Online hate speech has been a topic of public concern and research interest for some time. Initially the focus of this centred on the proliferation of online groups and websites promoting and distributing discriminatory content. Since the introduction of more interactive tools and platforms in the mid-2000s that enabled new and faster ways of disseminating content in a relatively anonymous fashion, concerns about online hate speech becoming a pervasive behavior have increased. Current research (...) and analysis acknowledge the complex nature of online hate, the mediating role of technology and the influence of other contextual factors (e.g. social or political events). However, despite the growing attention on the topic, New Zealand-based research looking at personal experiences and/or exposure to online hate is surprisingly absent. This study seeks to address this gap. It builds on existing international research on young people’s experiences to explore those of the adult New Zealand population based on a nationally representative sample. The research instrument used for this study was an online survey. (shrink)

Government agencies in New Zealand are not required to systematically collect data on online hate speech, thus, there is a lack of longitudinal evidence regarding this phenomenon. This report presents trends in personal experiences of and exposure to online hate speech among adult New Zealanders based on nationally representative data. The findings from this study are also compared with results from a similar research study conducted in 2018. In addition, this report explores people’s perceptions (...) about other issues related to hate speech. The goal of this study is to fill some knowledge gaps regarding the extent and nature of hate speech in New Zealand. It also seeks to provide reliable and robust evidence to inform public conversation on the topic and the implementation of strategies and activities to ensure all New Zealanders, no matter what their characteristics, are safe online to benefit from the multiple opportunities of the digital environment. (shrink)

Government agencies in New Zealand are not required to systematically collect data on online hate speech, thus, there is a lack of longitudinal evidence regarding this phenomenon. This report presents trends in personal experiences of and exposure to online hate speech among adult New Zealanders based on nationally representative data. The findings from this study are also compared with results from a similar research study conducted in 2018. In addition, this report explores people’s perceptions (...) about other issues related to hate speech. The goal of this study is to fill some knowledge gaps regarding the extent and nature of hate speech in New Zealand. It also seeks to provide reliable and robust evidence to inform public conversation on the topic and the implementation of strategies and activities to ensure all New Zealanders, no matter what their characteristics, are safe online to benefit from the multiple opportunities of the digital environment. (shrink)

We provide a new text corpus from the social medium Telegram, which is rich in indirect forms of divisive speech. We scraped all messages from one channel of supporters of Donald Trump, covering a large part of his presidency from late 2016 until January 2021. The discussion among the group members over this long time period includes the spread of disinformation, disparaging of out-group members, and other forms of offensive speech. To encourage research into such practices of poisoning (...) public political discourse, we added automatic annotations of offensive language to all messages. We further added manual annotations of harmful language to a portion of the posts in order to enable the analysis of more implicit forms of online harm. (shrink)

A lot of subordinating speech has moved online, which raises several questions for philosophers. Can current accounts of oppressive speech adequately capture digital hate? How does the anonymity of online harassers contribute to the force of their speech? This paper examines online abuse and argues that standard accounts of licensing and accommodation are not up to the task of explaining the authority of online hate speech, as speaker authority often depends (...) on the community in more ways than these accounts suggests. Instead I argue that online abusive speech is best understood as collective subordinating speech acts, as their authority is drawn from an ad hoc collective. I argue that anonymity and shared language offer online abusers a path to a type of group-authority that explains the harm their speech is capable of. I close by suggesting that similar considerations are in play for IRL subordinating speech, and that online abuse helps to reveal key features of subordinating speech across mediums that are under-emphasized in the existing literature. (shrink)

Harmful and dangerous language is frequent in social media, in particular in spaces which are considered anonymous and/or allow free participation. In this paper, we analyse the language in a Telegram channel populated by followers of Donald Trump, in order to identify the ways in which harmful language is used to create a specific narrative in a group of mostly like-minded discussants. Our research has several aims. First, we create an extended taxonomy of potentially harmful language that includes not only (...) hate speech and direct insults, but also more indirect ways of poisoning online discourse, such as divisive speech and the glorification of violence. We apply this taxonomy to a large portion of the corpus. Our data gives empirical evidence for harmful speech such as in/out-group divisive language and the use of codes within certain communities which have not often been investigated before. Second, we compare our manual annotations to several automatic methods of classifying hate speech and offensive language, namely list based and machine learning based approaches. We find that the Telegram data set still poses particular challenges for these automatic methods. Finally, we argue for the value of studying such naturally occurring, coherent data sets for research on online harm and how to address it in linguistics and philosophy. (shrink)

