election cycle.) White voters, on this model, tend to shy away from accepting explicitly racist proposals because they do not want to think of themselves as racist. The existence of racial resentment allows for the skilled intentional use of utterances that are unrelated to race on the surface yet access negative racial attitudes in a targeted audience, nudging them towards a particular course of action--e.g., voting for a preferred candidate.

An example of a covert intentional dogwhistle is the infamous Willie Horton ad used by the George H. W. Bush campaign in 1988. The ad targeted a prison furlough program in place during Michael Dukakis’s term as governor of Massachusetts. It presented a picture of Horton, an African American man, who while out on furlough raped a white woman and stabbed her husband. Though there was no explicit mention of race, it was clear to many that the ad drew on racial tropes about Blackness and criminality to stoke fear in white voters. In support of the interpretation that this was a covert dogwhistle, Saul notes that once the specter of race was raised about the ad, its effectiveness started to wane (2018, 366). The implication is that while the explicit appeal to racial resentment was a losing strategy, implicit appeal in the form of covert dogwhistles could be put to powerful use.

The unintentional dogwhistle is defined as an “unwitting use of words and/or images that, used intentionally, constitute an intentional dogwhistle, where this use has the same effect as an intentional dogwhistle” (2018, 368). Dogwhistles of this sort are passed on by unwitting others while achieving similar effects of the original intentional one. A special case of unintentional dogwhistles, what Saul calls amplifier dogwhistles , occurred when reporters and TV producers played the Willie Horton ad repeatedly. Presumably, the repeated presentations continued to make the associations between Blackness and criminality and, thus, continued to stoke fear and racial anxiety in significant portions of the white viewing public. For Saul, dogwhistles are therefore best understood functionally, and the difference in speaker-intentions between intentional and unintentional dogwhistles matters only insofar as we define them—their effects, in other words, are often identical.

The use of implicit means like dogwhistling—in both its covert and overt forms—can make the conceptualization and detection of hate speech more difficult. Undoubtedly, this poses a challenge for defining hate speech since dogwhistles are often designed to be innocuous. But what is it that explains the effects often attributed to dogwhistles? That is, how is it possible for language to work in this way?

Perhaps there is good reason to think something about dogwhistles’ meaning explains their effects. Consider, first, an ambiguity thesis that states code words have at least two meanings, a racial and a non-racial meaning. The expression ‘inner city’ in

purportedly expresses two meanings: (i) densely populated, high crime, urban areas, or (ii) poor African American (Khoo, 2017, 40). An ambiguous expression can be used in an utterance to produce a statement that leaves undetermined which interpretation is intended by the speaker.

One worry, however, is that terms like ‘inner city’ are not actually ambiguous. Khoo argues these terms do not behave like genuinely ambiguous expressions. Compare the following two sentences,

A reading of (3.6) is supposed to sound coherent given that ‘funny’ can mean ‘humorous’ or ‘strange’ whereas (3.7) is supposed to sound odd, even contradictory. If ‘inner-city’ were genuinely ambiguous in the way described above, we should be able to use it to mean ‘African American’ and get a coherent reading of (3.7).

A second view posits two dimensions of meaning for code words, at-issue and not-at-issue content. At-issue content is the main point of a speaker’s utterance, the directly asserted content that is foregrounded whereas not-at-issue content is projective , meaning it is able to survive embedding under operators like negation and modals (Tonhauser, 2012). Consider,

The at-issue content of (3.8) is represented by (a) and the not-at-issue by (b):

• John does not smoke.
• John used to smoke.

Note the difficulty in directly denying the not-at-issue content. If one were to follow an utterance of (3.8) with,

you would presumably find this odd and incoherent. A much more elaborate statement is needed to deny the not-at-issue content.

Applying this to view to ‘inner-city’ in (3.5), we end up with:

• At-issue : A poor, densely populated, high-crime, urban area.
• Not-at-issue : Those living in such areas are mostly African American.

Because the racial component of (3.5) is not-at-issue, we have a reasonable explanation for why the following pair of sentences clash,

An objection to this view is that code words do not display non-cancelability the way not-at-issue content typically does; “someone cannot disavow commitment to the not-at-issue content of a sentence S that she utters merely by following up her utterance by asserting the negation of that content” (Khoo, 45). Consider,

The juxtaposition of sentences in (3.11) is supposed to strike the reader as contradictory while those in (3.12) should not.

According to a third view, code words are neither ambiguous nor multidimensional, but possess only nonracial meaning. What explains the phenomenon associated with terms like ‘inner city’ is the presence of an antecedent belief in the audience member that then allows them to infer the racial component. For example, an audience member may already believe

Pre-existing Belief (PB): The inner city is mostly populated by poor African Americans,

so that when hearing a politician proclaim (3.5), the audience member comes to infer

Racial Inference (RI): The food stamp program will primarily benefit poor African Americans.

A contrasting view that draws on the same simple semantics is what Khoo calls the association-driven theory of code words. On this view, there is “an association between ‘inner city’ (or the concept INNER CITY) and the concept AFRICAN AMERICAN (or maybe just RACE) which then primes racist beliefs and prejudices” (2017, 50).

Khoo’s account is simple and compelling, but we may still wonder whether it is too liberal. For instance, expressions like ‘thug,’ ‘illegal alien,’ ‘welfare queen,’ and ‘terrorist’ seem to behave like the terms Khoo identifies as code words, yet they are generally understood to be explicitly racial in nature. Patrick O’Donnell (2017) argues that the aforementioned expressions are not code words but racialized terms . O’Donnell characterizes the difference between racialized terms and code words in the following way:

• Racialized terms involve direct or predicative relations between a term and a racialized group whereas code words involve indirect inferential or associational relations, and
• Racialized terms elicit racial resentment by making salient race-specific interpretive options, whereas code words function by making salient race-neutral interpretive options (2017, 28).

O’Donnell agrees with Khoo that code words are picked out according to their contextual cognitive-pragmatic role, while claiming that this role differs between code words and racialized terms.

Determining whether dogwhistles or coded language count as merely contentious claims that must be tolerated or as hate speech subject to regulation has implications for broader discussions. The subtlety of coded language, for instance, calls its status as hate speech into question. The impact coded language has on an audience lacks the kind of immediacy often attributed to hate speech. Lawrence (1993), for example, notes that hate speech is often experienced by targets as a slap in the face. On the other hand, Mendelberg’s account suggests coded speech can incite racial resentment, and so it may be more aptly considered similar to propagandistic hate speech, discussed above. (For more on this point, see Jason Stanley (2015).) This would appear to get us closer to how hate speech is purported to function, namely, by inciting racial hatred. Whether it is close enough is of course open for debate.

That hate speech and pornography are discussed so frequently together in philosophy might, at first glance, seem surprising. But given the overlap made in the arguments made by anti-porn feminist about pornography and anti-racist theorists about racist hate speech, the two are now intimately linked—for better or for worse. (One important fact that led to this development is, of course, the ruling that pornography is protected by the US first amendment as speech [see Miller v. California (1973)].) According to anti-porn feminists, much of what is said of racist hate speech and the harms that befall its targets also applies, with the appropriate changes, to pornography and women—including, it’s worth emphasizing, women of color.

Many of the important initial moves in this literature were crafted by feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon, along with Andrea Dworkin. One of MacKinnon’s most significant claims that has received sustained philosophical attention is the idea that (degrading and misogynist) pornography silences women. With some modifications, a similar claim may be applied to hate speech, namely, that hate speech silences its targets. However, as the literature has focused on the case of pornography and women, it’s worth examining these arguments in detail first.

This silencing argument begins with MacKinnon’s observation that there are “words that set conditions” for other speech acts’ successes or failures (1993, 63–68; see also Hornsby and Langton, 1998, 27). That is, there are some speech acts that fix the possibility of other speech acts. In other words, they make it possible for some persons to perform some speech acts, and make it impossible for others. This is most evident in formal settings, like a legislature, where the formal rules determine who may speak when, and in what manner. Pornography, the argument continues, does just this. It sets rules of behavior that, in effect, inhibit the speech of women. The result of which is that the speech acts of pornography—performed by those who produce and distribute it—create a climate that undermines women’s capacity to perform certain speech acts of their own. The speech of some (pornographers), therefore, curtails the speech of others (women).

In an influential account of the phenomena of silencing, Langton (1993) deploys speech act theory to examine the case of sexual refusal. According to the silencing argument, pornography depicts women as not (genuinely) refusing sexual advances with utterances of ‘no.’ Indeed, according to the myths perpetuated by pornography (among other social influences), a woman’s ‘no’ is not a refusal, but rather part of an elaborate sexual script. As a result, when a woman says ‘no’ in a non-pornographic context, intending to refuse a man’s sexual advances, she may find herself unable to be heard—that is, her words won’t have the force and effect she intends, and her hearer will not take her to be refusing. She may find herself silenced in this particularly horrendous way, unable to use the standard methods of refusing another’s sexual advances. The claim is that this occurs as a result of pornography silencing women’s refusals in the context of sex. It renders their words powerless.