This dissertation fits within the literature on subordinating speech and aims to demonstrate that how language subordinates is more complex than has been described by most philosophers. I argue that the harms that subordinating speech inflicts on its targets (chapter one), the type of authority that is exercised by subordinating speakers (chapters two and three), and the expansive variety of subordinating speech acts themselves (chapter three) are all under-developed subjects in need of further refinement—and, in some cases, (...) large paradigm shifts. I also examine cases that have yet to be adequately addressed by philosophers working on this topic, like the explosion of abusive speech online (chapter four) or the distinctive speech acts of protest groups (chapter five). I argue that by considering these alongside the ‘paradigm’ cases of subordinating speech that inform most models, we are better able to capture the lived realities of this phenomena, as described by members of groups targeted by such speech. I develop a novel account of speaker authority to explain the variety of pragmatic effects subordinating speech generates. Instead of seeing this authority as reducible to either a formal position or a merely local, linguistic phenomenon, I argue for a conception of speaker authority that is a richly contextual social fact, distributed unevenly among members of different social groups. I also develop an account of collective authority that explains how a group of speakers can join together to subordinate in a way that no individual speaker is capable of doing. This account, I argue, is better able to explain the social reality of subordinating speech than individualist models. Overall, I show how a more fine-grained account of subordinating speaker authority gives us a more accurate picture of the different subordinating speech acts available to different speakers, along with how these may harm their targets. (shrink)

Jeremy Waldron, among others, has forcefully argued that public hate speech assaults the dignity of its targets. Without denying this claim, I contend that it fails to establish that bans, rather than counterspeech, are the appropriate response. By articulating a more refined understanding of counterspeech, I suggest that counterspeech constitutes a better way of blocking hate speech’s dignitarian harm. In turn, I address two objections: according to the first, which draws on contemporary philosophy of language, counterspeech (...) does not block enough hate speech; according to the second, counterspeech blocks too much speech. Although these objections should qualify our optimism regarding counterspeech, I demonstrate that each can be turned, with even greater force, against hate speech bans. (shrink)

Are government restrictions on hate speech consistent with the priority of liberty? This relatively narrow policy question will serve as the starting point for a wider discussion of the use and abuse of nonideal theory in contemporary political philosophy, especially as practiced on the academic left. I begin by showing that hate speech (understood as group libel) can undermine fair equality of opportunity for historically-oppressed groups but that the priority of liberty seems to forbid its restriction. (...) This tension between free speech and equal opportunity creates a dilemma for liberal egalitarians. Nonideal theory apparently offers an escape from this dilemma, but after examining three versions of such an escape strategy, I conclude that none is possible: liberal egalitarians are indeed forced to choose between liberty and equality in this case and others. I finish the paper by examining its implications for other policy arenas, including markets in transplantable human organs and women’s reproductive services. (shrink)

According to René Girard, all religious traditions - and so every tradition- originate from a communitarian violence towards a randomly chosen individual. I provide an introductory construal of Girard’s proposal in the first section of my paper. In the second section, I will address a conceptual view of the theory by making explicit its principles and their inferential relations. In the third section, I will explain how philosophers of language address slurs and hate-speech. Particularly, I will apply such (...) materials to Girard’s assumption that the three friends’ discourses to Job are instances of hate-speech. My purpose is to defend the use of a presuppositional account of derogatory epithets in the philosophy of religion, and to argue for the legitimacy of reading a number of religious statements which cement a social group into a “we” in opposition to an individual who is individuated as an instance of a “not-we” as slurs. In the fourth section, I will argue that, if Girard is right in thinking that speech-hate and the use of slurs are means for the identification of a scapegoat within a group, then Girard’s theory needs to be adjusted in order to accommodate some obvious difficulties. Finally, in the fifth section, I will sum up my conclusions and then provide a few suggestions for defending the theory. (shrink)

This paper examines two recent contributions to the hate speech literature – by Steven Heyman and Jeremy Waldron – which seek a justification for the legal restriction of hate speech in an account of the way that hate speech infringes against people’s dignity. These analyses look beyond the first-order hurts and disadvantages suffered by the immediate targets of hate speech, and consider the prospect of hate speech sustaining complex social structures (...) whose wide-scale operations lower the social status of members of targeted groups. In Heyman’s and Waldron’s accounts we find plausible insights into the nature of identity-based social hierarchies, and the harms that redound to subordinated people under the operations of such hierarchies. I argue, however, that both analyses are unsuccessful as justifications for the restriction of hate speech, because they do not ultimately provide reason to think that hate speech is responsible for creating or sustaining identity-based social hierarchies. (shrink)

Contemporary egalitarian liberals—unlike their classical counterparts—have lived through many contentious events where the right to freedom of expression has been tested to its limits—the Skokie, Illinois, skinhead marches, hate speech incidents on college campuses, Internet pornography and hate speech sites, Holocaust deniers, and cross-burners, to name just a few. Despite this contemporary tumult, freedom of expression has been nearly unanimously affirmed in both the U.S. jurisprudence and philosophical discourse. In what follows, I will examine Ronald Dworkin's (...) influential contemporary justification for freedom of expression, which claims that a thoroughgoing right to freedom of expression is justified by the fact that it guarantees and preserves liberalism's commitment to equality by offering everyone an opportunity to speak, whereas any other policy, such as state regulation, would fail to offer this equal opportunity. This justification has been challenged by feminists and critical race theorists, who find the cases of pornography and hate speech to be sufficient threats to the freedom of expression and equality of their targets—women and minorities—to warrant limiting freedom of expression in these cases. I will argue that if Dworkin is to take equality as seriously as he claims to, then, by his own lights, he must back away from an unrestricted freedom of expression, in light of these distinctly contemporary challenges of the harms of systemic racism and sexism, which underlie hate speech and pornography. (shrink)

Of all the spheres where hate speech thrives, religion and politics seem to be more pronounced. Speeches made to cast aspersions on political affiliations and ideologies as well as on religious faiths, heavily affect the political beliefs, participation and reactions of the people concerned to the happenings within the sociopolitical arena. Comments made on religion, like those on politics, have a high propensity to either make or mar the entire political well-being or otherwise of the country. How religious (...) groups react deliberately or spontaneously to speeches against their faiths, and how such reactions affect the political stability of a country like Nigeria, is what this paper seeks to explore. In this paper that uses the library research method to make an incursion into the subject of hate speech and political stability, works of other scholars in the area are examined and the researcher‟s position is situated within the raging discourse on the subject matter. Extant laws governing the exercise of religious and speech freedom are explored. The paper contends that certain communication practices in parts of the world have undermined people‟s right to religious freedom. It, therefore, recommends respect for religious rights and freedom as a way to avert possible political instability occasioned by intolerable verbal attacks on religious practices. (shrink)

At the center of the hate speech controversy is the question whether it constitutes conduct. If hate speech is not conduct, then restricting it runs counter to free speech. But even if it could be shown that it is a kind of conduct, complicated questions arise. Does it necessarily follow that we restrict speech? Practically speaking, can speech even be restricted, either through new legislation or the enforcement of existing laws regulating conduct? Are (...) measures such as hate crimes legislation both useful and appropriate in protecting individuals and groups from violence? The present paper aims to address these questions by reconstructing and assessing Judith Butler’s important treatment of speech-acts and hate speech in her book Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative. (shrink)

Among the most persuasive arguments against hate speech bans was made by Ronald Dworkin, who warned of the threat to political legitimacy posed by laws that deny those subject to them adequ...

The dignity approach to racist hate speech regulation maintains that hate speech ought to be regulated because it impugns targets’ dignity and poses a threat to their equal treatment. This approach faces the significant causal challenges of showing that hate speech has the power to erode its targets’ dignity and that regulations can successfully protect that dignity. My aim is to show how a friend of the dignity approach can resolve these challenges. To do (...) so, I borrow insights from the critical legal studies (CLS) approach to hate speech. Specifically, I argue that hate speech can erode its targets’ dignity 1) by constituting an act of discrimination, and 2) by enacting norms that call for treating targeted groups as inferior. Yet while I maintain that the CLS approach offers valuable resources for shoring up the dignity approach, I reject the CLS approach in favor of the dignity approach. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that to properly understand our commitment to a principle of free speech, we must pay attention to what should count as speech for the purposes of such a principle. We defend the view that ‘speech’ here should be a technical term, with something other than its ordinary sense. We then offer a partial characterization of this technical sense. We contrast our view with some influential views about free speech , and show (...) that our view has distinct advantages. Finally, we consider racist hate speech. Here, we argue that if certain theorists are right about what some racist hate speech does, then such speech should fall outside the scope of the free speech principle, and so, should be as regulable as any non-speech action. (shrink)