In making this argument, Langton relies on the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, and, correspondingly, locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary silencing. A couple examples will explain these distinctions quickly:

When X says, ‘Shoot him!’ they are, we can see quite quickly, both saying something: ‘shoot him!’ and at the same time doing something: ordering the hearer to fire. In Austinian terms, we can say that X performs the locutionary act of making an utterance with a certain meaning, and at the same time is performing an illocutionary act of ordering the hearer to fire. In addition to these two things, the speaker is also, with their words, bringing about a number of effects, which Austin termed the ‘ perlocutionary act.’ In this case, leading to some unfortunate soul to be shot. (Adapted from Langton, 1993, 295, and Austin, 1962, 101)

To be clear, these three acts—locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary—all occur as part of a single utterance and serve to bring out different aspects of any speech act. Austin (and many after him) paid particular attention to the illocutionary act of an utterance, as this, he said, corresponds to the force of an utterance. That is, what someone is doing with their words.

With this in mind, we can see that there are, in fact, many ways one could silence someone. You could literally gag or threaten someone to prevent them from speaking at all, which would achieve a type of locutionary silencing. Alternatively, you could let them say what they wish, recognize what act they are performing, but prevent them achieving their goals, and in doing so achieve a type of perlocutionary silencing. Finally, a third alternative occurs when one speaks and is prevented not only from achieving their intended effects, but also is prevented from performing the very action they intend to perform (Langton, 1993, 315). It is this third alternative—illocutionary silencing—that is said to occur when a man fails to even recognize a woman’s ‘no’ as a refusal, owing at least partially to the influence of pornography.

The specific mechanics of silencing—along with the underlying theory that best explains the phenomena—is subject to much dispute in the literature, and numerous accounts with different essential features have been offered (see Langton (1993); Langton and West (1999); Hornsby (1994); Hornsby and Langton (1998); Maitra (2009); McGowan (2004, 2009, 2014); Mikolla (2011; 2019), among others).

Laura Caponetto (2021) distinguishes four different types of silencing, demonstrating the breadth of the concept. First, there is essential silencing, which consists in the hearer’s failure to recognize the illocutionary point of a speech act. Second, there is authority silencing, where a hearer fails to acknowledge a speaker’s authority in a relevant domain. Third, there is sincerity silencing, when the speaker’s utterance is inaccurately taken as insincere. Fourth and finally, there is seriousness silencing, which consists in the hearer’s failure to acknowledge the speaker’s words as appropriately serious. Given these fine-grained ways of understanding silencing, a broad, comprehensive definition of silencing may be put as follows:

Illocutionary Silencing A speaker S putting forth a speech act A addressed to a hearer H is illocutionarily silenced iff (i) H fails to recognize the obtaining of some conditions for A ’s success; (ii) S ’s attempt at A -ing meets the conditions that H fails to recognize; (iii) normal input and output conditions are met; (iv) the recognition failure on H ’s part is systematic. (Caponetto, 2021)

In nearly all discussions of silencing, one common piece of contention concerns the notion of ‘uptake.’ On different understanding of what uptake consists in—ranging from the hearer’s recognition of a speaker’s intent, or the type of speech act being performed, up to the material consequences of a speech act—we are led to different conclusions about whether a speaker was silenced or not. Disagreement about the conditions of uptake poses difficulty, therefore, for many accounts of silencing. Drawing on these difficulties, Samia Hesni (2018) has argued that the standard account of silencing needs significant retooling, in part because the necessary distinction between illocutionary silencing and perlocutionary silencing cannot hold, as it relies on a problematic—and arguably conceptually untenable—notion of uptake (Hesni, 2018, 957). In an attempt to avoid these difficulties, we might prefer an account of silencing that uses a Gricean, rather than Austinian or Searlian framework, bypassing the need to fully differentiate the illocutionary from the perlocutionary (see Maitra, 2009).

While much of this literature is explicitly focused on pornography’s potential to silence women in the realm of sexual refusal, the notion that racist hate speech may similarly play a silencing function has also been put forward. For example, in a classic paper on the topic, Lawrence wrote that:

Racist speech … distorts the marketplace of ideas by muting or devaluing the speech of Blacks and other despised minorities. Regardless of intrinsic value, their words and ideas become less saleable in the marketplace of ideas. An idea that would be embraced by large numbers of individuals if it were offered by a white individual will be rejected or given less credence if its author belongs to a group demeaned and stigmatized by racist beliefs. (Lawrence, 1993, 78–79)

Using the above framework, we might therefore say that racist hate speech can itself constitute words that set conditions for the success of other speech acts, and in doing so undermines the speech of its targets—and in some cases, effectively silencing them. That is, racist hate speech may, in cultivating an environment hostile to the voices (and lives) of many, can lead to both locutionary and illocutionary silencing in a way that threatens their freedom of expression. And as is noted above in the section on the harms of hate speech, one long-term consequence of racist hate speech may be the target’s partial withdrawal from certain aspects of public life, including public discourse (West, 2012, 237). One further harmful effect of hate speech, then, is its targets’ silence.

Another way in which racist hate speech might silence is more immediate. Returning to the distinction between propagandistic hate speech on the one hand, and assaultive hate speech on the other, where the latter consists in hate speech uttered directly to its target, we may note that hate speech often serves as a type of attack. So, despite the common refrain of ‘more speech’ offered as advice, conceiving hate speech as a personal attack demonstrates how it, in fact, threatens the speech rights of its targets. As Lawrence puts it: “The visceral emotional response to personal attack precludes speech” (1993, 68). He goes on:

Attack produces an instinctive, defensive psychological reaction. Fear, rage, shock, and flight all interfere with any reasoned response. Words like ‘nigger,’ ‘kike,’ and ‘faggot’ produce physical symptoms that temporarily disable the victim, and perpetrators often use these words with the intention of producing this effect. (ibid.)

So, in both cultivating an environment in which the speech of marginalized groups is systematically devalued, or in serving as an immediate threat, hate speech can be said to silence its targets.

As is the case with pornography and silencing, the details of the mechanisms that sustain this type of silencing, along with what particular type of silencing racist hate speech results in, are subject to dispute. But, just like in the pornography debate, the plausibility of the silencing argument lies partly in how it reframes the overall question surrounding regulation. Rather than simply being a source of harm that merely infringes on the equality rights of its targets, if hate speech silences then it also infringes on the speech rights of its targets (West, 2012). As a result, it is not simply a question of balancing the speech rights of hate speakers against the wellbeing of their targets, but of competing claims to (substantive, and not just formal) freedom of expression. And given the importance that most liberal democracies place on freedom of expression, the challenge presented from hate speech is of central importance. For this reason, the silencing question is one of the most disputed aspects of hate speech and has generated great attention.

5. Counteracting Hate Speech

On the presumption that hate speech is harmful—both particularly harmful for the members of targeted groups, and also generally harmful to democracy—the natural question that follows is: what should we do about it? This question, however, rests on several sub-questions—some empirical, some conceptual—that themselves admit of rich dispute. For example, depending on how one conceives of the value and point of free expression—to better seek the truth, to respect autonomy, to ensure democracy, etc.—different answers to the hate speech question will seem more worthwhile than others. The same consideration applies to empirical matters as well, which are often difficult to properly assess in the absence of uncontroversial data. This means that relatively straightforward empirical questions—does genocidal speech pave the way to actual genocidal violence; do governments abuse hate speech regulation to punish political rivals and disfavored minorities; and others—rarely receive unanimous agreement. Despite these challenges, many theorists have addressed the question of how to counteract hate speech, and what form that response ought to take.

We can divide the most common answers into three broad categories: (1) legally restrict it in some form, as a justified exception to free expression; (2) permit it on the basis of free expression, holding that the harms of censorship outweigh the harms of hate speech; or (3) permit it, but take explicit measures to undo the harm of hate speech.

First, the case for banning hate speech. While this position may be anathema to many (especially in the United States), it is the consensus position of most democratic nations around the globe, as well as the explicit position of the United Nations. In the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights , Article 20 requires a ban on hate speech—or, in their words, “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law” ( Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ; see also, Article 4 of Convention on Racial Discrimination ). It is worth noting the position of the United Nations and other democracies on hate speech in part because of the contrast they serve for the dominant position in the United States, which recognizes some exceptions to the right to free expression (e.g., obscenity, libel, child sexual abuse material), but not generally on the basis of (racial) hate. Moreover, these exhortations to criminalize hate speech from the United Nations sit alongside commitments that maintain the importance of freedom of expression. For instance, Article 20, quoted above, is immediately preceded by Article 19, which affirms right to freedom of expression ( Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ).

The standard justification offered for restrictions on freedom of expression are based on the necessity of (a) respect of the rights or reputations of others; and (b) reasons of national security or of public order. In other words, a ban on hate speech may be thought to follow from the recognition of the harms it presents, both to the dignity of minority-members of a nation, as well as their physical safety. This position maintains, then, that restrictions on hate speech are a legitimate—and necessary—exception to an otherwise wider understanding of free expression. (For some theorists, it’s worth noting, hate speech is best not understood as the type of speech that free speech protections are meant to include—e.g., it serves no purpose in the pursuit of truth—and so is not in fact an exception to a free speech principle, but simply not included in a proper understanding of the scope of free speech.) This view naturally follows from the understanding that multiple values and rights must be balanced against each other. This is true both of countries that explicitly prohibit hate speech in order to protect minority rights, as well as in more ‘speech-friendly’ nations like the United States, where speech that is aimed at and likely to result in “imminent lawless action” may be legitimately restricted (see Brandenburg v. Ohio ).

However, most advocates for legally restricting hate speech believe that its proper scope is wider than what US law currently allows. Parekh, for example, rejects the position that hate speech may only be restricted when there is “imminent danger” of violence on the grounds that this understanding is too short-sighted. Moreover, he says,

no action occurs in a historical vacuum, and every action produces consequences not inherently but against a particular background. … Imminent danger occurs against, and is imminent because of, the prevailing social climate, and consistency demands that we concentrate our efforts not only on fighting the immediate source of danger, but also on changing the climate. (2012, 45–46)

On the understanding that the threat of hate speech is not exhausted by cases that concern “imminent danger,” we might then ground the prohibition of hate speech on the basis that this may reduce speech that causes harm to its targets, beyond those most immediately affected. Of course, there is also an important role to be played by non-legal means (e.g., moral and social pressure) in erasing or reducing these harms, so legal bans are best understood as part of a broader approach to the ills of hate speech. Furthermore, advocates of bans describe the expressive dimension of these laws as themselves providing a reason in favor of legislation (Waldron, 2014). The law, in this sense, serves as a public statement on a community’s values, and has educational and symbolic importance in itself (Parekh, 2012, 46). (For an overview of expressive theories of law, see Anderson and Pildes, 2000.) A ban on hate speech, therefore, is intended both to reduce harms directly, by decreasing instances of hate by the threat of law, as well as indirectly, by shaping the community’s moral norms through an expression of value.

Though many would agree that hate speech can have destructive effects, and that there is a moral imperative on the state to cultivate something like respectful relations between its members, objections to hate speech bans abound. In a wide-ranging response to these concerns, Parekh (2012) considers (and rejects) six common objections to the prohibition of hate speech. These six objections are: (1) that the harm of hate speech, while real, is relatively minor and a small price to pay given the interest of democratic nations; (2) that bans are not the answer, but rather “better ideas” and “more speech” are; (3) that a prohibition would have a dangerous “chilling effect” and that hate speech bans are a slippery slope to all sorts of unwanted restrictions; (4) that bans give the state too much power to judge the content of speech and decide what can or cannot be said, threatening state-neutrality, skewing political debate, and infringing on individual liberty; (5) that bans are an objectionable form of paternalism or moral authoritarianism, and is incompatible with the assumption that humans are responsible and autonomous individuals and that society is made up of free and equal citizens; and finally, (6) that bans are ineffective at changing attitudes and removing the hate from the hate speaker’s heart, with the result that bans have the effect of moving extremists underground, alienating them from wider society, and in doing so rendering us ignorant of their violent potential and impotent to engage in effective de-radicalization.

Each of these concerns merits more space than can be given to them here. Still, considering these objections to bans and the responses available, even briefly, is illustrative of the theoretical concerns bans on hate speech bring forth (see the list of references for fuller development of the relevant theoretical and empirical issues). Again following Parekh (2012, 47–54), we can approach these objections as follows.

In response to (1), the objection that the interests of a vibrant democracy outweigh the harms imposed by hate speech, it may be argued that hate speech does not embody the values of free speech but, in fact, undermines them by promoting irrational fears and hatred over reasoned arguments and public scrutiny. How powerful one takes this response to be depends directly on what one takes the value and justification of a right to free expression to be, which is of course a matter of dispute.

One response to (2), the common ‘more speech’ objection, is to note that the “marketplace of ideas” is not neutral, and likely requires some regulation (just like a marketplace of other goods). This is what a ban does, and so may be considered to be helping ensure ‘fair competition’ by countering prevailing prejudices, and encouraging greater participation from the members of communities targeted by hate speech. In other words, bans on hate speech may promote greater freedom of expression, by preventing the type of silencing considered above.

While acknowledging the worries of (3), namely that of a ‘chilling effect’ or a ‘slippery slope,’ represent an important objection, we may respond by noting that the problems these signal rest on the vague wording and inconsistent or biased application of hate speech bans. They are not, therefore, direct objections to hate speech bans as such. The remedy, therefore, lies in correcting these aspects of a ban, rather than abandoning it altogether. Moreover, the appeal to a ‘slippery slope’ may be inapt, as it implies that once one type of speech is prohibited, society cannot help but prohibit even more types. But we have no clear reason to suppose that this is the case, as existing bans on defamation have not led to bans on fair critical comment, for example.

The worries at the core of objection (4) represents a well-founded fear of the state, and so must be taken seriously. But, to defenders of hate speech bans, its understanding of the threat that hate speech bans pose to state-neutrality is nonetheless flawed. It fails to recognize that the state often already judges the content of speech (e.g., in banning commercial fraud, criminal solicitation, public displays of obscenity) and often elides neutrality when it speaks in favor of certain positions (e.g., the value of human dignity, equality, liberty). While any defense of hate speech bans must reckon with the possibility of further empowering the state, opponents ought not misrepresent the status quo, exaggerating the reality of state-neutrality.

Objections grounded on the threat of paternalism or moral authoritarianism, like (5), are similarly serious. However, one response on behalf of bans would be to point out how autonomy is always exercised under certain conditions and requires various external circumstances for its development and use. When appealing to personal autonomy, therefore, we should not idealize too greatly so that its real-world exercise is ignored. Rather, the threats that racism and bigotry pose for autonomy must also be acknowledged, alongside praise for our rational faculties.

One response to (6), that bans are ineffective at changing attitudes, is to admit the law cannot change attitudes (like hatred) directly and maintain that this is no knock against the law, and indeed is no problem for hate speech bans. The aim of these bans, in most cases, is not to prevent hatred but to prevent the harm that the public expression of hate can cause. The indirect effects of such a law, however, are an empirical matter, and it is unlikely they admit of a single, general answer, but are highly context-dependent. The subject of the practicability of hate speech bans deserves special attention, however. Opponents to bans may worry that the suppression of hate speech is likely to backfire, not only by failing to reduce hatred, but by increasing the sense of oppression and victimization that many bigots thrive on, leading to an escalation of racist violence (Baker, 2012, 77). Again, as an empirical hypothesis, it cannot be settled simply from the armchair. Still, a further response available on behalf of hate speech bans would be to question the legitimacy of this objection. If, by hypothesis, bans generated an increase in violence, it would still be the responsibility of the state to manage this violence effectively. The role of the state is not exhausted by implementing a ban, but must be seen alongside its enforcement.

This, however, leads to a slightly different objection. The opponent of bans may worry that the enforcement of laws against hate speech would divert the state’s energies away from more effective measures against hated, such as “those directed at changing material conditions in which racism festers, material conditions of both the purveyors and targets of hate” (Baker, 2012, 77). That is, the energies and resources that would be directed towards establishing and enforcing hate speech bans may be better spent on alternative policies. The guiding thought rests on two important points. First, that the intended ends of hate speech bans (e.g., reduction in the harms of hate speech that fall on those targeted by it, mitigation of the expansion of racist attitudes, lessening occurrences of violent hate crimes) may be more effectively achieved via different means, such as reducing inequality, improving social safety nets, political empowerment, and more. Second, though the state can do more than one thing at once, it is nonetheless working with limited resources, and efficiency is a value. That these alternative policy options may indeed be more effective is an unresolved empirical matter. And it remains an open question whether indirect approaches like this would fail to achieve the expressive ends of hate speech bans, which more directly communicate to those targeted by hate speech that they are valued members society.

Many of the claims made above, both on behalf of bans and in opposition, raise theoretical and empirical issues whose proper examination spans many articles and books. Suffice to say that the debate over bans is a highly contested one, and each position rests on an understanding of such issues as the value of free expression, the harm of hate speech, the likely effects a ban might have in a particular context, and so on. For instance, one who believes that free expression is valuable in part because of its role in democratic decision-making may maintain that specifically political speech deserves increased protections, and that some of what others regard as hate speech might fall into this category, escaping regulation. Alternatively, one may view the immunity for political speech as perhaps a red herring. On the speech act theoretic framework outlined above, some forms of racist hate speech are functionally identical to a ‘Whites Only’ sign hanging in a public restaurant (McGowan 2012; McGowan and Maitra 2009). The latter expresses a political opinion in the same way as the former expression does, but it is also regarded as unlawful racially discriminatory. The same considerations—legal sanction—might therefore apply to the verbal utterance as the written sign, and the appeal to the political content of the message is irrelevant.