Contemporary public discourse is saturated with speech that vilifies and incites hatred or violence against vulnerable groups. The term “hate speech” has emerged in legal circles and in ordinary language to refer to these communicative acts. But legal theorists and philosophers disagree over how to define this term. This paper makes the case for, and subsequently develops, the first corpus-based analysis of the ordinary meaning of “hate speech.” We begin by demonstrating that key interpretive and (...) moral disputes surrounding hate speech laws—in particular, surrounding their compatibility with the rule of law, democracy, and free speech—depend crucially on the ordinary meaning of “hate speech.” Next, we argue, drawing on recent developments in legal philosophy, that corpus linguistics constitutes a distinctively promising tool for ascertaining the ordinary meaning of “hate speech.” Finally, we offer a proof of concept, by outlining, and analyzing the interpretive and moral implications of, the first such study. (shrink)

Derogatory terms (racist, sexist, ethnic epithets) have long played various roles and achieved diverse ends in works of art. Focusing on basic aspects of an aesthetic object or work, this article examines the interpretive relation between point of view and content, asking how aesthetic contextualization shapes the impact of such terms. Can context, particularly aesthetic contexts, detach the derogatory force from powerful epithets and racist and sexist images? What would it be about aesthetic contexts that would make this possible? The (...) article puts into aesthetic contexts both Absolutist and Reclaimer views about the power of derogatory terms, applying an inferential role semantics, developed for language, to both words and images. The Reclaimer’s position, that derogation is a matter of pragmatics, of use, emphasizes the context-sensitivity of the term, that is matters who says it, to whom, when, where, and why. Understanding derogatory terms used as hate speech helps to make this position clear. The Absolutist’s position, that no contextual variations can detach the derogation from these deeply derogatory terms, is developed here through attention to subordinating images in pornography. The article argues that art may be able to achieve the deviant interpretations that the Reclaimer needs to undermine the derogations while maintaining sensitivity and awareness of the history of oppression. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that hate speech expresses hate, and answer some objections to expressivist views. First, I briefly comment on some limitations of pragmatic accounts of harmful speech. I then present an expressive-normative view of derogatory discourse according to which it is expressive of an affective state by presupposing it. A linguistic act expressive of an affective state inherits the normativity that is constitutive of that state, as directed to its intentional object. If the (...) act is successful, it updates the conversational context with the normative appraisal conditions of the affective state presupposed. I argue that this model can be applied to hate speech. I rely on current research on the psychology of hate to identify the appraisal conditions, action tendencies, and motivational goals characteristic of hate. The account supplements other pragmatic accounts of hate speech. (shrink)

At first glance, hate speech and microaggressions seem to have little overlap beyond being communicated verbally or in written form. Hate speech seems clearly macro-aggressive: an intentional, obviously harmful act lacking the ambiguity (and plausible deniability) of microaggressions. If we look back at historical discussions of hate speech, however, many of these assumed differences turn out to be points of similarity. The harmfulness of hate speech only became widely acknowledged after a concerted (...) effort by critical race theorists, feminists, and other activists. Before the 1990s, slurs were widely considered socially acceptable behavior: mere jokes that weren’t intended to be harmful. Authors like Richard Delgado, Mari Matsuda, and Charles Lawrence pushed back against this dismissal. In this chapter, I show that their arguments for the serious harmfulness of hate speech prefigure and provide support for current debates about the serious harmfulness of microaggressions. Exploring resonances with the 1980s hate speech debate will allow us to explain why microaggressions fall below the cutoff for legal liability but remain apt targets for moral blame. (shrink)

The distinctly contemporary proliferation of pornography and hate speech poses a challenge to liberalism's traditional ideal of a 'marketplace of ideas' facilitated by state neutrality about the content of speech. This new study argues that the liberal state ought to depart from neutrality to meet this challenge.

In this article, I provide an argument against the idea that public hate-speech events are harmful because they cause a discrete, traceable and harmful change in one’s propositional attitudes. To do so, I identify the essential conceptual architecture of public hate-speech situations, I assess existing arguments for the direct and indirect harm of public hate speech and I propose a novel way to approach public hate-speech situations: a maieutic approach. On this perspective, (...) public hate-speech events do not cause changes in propositional attitudes, but rather, if successful, either such events bring a person’s latent propositional attitudes into clear consciousness, or they play with propositional attitudes speakers and their audience had prior to the public hate-speech situation. (shrink)

Some authors claim that hate speech plays a key role in perpetuating unjust social hierarchy. One prima facie plausible hypothesis about how this occurs is that hate speech has a pernicious influence on the attitudes of children. Here I argue that this hypothesis has an important part to play in the formulation of an especially robust case for general legal prohibitions on hate speech. If our account of the mechanism via which hate (...) class='Hi'>speech effects its harms is built around claims about hate speech’s influence on children, then we will be better placed to acquire evidence that demonstrates the processes posited in our account, and better placed to ascribe responsibility for these harms to individuals who engage in hate speech. I briefly suggest some policy implications that come with developing an account of the harm of hate speech along these lines. (shrink)