The preceding summarizes the two main positions in the debate over hate speech: on the one hand, there are those who defend prohibitions, and on the other, those who maintain hate speech as protected under a wide conception of freedom of expression, and so oppose laws that aim at its prohibition. A third position aims to avoid some of the impasses that haunt this debate. On this view, this impasse is the result of a failure by those who oppose hate speech bans (and, as a result, tend to favor ‘more speech’) to acknowledge the strength of one of the main arguments from those who advocate for bans, namely, that hate speech is a type of assault that often renders one unable to respond. This, along with a failure of those who defend bans from considering non-punitive options for mitigating the harms of hate speech, leads to stalemate. On this understanding, both sides of the debate over bans see the only alternatives as either increased governmental powers to punish, or absent that, ‘unsupported’ counterspeech on the part of those targeted by hate speech (see Gelber, 2012a; 2012b).

By contrast, the “supported counterspeech” alternative aims to recognize the specific harms inflicted by hate speech and provide state support to empower those who are harmed. Gelber, an advocate for this alternative, places it within the capabilities approach originally developed by Amartya Sen (1992) and Martha Nussbaum (2000; 2003). “If hate-speech acts harm their targets’ capacity to develop human capabilities,” Gelber says, then “this is what needs to be remedied” (2012a, 54). The impetus for this approach therefore begins from the idea that we must think about remedies to hate speech beyond restrictions and punishment, as neither of these approaches achieve the goal of empowering the target of hate speech. (This is especially true of the latter, punishment, which also carries with it all the negative consequences that anti-carceral advocates have noted.) The supported counterspeech policy is therefore not focused on hate speakers, but rather the targets of hate speech more directly.

The core of this approach lies in an enlarged conception of counterspeech as well as a commitment by the state to provide the material conditions necessary for this speech. In practice, this would mean that the state is committed to responding to an incident of hate speech by empowering its targets to engage in more speech, after the fact. The specific forms this support may take will depend on the conditions of different contexts, along with calibration for the specifics of the incident it is meant as a response to, as well as the needs of the particular communities. Still, to give a sense of what this may entail, examples of the sort of supported counterspeech that this position recommends include things such as: assistance in the production of a community newsletters, op-eds, radio broadcasts, or television advertisements; the development of antiracism awareness programs, or anti-hate-speech workshops; subsidizing community-led art projects; etc.

In each case, the aim of supported counterspeech is to empower the targets of hate speech, and to increase their capacity for engaging in counterspeech. The goal is thus to undo (as much as one can) the specific harms of hate speech, while avoiding the pitfalls of “private remedies” (as critiqued by Matsuda, 1993). While supported counterspeech could be taken as either an alternative to bans or a supplement to them, it remains an under-explored avenue for considering responses tailored to the particular harms of hate speech.

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• Haney Lopez, Ian, 2014, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• MacKinnon, Catharine, 1993, Only Words , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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• Maitra, Ishani, and Mary Kate McGowan (eds.), 2012, Speech & Harm: Controversies Over Free Speech , New York: Oxford University Press.
• Matsuda, Mari, 1993, “Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim’s Story,” in Mari Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Crenshaw (eds.), Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment , Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 17–51.
• Matsuda, Mari, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Crenshaw (eds.), 1993, Words that Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech and the First Amendment , Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
• McGowan, Mary Kate, 2004, “Conversational Exercitives: Something Else We Do With Our Words,” Linguistics and Philosophy , 27: 93–111.
• –––, 2009, “Oppressive Speech,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 87(3): 389–407.
• –––, 2012, “On ‘Whites Only’ Signs and Racist Hate Speech: Verbal Acts of Racial Discrimination,” in Ishani Maitra and Mary Kate McGowan (eds.), Speech & Harm: Controversies Over Free Speech , New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 121–47.
• –––, 2014, “Sincerity Silencing,” Hypatia , 29(2): 458–473.
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• –––, 2019, Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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• –––, 2003, “Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice,” Feminist Economics , 9(2/3): 33–59.
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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Swanson, Eric, 2015, “ Slurs and Ideology ,” unpublished manuscript
• American Library Association, “ Hate Speech and Hate Crime ”
• European Commission against Hate Speech and Violence
• UN Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech
• UNESCO, “ Countering Online Hate Speech ”
• Rights for Peace, “ Hate Speech ”
• Anti-Defamation Leage, “ Resources for Responding to Hate Speech in the Community ”
• Library of Parliament Research Publication, “ Hate Speech and Freedom of Expression: Legal Boundaries in Canada ”

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Understanding hate speech

Hate speech versus freedom of speech

The need to preserve freedom of expression from censorship by States or private corporations’ is often invoked to counter efforts to regulate hateful expression, in particular online.

Freedom of opinion and expression are, indeed, cornerstones of human rights and pillars of free and democratic societies. These freedoms support other fundamental rights, such as to peaceful assembly, to participate in public affairs, and to freedom of religion. It is undeniable that digital media, including social media, have bolstered the right to seek, receive and impart information and ideas. Therefore, legislative efforts to regulate free expression unsurprisingly raise concerns that attempts to curb hate speech may silence dissent and opposition.

To counter hate speech, the United Nations supports more positive speech and upholds respect for freedom of expression as the norm. Therefore, any restrictions must be an exception and seek to prevent harm and ensure equality or the public participation of all. Alongside the relevant international human rights law provisions, the UN Rabat Plan of Action provides key guidance to States on the difference between freedom of expression and “incitement” (to discrimination, hostility and violence), which is prohibited under criminal law. Determining when the potential of harm is high enough to justify prohibiting speech is still the subject of much debate. But States can also use alternative tools – such as education and promoting counter-messages – to address the whole spectrum of hateful expression, both on and offline.

“Addressing hate speech does not mean limiting or prohibiting freedom of speech. It means keeping hate speech from escalating into something more dangerous, particularly incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence, which is prohibited under international law.”

— United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, May 2019

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Home » Articles » Topic » Issues » Issues Related to Speech, Press, Assembly, or Petition » Hate Speech

Hate Speech

Chris Demaske

The Supreme Court has struck down laws that have restricted offensive speech, such as the wearing of swastikas in Village of Skokie v. National Socialist Party of America. But in Virginia v. Black, the Supreme Court declined to rule that cross-burning was protected expressive speech under the First Amendment when such an activity was intended to intimidate, reasoning that sometimes it can constitute a "true threat." (Photo of Ku Klux Klansmen and women at a cross lighting in 2005 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)

The term “hate speech” is generally agreed to mean abusive language specifically attacking a person or persons because of their race, color, religion, ethnic group, gender, or sexual orientation. Although the First Amendment still protects much hate speech, there has been substantial debate on the subject in the past two decades among lawmakers, jurists, and legal scholars.

Debate over hate speech flared over campus speech codes

The scholarly debate concerning the regulation of hate speech flared in the late 1980s, primarily focusing on  campus speech codes , pitting those who view regulation of hate speech as a necessary step toward social equality against those who see hate speech regulations as abridgements of the fundamental right of free speech.

Liberal theorists say more speech is the First Amendment remedy for hate speech

The traditional liberal position is that speech must be valued as one of the most important elements of a democratic society. Traditional scholars see speech as a fundamental tool for self-realization and social growth and believe that the  remedy for troublesome speech is more speech , not more government regulation of speech. For example, liberal theorist  Nadine Strossen , relying to some degree on  John Stuart Mill’s connection between speech and the search for truth, argues that restricting hate speech will mask hatred among groups rather than dissipate it.

Balance between free speech and social equality a concern

Proponents of hate speech regulation usually do so from the perspective of  critical race theory , believing that legal decisions are based on preserving the interests of the powerful, and see no value in protecting bias-motivated speech against certain already oppressed groups. They question the necessity and logic of protecting speech that not only has no social value but is also socially and psychologically damaging to minority groups. These proponents of the regulation of hate speech suggest a new balance between free speech and social equality.

For example, Mari Matsuda, a law professor at Georgetown University, has advocated creating a legal doctrine defining proscribable hate speech from a basis in cases where the message is one of racial inferiority, the message is directed against a historically oppressed group, and the message tends to persecute or is otherwise hateful and degrading.

The Illinois Supreme Court reviewed the question of restricting a Nazi rally in  Village of Skokie v. National Socialist Party of America (1978) . The court, relying heavily on a U.S. Supreme Court case,  Cohen v. California (1971) , raised the slippery slope argument, contending that restricting the wearing of a swastika would lead to an endless number of restrictions on all sorts of offensive speech. Adhering to the  content neutrality principle , the court ruled that the government could not base rules on the feelings of “the most squeamish among us” and that the wearing of swastikas was “a matter of taste and style.”

Members of the Jewish Defense League donned helmets as they arrived in Skokie, north of Chicago on Monday, July 4, 1977. They were one of the groups demonstrating against a march of the National Socialist Party (Nazis), who called off a Fourth of July march when they failed to get a permit. The Supreme Court contended that restricting the wearing of a swastika would lead to an endless number of restrictions on all sorts of offensive speech. Adhering to the content neutrality principle, the Court ruled that the government could not base rules on the feelings of “the most squeamish among us” and that the wearing of swastikas was “a matter of taste and style.” (AP Photo/CEK, used with permission from The Associated Press.)

Court struck down hate speech law

In  R.A.V. v. St. Paul (1992) the Supreme Court appeared to close the door on hate speech regulations. The case involved a city ordinance in St. Paul, Minnesota, prohibiting bias-motivated disorderly conduct against others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender. The Court struck down the ordinance, finding it to be unconstitutional on its face because it was viewpoint discriminatory.

The Court reviewed whether hate speech as defined in the ordinance fit into the  “fighting words” category . This category, first established in  Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942) , was defined as “such words, as ordinary men know, are likely to cause a fight.” The Court in R.A.V. found that the ordinance had removed specific hateful speech from the category of fighting words because, by specifying the exact types of speech to be prohibited, the restriction was no longer content neutral.

Court upheld cross-burning law

More than a decade later, the Supreme Court again ruled on a hate speech case.  Virginia v. Black (2003) concerned the constitutionality of a Virginia statute that made it unlawful to burn a cross with the intent of intimidating any person or group of persons. Many scholars have argued that the Court’s opinion in Black is completely opposite from its ruling in R.A.V.

Relying on the history of the use of  cross burnings to intimidate African Americans, the plurality found that R.A.V. did not mean “the First Amendment prohibits all forms of content-based discrimination within a proscribable area of speech.” The Court did accept the idea that some individuals might burn crosses for reasons other than intimidation.

Hate speech law has now focused on the Internet

Current case law and research concerning hate speech has shifted focus toward hate speech on the Internet. The  Internet brings with it a myriad of new problems for the First Amendment , including how to determine what level of scrutiny to apply and how to react to existing restrictions on hate speech by much of the international community.

This article was originally published in 2009 and updated in 2017. Chris Demaske is an associate professor of communication at the University of Washington Tacoma. Her research explores issues of power associated with free speech and free press and has covered topics including hate speech, academic freedom, and Internet pornography.

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hate speech

Definition of hate speech

Examples of hate speech in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'hate speech.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Dictionary Entries Near hate speech

hate someone's guts

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“Hate speech.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hate%20speech. Accessed 24 Oct. 2024.

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Legal definition of hate speech.

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hate speech

[ heyt speech ]

The racist graffiti was condemned as hate speech.

• speech disparaging a racial, sexual, or ethnic group or a member of such a group

Word History and Origins

Origin of hate speech 1

Example Sentences

The initial wave of internet regulation in Africa mostly targeted users, with hate speech and misinformation laws as well as the imposition of digital taxes.

The protection from legal liability proved essential to the explosive growth of the internet platforms, allowing them to remove posts that contained hate speech and other graphic material that might drive away users or advertisers.

As a moderator for a Reddit community notorious for its hate speech and loose talk of violence, Williams bristled at some of the casual racism but also at Reddit’s enforcement actions for policy violations, he said.

Major social-media platforms already have AI tools to flag hate speech or false information.

They’re trained on the language of the internet, including the dark corners of Reddit and Twitter that may include hate speech and disinformation.

So why are we continually inundated with images and hate speech perpetuating this harmful lie?

Koreans living in Japan suffer the brunt of racism and hate speech, and their situation is complex.

If hate-speech becomes a crime, she may be in charge of overseeing the police that enforce the law.

A Facebook page called “I Report Wilders [for Hate Speech]” has collected 98,000 likes.

A Supreme Court Case would ultimately pit the right to assembly against the right to be free from hate speech.

Hate Speech and Hate Crime

Hate speech.

There is no legal definition of "hate speech" under U.S. law, just as there is no legal definition for evil ideas, rudeness, unpatriotic speech, or any other kind of speech that people might condemn. Generally, however, hate speech is any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, religion, skin color sexual identity, gender identity, ethnicity, disability, or national origin. 1

In the United States, hate speech is protected by the First Amendment. Courts extend this protection on the grounds that the First Amendment requires the government to strictly protect robust debate on matters of public concern even when such debate devolves into distasteful, offensive, or hateful speech that causes others to feel grief, anger, or fear. (The Supreme Court's decision in Snyder v. Phelps provides an example of this legal reasoning.) Under current First Amendment jurisprudence, hate speech can only be criminalized when it directly incites imminent criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group.

For the purposes of collecting statistics, the FBI has defined a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity,” including skin color and national origin. Hate crimes are overt acts that can include acts of violence against persons or property, violation or deprivation of civil rights, certain "true threats," or acts of intimidation, or conspiracy to commit these crimes. The Supreme Court has upheld laws that either criminalize these acts or impose a harsher punishment when it can be proven that the defendant targeted the victim because of the victim's race, ethnicity, identity, or beliefs. A hate crime is more than than offensive speech or conduct; it is specific criminal behavior that ranges from property crimes like vandalism and arson to acts of intimidation, assault, and murder. Victims of hate crimes can include institutions, religious organizations and government entities as well as individuals.

For Libraries

All libraries should be welcoming and inclusive spaces for all library users, library workers, and members of the community. Each library user has the the right to use the library free of discrimination and loss of individual safety; library workers also have a right to a safe workplace free from bias and discrimination. Hateful conduct should never be tolerated in the library. A library's policies on user behavior and workplace safety and conduct should address hateful conduct as a violation of those policies. Libraries should be prepared to prosecute, or support prosecution, of all bias-motivated criminal acts and provide aid and support to victims of such crimes and those targeted by hateful conduct.

Responding to Hateful Speech and Hate Crime

Reports of hateful speech and hate crimes in libraries is escalating in a time when reported hate crimes are at an all time high . The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services have prepared a white paper, Hateful Conduct in Libraries: Supporting Library Workers and Patrons to provide additional guidance for librarians struggling with issues of hate and intolerance.

In responding to hate speech and hateful conduct, public libraries should be aware that they operate under the First and Fourteenth Amendments and the associated court opinions governing access to the library as a designated public forum. There is an established body of case law holding that public libraries are a type of public forum, and that every person using a public library has a First Amendment right to access, use and take advantage of all the services the public library has to offer, without regard to the person's background, identity or economic status or their beliefs, opinions, or views. This is consistent with ALA's support for intellectual freedom, as expressed in ALA's Library Bill of Rights , which states that "a person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views."

Thus, under law, public libraries cannot discriminate against a library user or deny the user access to library resources and services based upon their views or beliefs. This principle applies to the provision of access to books, media, programming and the internet as well as publicly available meeting room space.

Knowing that the presence and activities of some groups in public libraries, while constitutionally protected, can cause fear and discomfort in some library users and staff, there are some strategies public libraries can employ to embrace their role as welcoming, inclusive, and responsible spaces that go beyond the adoption and enforcement of user behavior policies.

One strategy is to forgo the provision of public meeting room spaces for all users, allowing the library to fully control the messaging that takes place in its building and spaces. A second strategy is to employ the library's right under the First Amendment to speak in its own voice as a government agency about matters of importance. The library can exercise its prerogative to convey strong messaging that counters messages of bias, hatred and discrimination. Such messaging can be proactive, affirmative, and ongoing as well as a reaction to an incident of hateful conduct or speech. Libraries, could, for example, mount prominent signage throughout the library and in meeting rooms announcing its support for equality, diversity, and inclusion, and its belief in the human dignity of all persons, especially those in marginalized communities. Library-sponsored programming and services can echo this message.

Both the Office for Intellectual Freedom and the Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services are available to provide assistance, counsel and support to libraries considering these strategies.

ALA Resources, Statements and Policies

Resource Guide for Library Safety and Preparedness (2023)

Equity, Diversity, Inclusion: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights (2017)

Libraries Respond: Hate Crimes in Libraries (2017)

Libraries Respond: Hate Groups and Violence in Libraries (2017)

Resolution on Libraries as Responsible Spaces (2017)

Hateful Conduct in Libraries: Supporting Library Workers and Patrons (2020)

The Universal Right to Free Expression: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights (2014)

Diverse Collections: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights (2019)

Religion in American Libraries: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights (2016)

Access to Library Resources and Services Regardless of Sex, Gender Identity, Gender Expression, or Sexual Orientation: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights (2020)

Politics in American Libraries: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights (2020)

Meeting Rooms: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights (2019)

Assistance and Consultation

Hate crimes can be reported on the OIF Challenge Reporting form .

The staff of the Office for Intellectual Freedom is available to answer questions or provide assistance to librarians, trustees, educators and the public about hate speech and hate crimes. Areas of assistance include policy development, First Amendment issues, and professional ethics. Inquiries can be directed via email to [email protected] or via phone at (312) 280-4226.