The use of language in hate speech is understandably offensive. Though words do not kill, they convey an alarming message that can harm the victim. To understand how words can harm, it is necessary to understand the nature of the meaning of pejoratives or slurs that are used in hate speech. Pejoratives are undeniably offensive. However, they are puzzling as they can be used in two directions, namely, the offensive power preservation and the offensive power destruction. (...) This paper proposes that the direct reference theory of pejoratives can solve the puzzle. A characterization of pejoratives is that it has the property of immediacy. They refer directly to the object of speech. Grounding on a shared context, any descriptions are unnecessary for understanding the offensive message of pejoratives. In this sense, pejoratives have indexical content as it is context-sensitive. The kind of indexical content that pertains to pejoratives is action-oriented. However, its object of reference is empty. In discussing pejoratives that are used in hate speech, some examples of Thai slurs are shown. (shrink)

_One of the strongest arguments against hate speech legislation is the so-called Argument from Political Speech. This argument problematizes the restrictions that might be placed on political opinions or political critique when these opinions are expressed in a way which can be interpreted as ‘hateful’ towards minority groups. One of the strongest free speech scholars opposing hate speech legislation is Ronald Dworkin, who stresses that having restrictions on hate speech is, in fact, (...) illegitimate in a liberal democracy. The right to express oneself freely concerning any political decision is, according to Dworkin, a core democratic principle; it is what self-governance – and hence liberal democracies – are built upon. Dworkin and many other free speech scholars based in the United States see hate speech legislation as a threat to expressing oneself freely and critically. I argue that Dworkin and other US-based free speech scholars tend to overlook actual hate speech legislation in countries where such laws have been implemented and have functioned for decades. Furthermore, I argue that the real threat against political speech lies not in hate speech legislation but rather outside of the law, namely, in private institutions such as universities and museums. Restrictions on political speech in various societal circumstances have been on the rise over the last decades – first and foremost in the US. I analyse why these restrictions on political speech are more widespread in the only Western country without laws against hate speech than they are in countries with implemented hate speech laws._ _Keywords_: political speech, hate speech, hate speech legislation, private institu-tions, universities, USA. (shrink)

Overall, there’s a rich literature on free speech and hate speech. However, there’s been comparatively less discussion on hate speech that brings in empirical psychological and medical evidence on the possible health harms hate speech can have for minorities. I introduce and piece together a set of pre-existing scientific data that’s new to the philosophical literature to help sufficiently establish an argument that governments should ban hate speech. Given the adverse effects (...) hate speech can have on one’s mental and physical health, hate speech causes harm at many times. Since it causes such harm and leads to overridingly negative consequences, the government ought to regulate such speech. (shrink)

‘Transformative liberals’ believe that the state should use its non-coercive capacities to counter hateful speech and practices, by seeking to transform the views of those who hold hateful and discriminatory beliefs. This paper critically assesses transformative liberalism, with a particular focus on the theory developed by Corey Brettschneider. For Brettschneider, the state should engage in ‘democratic persuasion’ by speaking out against views that are incompatible with the ideal of free and equal citizenship, and refusing to fund or subsidise civil (...) society groups that hold such views. My critique has five parts. I first rebut two central justifications for transformative liberalism, regarding complicity and the undermining of equal citizenship. Second, I show that some of the central policies that Brettschneider advocates are in fact coercive. Third, I raise concerns about the nature of the complex and contestable judgments that transformative liberalism requires the state to make. Fourth, I argue that Brettschneider’s view has various troubling implications. Finally, I argue that many of these problems derive from his adoption of a thick conception of free and equal citizenship, resulting in an overly broad definition of hateful viewpoints and of hate speech. A defensible version of transformative liberalism would use a significantly narrower conception. (shrink)

Anonymity promotes free speech by protecting the identity of people who might otherwise face negative consequences for expressing their ideas. Wrongdoers, however, often abuse this invisibility cloak. Defenders of anonymity online emphasise its value in advancing public debate and safeguarding political dissension. Critics emphasise the need for identifiability in order to achieve accountability for wrongdoers such as trolls. The problematic tension between anonymity and identifiability online lies in the desirability of having low costs (no repercussions) for desirable (...) speech and high costs (appropriate repercussions) for undesirable speech. If we practice either full anonymity or identifiability, we end up having either low or high costs in all online contexts and for all kinds of speech. I argue that free speech is compatible with instituting costs in the form of repercussions and penalties for controversial and unacceptable speech. Costs can minimise the risks of anonymity by providing a reasonable degree of accountability. Pseudonymity is a tool that can help us regulate those costs while furthering free speech. This article argues that, in order to redesign the Internet to better serve free speech, we should shape much of it to resemble an online masquerade. (shrink)