ALA's Office for Diversity, Literacy, and Outreach Services (ODLOS) works in close coordination with the Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) to respond to incidents that have been reported, as well as units across the Association and its affiliates as needed. However, if library staff have encountered hate speech that may not be defined as a crime, we acknowledge that the impact can be traumatizing. We encourage you to reach out to ODLOS at [email protected] , or directly contact ODLOS Interim Director Kristin Lahurd .

1 Kenneth Ward, Free Speech and the Development of Liberal Virtues: An Examination of the Controversies Involving Flag-Burning and Hate Speech, 52 U. Miami L. Rev. 733 (1998)

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What is hate speech, and is it protected by the First Amendment?

Hate speech may be offensive and hurtful; however, it is generally protected by the First Amendment. One common definition of hate speech  is “any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, religion, skin color, sexual identity, gender identity, ethnicity, disability or national origin.”  Courts  have  ruled  that restrictions on hate speech would conflict with the First Amendment’s protection of the freedom of expression. Since public universities are bound by the First Amendment, public universities must adhere to these rulings. However, universities also have an obligation to create a safe, inclusive learning environment for all members of the campus community.

With these considerations in mind, courts in the United States have found that expression generally cannot be punished based on its content or viewpoint. Thus, although hate speech, alone, receives constitutional protection, any expression that constitutes a true threat, incitement to imminent lawless action, discriminatory harassment or defamation can be punished by UWM for those reasons.

Legal Dictionary

The Law Dictionary for Everyone

Hate Speech

Hate speech is talk that attacks an individual or a specific group based on a protected attribute such as the target’s sexual orientation, gender, religion, disability, color, or country of origin. Some countries consider hate speech to be a crime, because it encourages discrimination, intimidation, and violence toward the group or individual being targeted.

Hate speech has been a topic of debate for those who argue that any attempt to curtail someone’s expression of ideas amounts to an infringement on his or her constitutionally protected freedom of speech . Others counter that hate speech does nothing but fuel the flames of violence and brutality. To explore this concept, consider the following hate speech definition.

Definition of Hate Speech

• Speech that is intended to offend, insult, intimidate, or threaten an individual or group based on a trait or attribute, such as sexual orientation, religion, color, gender, or disability.

What is Hate Speech

Hate speech is spoken words that are offensive, insulting, and/or threatening to an individual or group based on a particular attribute of that person or persons being targeted. Targeted attributes include such traits as ethnic background, sexual orientation, race, or disability, though there are other target attributes. In the U.S., another term for hate speech is “fighting words,” as such talk is likely to provoke an otherwise reasonable person into acting rashly against speaker doing the provoking.

Unfortunately, defending freedom of speech means defending any and all speech equally, even that which may be regarded as unbearably offensive. Examples of hate speech include name-calling and racial slurs, though occasionally symbols like the swastika and burning crosses are called into question as to whether or not they are truly examples of hate speech, or if they are nothing more than symbols that are given a negative connotation from the situation in which they are used.

Hate Speech vs. Free Speech

Modern times have seen Americans staunchly protective of their First Amendment right to free speech, believing that the government should only intervene in extreme cases, and just as many people wondering where free speech stops and hate speech begins. On the other hand, “fighting words” are, according to many, a good reason for the government to get involved and place a limit on how far someone can go with their speech.

In the debate over hate speech vs. free speech, many Americans express a concern that the number-one priority should be the well-being of the community, and that a person’s right to freedom of speech can and should be limited, if it poses a threat to that community’s well-being.

Hate Speech Laws in Other Countries

With the advent of social media, the issue of offensive and threatening speech has become a global problem. Just as the U.S. is struggling to determine where free speech goes too far, hate speech laws in other countries are evolving. Examples of hate speech laws in other countries include:

• Japan – Japan’s laws protect its citizens from threats and slander . However, derogatory comments directed at general groups of individuals remain unrestricted in Japan. Despite global calls for hate speech to be criminalized, Japan claims that hate speech has never reached such a point as to warrant legal action.
• United Kingdom – Hate speech is widely criminalized in the U.K. Communications that are abusive, threatening, or insulting, or which target someone based on his race, religion, sexual orientation, or other attribute, are forbidden. Penalties for hate speech in the U.K. include fines and imprisonment .
• Sweden – Hate speech, defined as public statements made to threaten or disrespect groups based on their race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or skin color, is prohibited in Sweden. Constitutional restrictions determine which acts are and are not criminal, as do limits imposed by the European Convention on Human Rights .
• Ireland – While Ireland’s constitution guarantees the right to free speech, there is an understanding that freedom of expression will not be abused to “undermine public order or morality or the authority of the State.” Further, the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act 1989 defines threatening or abusive speech or behavior as that which is likely to inspire hatred against a group of individuals based on their race, color, religion, or other attribute.
• India – While freedom of speech and expression are protected under India’s constitution, “reasonable restrictions” can be imposed in order to maintain the “ sovereignty and integrity of India,” as well as the country’s safety and its relations with other countries. Freedom of speech and expression may also come under fire in India with regard to offenses such as contempt of court , and defamation .
• Canada – Advocating for genocide in Canada against any “identifiable group” (any group that can be identified by their race, religion, sexual orientation, or other attribute) is a criminal offense that carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison , with no minimum sentence. It is also a criminal offense to provoke hatred against an identifiable group

Hate Speech Examples in Legal Cases

There are several hate speech examples in legal cases over the years that have dealt squarely with the issue of whether or not the accused’s right to freedom of speech had been violated. A few of these landmark cases are outlined below.

Criminal Charges Enhanced by Hate Speech

In October of 1989, a group of young black men were hanging out in front of their apartment complex, discussing the movie Mississippi Burning , in which a number of black people are beaten. As a young white boy walked past the complex, and Todd Mitchell, one of the group, called out “Do you all feel hyped up to move on some white people?” then said, “There goes a white boy; go get him!” and led his friends in an attack on the boy. The black men stole the boy’s tennis shoes, and beat him so badly that he was in a coma for four days.

Mitchell was convicted on charges of aggravated battery in the Circuit Court, but because the jury ruled he had chosen the victim based solely on race, the crime was elevated to the level of a hate crime . In this case, Mitchell’s words were intended to incite violence against a person, based on a trait or attribute – his race. Although Mitchell appealed his conviction, claiming the conviction violated his right to free speech.

The question of constitutionality in this case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993 , which held that the First Amendment does not bar the use of a person’s speech as evidence to establish elements of a crime. In fact, such evidence is commonly used to prove a defendant ’s intent or motive, as well as to determine relevancy of certain evidence, or reliability of a witness ’ testimony. The crime in Mitchell’s case was aggravated battery, not the words that he spoke, which provoked his companions to engage in the crime. Therefore, Mitchell’s free speech rights were never impeded.

Ruling on Swastika as Hate Speech

The case referred to as the “ Skokie affair ” dealt with the swastika symbol in particular and determined that the symbol itself is protected by the First Amendment, that it is an expression of free speech and that, as a symbol, it does not, by itself, embody the idea of “fighting words,” or hate speech. The case came about in 1977 when Frank Collin, the leader of the National Socialist Party of America, announced that the party was planning a march through Skokie, Illinois – a predominantly Jewish community where as many as one in six citizens living in the town was either a Holocaust survivor, or immediately related to one.

The Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois issued an injunction upon the group, prohibiting them from wearing Nazi uniforms, and from openly displaying swastikas during their march. The ACLU challenged the injunction, arguing that it violated the marchers’ First Amendment rights. In the end, the Supreme Court agreed, and the group was permitted to march.

Free Speech or Hate Speech at Soldier’s Funeral

Westboro Baptist Church earned itself a reputation for pushing the boundaries of what constitutes free speech. In a typical example of the group’s use of hate speech, The Westboro Baptist Church picketed the 2011 military funeral of a soldier who was killed in Iraq. The father of the soldier sued Fred Phelps and his church for intentional infliction of emotional distress after the group protested his son’s funeral with signs that carried such messages as “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11.”

Ultimately, Phelps and his church prevailed, as the Supreme Court ruled that the church was expressing their discontent with “matters of public concern,” rather than outright targeting the soldier and his family directly. So while the church’s messages may be considered hate speech by the majority, the Court noted that it had to take into account all of the details of the situation in order to issue a proper ruling, which included what was said, where it was said, and how it was said. Considering all of these elements together changes the landscape of the issue at hand.

Related Legal Terms and Issues

• Aggravated Battery – Battery in which serious bodily harm occurs, or in which the perpetrator intended to cause serious harm, often involving a hate crime, or battery against a police officer.
• Discrimination – The practice of unfairly treating different categories of people, especially on the grounds of ethnicity, national origin, gender, race, religion, and sexual orientation.
• Racial Slur – A derogatory, insulting, or disrespectful nickname for a person’s race.
• Slander – An intentional false statement that harms a person’s reputation, or which decreases the respect or regard in which a person is held.

The Law Dictionary

Your Free Online Legal Dictionary • Featuring Black’s Law Dictionary, 2nd Ed.

The Legalities Of Hate Speech

Often discussed on a variety of platforms, hate speech and the legalities associated with it can be a hotly debated topic. Hate speech is loosely defined by laypersons as any offensive speech targeted toward people based on race, religion , sexual orientation, or gender. Opinions about how such speech should be handled by legal authorities vary. Few seem to be familiar with the actual legalities of hate speech, and it is not uncommon for it to be confused with other crimes where hatred is believed to be a motivating factor.

Which Laws Govern Hate Speech?

In the United States, there are no laws against hate speech. Due to rights protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment , a person can say just about anything he or she wants to another person or group. By itself, such speech is allowed to take place without penalty under the law.

A person hurling insults, making rude statements, or disparaging comments about another person or group is merely exercising his or her right to free speech. This is true even if the person or group targeted by the speaker is a member of a protected class. According to U.S. law, such speech is fully permissible and is not defined as hate speech.

Under the First Amendment, American citizens have the legal right to say whatever they’d like to. While much ado is often made about so-called “hate speech”, no satisfactory definition for this type of speech exists within the confines of the law. Not to be confused with “hate crimes,” a person’s speech does not affect another person’s physical condition or personal property and is, therefore, not punishable by law.

Are There Any Exceptions?

There really aren’t any exceptions to this rule, but there are accompanying circumstances which can lead to a crime. For example, harsh words can feel threatening, and such a threat may result in criminal charges. Depending on the jurisdiction where the threat takes place, charges can range from a terrorist threat to harassment to criminal assault .

For example, a person who makes bigoted statements while threatening bodily harm to a person of the Muslim faith can be charged with a crime. Charges would not be brought about simply due to any insulting language used, but charges may be applied because it is illegal to make threats against a person. For the same reasons, this would also include inciting violence against a group being discriminated against. Again, it is not the speech that is deemed to be illegal, but rather what the speech is threatening or encouraging others to do.

It should further be noted that individuals employed by the Federal Government are not allowed to discriminate against any members of a protective class. Therefore, any speech representing hostility or disdain for a member of a protected class, may not be illegal but may result in the dismissal of the employee making such statements.

Members of a protected class are identified by:

• Age (applies primarily to those aged 40 years and above)
• Handicap (whether visibly apparent or not)
• Veteran status
• Country of origin (this includes a person’s citizenship status)

If allegations of hateful speech are proven, a person found guilty of discriminating against one of the above groups would not be legally charged with hateful speech but could be declared guilty of discrimination and summarily dismissed from work.

Should Hate Speech Be Illegal?

A 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case ruled it was perfectly legal for Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan member in Ohio, to speak in favor of violence toward minorities as long as he was not directly encouraging people to engage in violence or other activities that were against the law. So, while the court did not deem his speech to have broken the law, a line was drawn between speech supporting or favoring violence and speech that actually directly incites violence. The former is protected by law, but the latter is an actual crime.  

In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Westboro Baptist Church being punished by way of a civil judgment for actions many Americans deemed to be hateful. The church based in Topeka, Kansas, is known for showing up at the funerals of gay people and others whose lifestyles the church vehemently opposes, taunting and ridiculing grieving loved ones at the funeral services. They accomplish this by picketing outside with large signs displaying hateful rhetoric, as well as by shouting slurs and insults, and even by giving provocative media interviews using language mimicking what is displayed on their signs. Despite the public’s demands for local law enforcement to stop Westboro Baptist Church from spewing such offensive language and ideas, the Supreme Court insists that their right to free speech is fully protected under the law.

Some Americans have advocated in favor of the creation of hate speech laws. Resistance to the adoption of such stems from a failure to clearly define what hate speech actually is, though. Activists have also been challenged to clearly separate hate speech from free speech without infringing on a person’s right to the latter.

While the United States Constitution can be amended as it has been many times before, no one has yet been able to solve the difficulty of doing so as it applies to hate speech. Doing so would require taking away a person’s right to free speech. A single and solid definition of hate speech, which does not violate the First Amendment, continues to be difficult for courts to accept and probably will be for some time to come.

The Role of Hate Speech in Hate Crimes

A person’s speech can be used against them in establishing the occurrence of a hate crime. In some cases, it can be argued that a person’s offensive speech is literal evidence of a certain type of crime. For example, if a person is repeatedly called a racial slur, no crime has been committed. However, if the person is then assaulted by the person making those slurs, it can be argued that disdain for the person’s racial identity served as a motive for the crime against them as evidenced by the language used preceding or during the assault. If the assailant was found to be guilty and it is proven that their actions were motivated by bigotry, the offender could be charged with a hate crime.

Making sense of the difference between hate speech and hate crimes hearkens back to early childhood when we all learned about sticks and stones. Actions causing harm to person or property are a crime. Name-calling and degrading speech are not. Unless or until speech directly encourages or includes harm to a person’s body or property, it is protected as an American right.

Beyond the U.S.: Hate Speech Vs. Free Speech

Outside of the U.S., countries like Austria and Germany have strict laws against hate speech. Certain Neo-Nazi groups have found ways around anti-hate speech laws in those countries when it comes to disseminating information on the Internet. Using servers based in the United States, these groups have created websites filled with hateful rhetoric. Such sites would be illegal if associated with servers based in their home countries, but as they exist on American servers, they are completely protected by the First Amendment.

Russian citizens, in particular, have struggled with differentiating free speech from hateful speech. In less than a decade, multiple laws have passed making it difficult for Russian citizens to speak publicly, especially via social media, about any discontent with the country’s government or even with certain religious authorities, such as the Russian Orthodox Church. While Russia’s Constitution shuns censorship and claims to protect freedom of thought and expression, those espousing critical viewpoints may be subject to a fine, community service or prison.

Hate Speech is Perfectly Legal

To hate a person or group is not a crime in America. To voice one’s hatred is not a crime, either. Hate speech is very difficult to separate from mere opinion, and without a definition everyone can agree upon, words and statements may be interpreted by some as offensive while others may find the exact same speech perfectly acceptable and cite one’s freedom of expression.

If you still have questions about hate speech, including how it may be used in determining a hate crime, you may read more about the First Amendment or consult a civil rights attorney in your area.

This article contains general legal information but does not constitute professional legal advice for your particular situation. The Law Dictionary is not a law firm, and this page does not create an attorney-client or legal adviser relationship. If you have specific questions, please consult a qualified attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.

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Meaning of hate speech in English

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• affirmation
• assert your right
• designation
• lay something on the line idiom
• self-affirmation
• send a message idiom
• set yourself up as something phrasal verb

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soft, loose clothing that is worn in bed and consists of trousers and a type of shirt

Cooking or hitting the books? (Idioms with ‘book’)

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Computer Science > Computation and Language

Title: defverify: do hate speech models reflect their dataset's definition.

Abstract: When building a predictive model, it is often difficult to ensure that domain-specific requirements are encoded by the model that will eventually be deployed. Consider researchers working on hate speech detection. They will have an idea of what is considered hate speech, but building a model that reflects their view accurately requires preserving those ideals throughout the workflow of data set construction and model training. Complications such as sampling bias, annotation bias, and model misspecification almost always arise, possibly resulting in a gap between the domain specification and the model's actual behavior upon deployment. To address this issue for hate speech detection, we propose DefVerify: a 3-step procedure that (i) encodes a user-specified definition of hate speech, (ii) quantifies to what extent the model reflects the intended definition, and (iii) tries to identify the point of failure in the workflow. We use DefVerify to find gaps between definition and model behavior when applied to six popular hate speech benchmark datasets.

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CBS Studios Killed ‘Brady Bunch’ Revival Over Cindy Brady Actor’s Hate Speech; She Says Her Political Views Made Her ‘Too Dangerous’

Cindy Brady actor Susan Olsen recently claimed on the “Walk Away Campaign” podcast (via Vanity Fair ) that CBS killed a revival of “ The Brady Bunch ” due to her support of Donald Trump and her controversial stances on hot button issues like Covid vaccines and the LGBTQ+ community — but that’s not the whole story, insiders note. For one thing, the show was set up at CBS Studios and hadn’t even been pitched to networks or streamers yet. More importantly, sources note that it was scrapped due to hate speech by Olsen, including homophobic slurs that had previously gotten her fired from a radio gig.

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“I did have a phone call with my [TV] siblings and my agent,” Olsen said on the podcast. “Everybody was saying, ‘We’re sorry, but they just won’t budge. They just will not have you in this.’ I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve been canceled.’ A role that I’ve played for over 50 years, I can’t play it now because I’m too dangerous. I was like ‘Well, okay guys, good luck, I hope you can sell it.’”