Marginalized communities are confronted with issues resulting from their marginalization, such as exclusion, invisibility, misrepresentation, and hate speech, not only offline but – due to digital change – increasingly online. Our research project DigitalDialog21 aims at evaluating the effects of digital change on society and how digital change, and the risks and possibilities that come with it, is perceived by the population. Digital change is understood as a factor of social change in this project. By investigating digital (...) change and its effects on society, we are able to draw more general inferences on how societies change socially and what needs to be done in education to establish digital trust. In 2017 the Digital Evolution Index observed an increasing trust deficit and skepticism towards digitalization in both very industrialized and lesser industrialized countries. We will draw inferences from these observations here and hypothesize the following: It seems that especially in marginalized communities, that is: in communities that are structurally and systemically disadvantaged and that experience societal marginalization, this trust deficit and skepticism towards digitalization is prevalent. This could be so because, as a member of a marginalized community, one might quickly find issues resulting from marginalization to be present in digital spaces just like they are present in non-digital spaces. This paper will examine critically how attitudes in marginalized communities towards digital media are influenced by digital change. Do the risks of digitalization outweigh the advantages for marginalized communities? Are digital media perceived to provide advantages such as increased visibility and representation or are they perceived to fuel discrimination against marginalized people? Our research project brings together secondary analyses of existing studies with the results of our own qualitative interview study on marginalized people's perceptions of digital change. The paper will portray some example interviews, and thereby analyze if and how attitudes in the margins towards digital media change, what this change consists of, and how we can understand the changing attitudes within an ethical and educational framework. Our findings will point at a necessity to increase ethically based digital literacy (PEAT) in the German education system, starting in early education. Marginalized groups in particular must be empowered to become digitally competent through problem-oriented education. Independent self-efficacy can increase digital trust in fragmented societies. The paper concludes by introducing media ethics tools that are being developed as part of the project. (shrink)

This article offers a comprehensive and critical analysis of Eric Heinze’s book Hate Speech and Democratic Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2016). Heinze’s project is to formulate and defend a more theoretically complex version of the idea (also defended by people like Ronald Dworkin and James Weinstein) that general legal prohibitions on hate speech in public discourse compromises the state’s democratic legitimacy. We offer a detailed synopsis of Heinze’s view, highlighting some of its distinctive qualities and strengths. (...) We then develop a critical response to this view with three main focal points: (1) the characterisation of democratic legitimacy as something distinct from (and whose demands aren’t identical with those of) legitimacy per se; (2) the claim that the requirements of democracy are hypothetical, rather than categorical, imperatives; and relatedly (3) the question of how we should reconcile the requirements of democratic legitimacy with the costs that may follow from prioritising democratic legitimacy. We argue that there are significant difficulties for Heinze’s account on all three fronts. (shrink)

Hate speech, understood broadly, is any form of expression intended to arouse hatred or contempt toward members of a particular social group. When university administrators have reason to believe that a planned speaking event on campus may feature hate speech (at least in the eyes of some), how should they respond? In this paper I address this question as it arises for Canadian universities. I argue that, where the regulation of campus speech is concerned, the (...) right course of action for university administrators is nearly always to do absolutely nothing. They will have reason to become actively involved only in order to ensure that a speaking event proceeds safely, or when it threatens to disrupt the functioning of the university, or when it is itself threatened with disruption by protesting groups. In those instances the justification for intervention will be to protect and facilitate speech, not to shut it down. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to consider the question of whether democratic legitimacy requires viewpoint neutrality with regard to political speech – including extremist political speech, such as hate speech. The starting point of my discussion is Jeremy Waldron’s negative answer to this question. He argues that it is permissible for liberal democracies to ban certain extremist viewpoints – such as vituperative hate speech – because such viewpoint-based restrictions protect the dignity of persons (...) and a social and moral environment of mutual respect. According to Waldron, well-drafted narrow hate speech bans are not democratically illegitimate, and they do not undermine systemic democratic legitimacy – that is, the legitimacy of a democratic political system. In contrast to Waldron, I will argue that democratic legitimacy requires viewpoint neutrality to respect persons as thinking agents. I will defend a civil libertarian doctrine of viewpoint neutrality, and this doctrine requires that citizens in liberal democracies ought to have a legal free speech right to do moral wrong – that is, a legal right to express and defend any political viewpoint or idea, even if it is morally wrong to express, or expose others to, such views. It will be argued that any viewpoint-based restriction on public discourse is democratically illegitimate, and that such restrictions undermine systemic democratic legitimacy. (shrink)

While most of the literature has attempted to justify harsh and soft containment given some fundamental commitments of political liberalism, I focus on how justified forms of containment can in themselves be deemed effective. This article shows that a reading of Rawls allows for a comparison of different containment practices based on their capacity to protect the stability of liberal democracies under serious threat. And, in making it possible to compare harsh and soft containment, I evaluate immediate stability gains against (...) citizens’ judgements about their liberal democratic institutions. (shrink)

This paper clarifies the legal right to free speech, identifies ways that speech can be harmful, and discusses pornography hate speech, and lies. It is also written for a non-technical audience.

Using speech act theory from the Philosophy of Language, this paper attempts to develop an ethical framework for the phenomenon of speech processing. We use the concepts of the illocutionary force and the illocutionary content of a speech act to explain the ethics of speech processing. By emphasizing the different stages involved in speech processing, we explore the distinct ethical issues that arise in relation to each stage. Input, processing, and output are the different ethically (...) relevant stages under which a spoken item or a speech navigates within the range of speech-processing modules. Employing the illocutionary force-content distinction, we specify and characterize the input-related ethical issues, the output-related ethical issues, and the processing-related ethical issues involved in speech processing. Together with illocutionary force-content distinction, we employ the data-information distinction to characterize the stage-wise ethical issues in the phenomenon of speech processing as the ethics of collecting (speech) data, the ethics of contextualizing (speech) data/information, and the ethics of releasing the con-textualized information (processed speech). Immediate ethical issues that arise from the range of speech processing modules are distinguished from distant ethical issues. We also indicate the nature of ethical issues that arise from Speaker Independent speech technologies. (shrink)

The research study aimed at assessing the various difficulties that speech teachers had in delivering lessons during the distance learning era. The various phenomena and themes that emerged from the survey were determined using a descriptive research design. The survey was conducted to collect information about the various characteristics and behavior of speech teachers. It also explored the factors that influenced their decisions and actions when it came to addressing the pandemic. The repeated themes that emerged, include low (...) motivation, altered activities, unstable internet connection, comprehension, questionable output integrity, delayed submissions, in-person monitoring, and the system of communicating with inactive students in online mode. (shrink)

Building on the work of Peter Hinst and Geo Siegwart, we develop a pragmatised natural deduction calculus, i.e. a natural deduction calculus that incorporates illocutionary operators at the formal level, and prove its adequacy. In contrast to other linear calculi of natural deduction, derivations in this calculus are sequences of object-language sentences which do not require graphical or other means of commentary in order to keep track of assumptions or to indicate subproofs. (Translation of our German paper "Ein Redehandlungskalkül. Ein (...) pragmatisierter Kalkül des natürlichen Schließens nebst Metatheorie"; online available at http://philpapers.org/rec/CORERE.). (shrink)

An article by Gregory in The Conversation in early 2024 re-introduced the inner speech experiences and referred readers to a 2023 publication by Nedergaard and Lupyan in 2023. Nedergaard and Lupyan’s paper has proposed the term “anendophasia,” describing the phenomenon whereby some people have not experienced inner speech.

Despite its long history of investigating sociality, phenomenology has, to date, said little about online sociality. The phenomenological tradition typically claims that empathy is the fundamental way in which we experience others and their experiences. While empathy is discussed almost exclusively in the context of face-to-face interaction, I claim that we can empathetically perceive others and their experiences in certain online situations. Drawing upon the phenomenological distinction between the physical, objective body and the expressive, lived body, I: (i) (...) highlight that empathy involves perceiving the other’s expressive, lived body, (ii) show that the lived body is not tied to the physical body and that empathy can take place outside of face-to-face interactions, and (iii) argue that the lived body can enter online space and is empathetically available to others there. I explore two ways in which the other’s lived body enters online space and can be empathetically perceived: first, in cases where our face-to-face encounter is technologically-mediated over video link and, second, by showing how the other’s texts, as speech, can form part of the other’s lived body. Investigating empathy online not only furthers our understanding of online encounters but also leads to a refined conception of empathy more generally. (shrink)