CBS Studios declined comment. According to Olsen, she was in talks for a “Brady Bunch” revival for about a year. She was allegedly questioned during the show’s early development about her politics by the revival’s showrunner and the son of Sherwood Schwartz, who created the original “Brady Bunch.” The actor was previously fired from the “Two Chicks Talkin’ Politics” radio show in 2016 after she shared anti-LGBTQ views on social media; she reportedly later responded to a guest (who had criticized her on social media) by sending him a text message filled with slurs and hate speech.

Per Vanity Fair’s recap of Olsen’s interview: “According to Olsen, the revival was going to thrust the Brady Bunch family into the modern era. One of Jan’s children was going to be trans, and one of the Bradys was going to have a Black spouse. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, did not sit right with Olsen. ‘To that I was like, come on, let’s not be so obvious. Let’s make this Black spouse somebody who has a really close relationship with another Brady, and that’s how this Brady met them. Give them a foundation so this isn’t a token position.'”

Olsen went on to say the “Brady Bunch” revival series is “dead in the water” now. Listen to the actor’s full interview on the “Walk Away Campaign” podcast here.

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Harris says she concurs with assessment that Trump is a fascist

John F. Kelly, a retired Marine general who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff, said in a recent interview that Trump seeks unfettered power.

PHILADELPHIA — Vice President Kamala Harris said on Wednesday she believes former president Donald Trump is a fascist, agreeing with the assessment of a growing number of Trump’s former top aides as she escalated her warnings about the Republican nominee’s character and fitness for office less than two weeks before Election Day.

Asked directly during a CNN town hall whether she thinks that Trump is a fascist, Harris said, “Yes, I do. Yes, I do.” Later, discussing voters concerned about the war in Gaza , the vice president said: “I also do know that for many people who care about this issue, they also care about bringing down the price of groceries. They also care about our democracy and not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

Harris’s comments came a day after a statement by Trump’s former White House chief of staff John F. Kelly that Trump meets the definition of a fascist, intensifying a debate over whether Trump has authoritarian tendencies and would abuse governmental power in a second term. Kelly, a retired Marine general, told the New York Times that Trump’s desire for unfettered power and other qualities fit the fascist label.

Mark T. Esper, who served as Trump’s secretary of defense, added Wednesday on CNN that “it’s hard to say” Trump does not fall into the category of a fascist. That followed a warning from retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a new book by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward that the former president is “fascist to the core.”

The cascade of alarms has created the unprecedented spectacle of a series of high-ranking military leaders, who by tradition are often nonpolitical, warning voters that a major presidential nominee is a potential dictator, underlining that message with a label that has traditionally been reserved for such figures as Italy’s Benito Mussolini rather than American political leaders.

Kelly’s warning has given Harris new ammunition for her assertion that Trump cannot be trusted with the powers of the presidency, and it has ensured that the question of Trump’s purported dictatorial character would be at the center of the campaign’s final days.

“He’s just putting out a 911 call to the American people,” Harris said of Kelly. “Understand what could happen if Donald Trump were back in the White House. And this time we must take very seriously [that] those folks who knew him best and who were career people are not going to be there to hold him back.”

Several hours before the CNN town hall Wednesday, Harris emerged from the vice-presidential residence at the Naval Observatory, an official building and one that has rarely been the scene of campaign pronouncements, to urge voters to heed the alarms from people who have worked with Trump that his beliefs are “incredibly dangerous.”

“Donald Trump is increasingly unhinged and unstable, and in a second term, people like John Kelly would not be there to be the guardrails against his propensities and his actions,” Harris told reporters. “Those who once tried to stop him from pursuing his worst impulses would no longer be there, and no longer be there to rein him in.”

She added, “The bottom line is this: We know what Donald Trump wants. He wants unchecked power. The question in 13 days will be: What do the American people want?”

Harris also responded to Kelly’s comment that Trump said that Adolf Hitler “did some good things.” The Atlantic, meanwhile, reported Tuesday that Trump once said in a private White House conversation: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”

“It is deeply troubling and incredibly dangerous that Donald Trump would invoke Adolf Hitler,” the vice president said. “The man who is responsible for the deaths of 6 million Jews and hundreds of thousands of Americans. All of this is further evidence for the American people of who Donald Trump really is. ”

Trump and his campaign sharply denied Kelly’s account of Trump’s comments.

“Thank you for your support against a total degenerate named John Kelly, who made up a story out of pure Trump Derangement Syndrome Hatred!” the former president wrote on Truth Social. “This guy had two qualities, which don’t work well together. He was tough and dumb. The problem is his toughness morphed into weakness, because he became JELLO with time.”

Election 2024

This is not the first time former military or diplomatic figures have warned that Trump has authoritarian impulses, although they have rarely used the term “fascist” until now.

Last month, more than 700 onetime national security officials of both parties issued an open letter endorsing Harris while saying Trump represents “authoritarianism” and would endanger democracy.

“He has heaped praise on adversarial dictators like China’s Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, as well as the terrorist leaders of Hezbollah,” said the letter, released by National Security Leaders for America.

Speaking to the Times, Kelly said he felt compelled to denounce Trump publicly in the weeks leading up to the 2024 election because of the former president’s repeated comments about deploying the power of the executive branch, including the military if necessary, to eliminate the “enemy from within.”

“And I think this issue of using the military on — to go after — American citizens is one of those things I think is a very, very bad thing — even to say it for political purposes to get elected — I think it’s a very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it,” Kelly said, according to the Times.

Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump, said in a statement that “John Kelly has totally beclowned himself with these debunked stories he has fabricated because he failed to serve his President well while working as Chief of Staff and currently suffers from a debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Cheung added that Trump “has always honored the service and sacrifice of all of our military men and women, whereas Kamala Harris has completely disrespected the families of those who gave the ultimate sacrifice, including the Abbey Gate 13.” That is a reference to the 13 American service members killed in an attack at Kabul’s airport during the rocky U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021.

The notion that Trump is a would-be dictator has become central to Harris’s argument in the campaign’s final stretch. While top figures in both parties have hammered on this theme for months, Kelly’s decision to speak publicly has added a dramatic new resonance to the message.

Kelly is a decorated Marine who served two long tours in Iraq. In 2010 he lost a son , Lt. Robert Kelly, who was killed by a land mine while serving in Afghanistan.

Trump named the recently retired Kelly as homeland security secretary in 2017, one of several prominent military officials he appointed to top posts in his administration upon taking office. Trump then tapped Kelly to be his chief of staff, the most powerful staff position in the White House and a job Kelly held for about a year and a half.

Kelly has previously made clear his dim view of the former president. In an October 2023 interview with CNN , Kelly confirmed previous reporting that Trump told him service members who had been seriously wounded or tortured as prisoners of war were “suckers” and those who died in combat were “losers.”

And in November, about two months before the start of the Republican presidential primaries, Kelly said in an interview with The Post that he was bewildered by Trump’s enduring popularity within the Republican Party. “What’s going on in the country that a single person thinks this guy would still be a good president when he’s said the things he’s said and done the things he’s done?” Kelly said. “It’s beyond my comprehension he has the support he has.”

Kelly is one of the most prominent figures among scores of former Trump administration officials who have spoken out against his comeback bid. The group includes Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence , who broke with Trump over his push to overturn his 2020 reelection loss, as well as over more traditional conservative issues.

The warnings by former Trump advisers are factoring heavily into Harris’s closing message, which paints Trump as unstable and power-hungry. Harris spent Monday campaigning across battleground states with former GOP congresswoman Liz Cheney , who emerged as a vocal Trump critic after his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The criticism of Trump by people who served under him has been notable among those with military backgrounds, a striking phenomenon given the nonpolitical culture of the American military. These former military figures have framed their efforts to block Trump from a return to the White House as a matter of national security.

“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try,” Jim Mattis, Trump’s former defense secretary, said in a 2020 statement .

Harris’s campaign sought to further emphasize Kelly’s latest comments during a media call Wednesday with Steve Anderson, a retired Army brigadier general supporting Harris, and Kevin Carroll, a senior counselor to Kelly when he was Trump’s homeland security secretary.

Anderson said he was grateful that Kelly was speaking up but wished that he had done so earlier, and he suggested that Kelly should go further and endorse Harris. Carroll said Kelly, as a former military leader, remains “loath” to make any partisan endorsements.

Still, Carroll added, “The man would rather chew on broken glass than vote for Donald Trump.”

Svitek and Edwards reported from Washington. Marianne LeVine in Washington contributed to this report.

Follow live updates on the 2024 election and Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump from our reporters on the campaign trail and in Washington.

Presidential polls: Check out how Harris and Trump stack up, according to The Washington Post’s presidential polling averages of seven battleground states. We’ve identified eight possible paths to victory based on the candidates’ current standing in the polls and created a guide to the seven swing states .

Policy positions: We’ve collected Harris’s and Trump’s stances on the most important issues — abortion, economic policy, immigration and more.

House and Senate control: Senate Democrats are at risk of losing their slim 51-49 majority this fall. The Post breaks down the nine races and three long shots that could determine Senate control . In the House, 10 competitive races will determine whether Republicans will retain their narrow control of the chamber next year.