Social media platforms allow users to perform different speech acts: status updates could be assertives, a like is an expressive, a friendship request is a directive, and so on. But sharing (or "retweeting") seems to lack a fixed illocutive status: this explains why present controversies concerning the sharing of misinformation have been debated in legal procedure and discussed from the point of view of personal responsibility without reaching a general consensus. The premise of this paper is that the diffusion (...) of false or unwarranted information could be better analyzed if we consider sharing a precisely definable speech act. I will describe some dominant interpretations of the act of sharing that are not, however, sufficient to fully explain it. As an alternative, it will be shown that there is a specific illocutive structure of the act of sharing, which not only consists in asserting the "shareworthiness" or the relevance of a content, but is primarily comparable to an "attention-orienting" directive. (shrink)

In this paper I provide an interpretation of Kant’s conception of free speech. Free speech is understood as the kind of speech that is constitutive of interaction respectful of everybody’s right to freedom, and it requires what we with John Rawls may call ‘public reason’. Public reason so understood refers to how the public authority must reason in order to properly specify the political relation between citizens. My main aim is to give us some reasons for taking (...) a renewed interest in Kant’s conception of free speech, including his account public reason. Kant’s position provides resources for dealing with many of the legal and political problems we currently struggle to analyze under this heading, such as the proper distinction between the sphere of justice and the sphere of ethics, hate speech, freedom of speech, defamation, and the public guarantee of reliable media and universal education. (shrink)

Exploring online criticisms of the ‘take the knee’ protest during ‘Euro 2020’, this article examines how alt- and far-right conspiracies were both constructed and communicated via the social media platform, Twitter. By providing a novel exploration of alt-right conspiracies during an international football tournament, a qualitative thematic analysis of 1,388 original tweets relating to Euro 2020 was undertaken. The findings reveal how, in criticisms levelled at both ‘wokeism’ and the Black Lives Matter movement, antiwhite criticisms of the ‘take the (...) knee’ protest were embroiled in alt-right conspiracies that exposed an assumed Cultural Marxist, ‘woke agenda’ in the tournament’s organization and mainstream media coverage. In conclusion, it is argued that conspiratorial discourses, associated with the alt-right, provided a framework through which the protest could be understood. This emphasises how the significance of conspiracy functions to promote the wider dissemination of alt-right ideology across popular cultural contexts, such as sport. (shrink)

This paper investigates whether search engines and other new modes of online communication should be covered by free speech principles. It criticizes the analogical reason-ing that contemporary American courts and scholars have used to liken search engines to newspapers, and to extend free speech coverage to them based on that likeness. There are dissimilarities between search engines and newspapers that undermine the key analogy, and also rival analogies that can be drawn which don’t recommend free speech (...) protection for search engines. Partly on these bases, we argue that an analogical approach to questions of free speech coverage is of limited use in this context. Credible verdicts about how free speech principles should apply to new modes of online com-munication require us to re-excavate the normative foundations of free speech. This method for deciding free speech coverage suggests that only a subset of search engine outputs and similar online communication should receive special protection against government regulation. (shrink)

Online service providers —such as AOL, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter—significantly shape the informational environment and influence users’ experiences and interactions within it. There is a general agreement on the centrality of OSPs in information societies, but little consensus about what principles should shape their moral responsibilities and practices. In this article, we analyse the main contributions to the debate on the moral responsibilities of OSPs. By endorsing the method of the levels of abstract, we first analyse the moral (...) responsibilities of OSPs in the web. These concern the management of online information, which includes information filtering, Internet censorship, the circulation of harmful content, and the implementation and fostering of human rights. We then consider the moral responsibilities ascribed to OSPs on the web and focus on the existing legal regulation of access to users’ data. The overall analysis provides an overview of the current state of the debate and highlights two main results. First, topics related to OSPs’ public role—especially their gatekeeping function, their corporate social responsibilities, and their role in implementing and fostering human rights—have acquired increasing relevance in the specialised literature. Second, there is a lack of an ethical framework that can define OSPs’ responsibilities, and provide the fundamental sharable principles necessary to guide OSPs’ conduct within the multicultural and international context in which they operate. This article contributes to the ethical framework necessary to deal with and by endorsing a LoA enabling the definition of the responsibilities of OSPs with respect to the well-being of the infosphere and of the entities inhabiting it. (shrink)

Algorithm engineering is sometimes portrayed as a new 21st century return of manipulative social engineering. Yet algorithms are necessary tools for individuals to navigate online platforms. Algorithms are like a sensory apparatus through which we perceive online platforms: this is also why individuals can be subtly but pervasively manipulated by biased algorithms. How can we better understand the nature of algorithm engineering and its proper function? In this chapter I argue that algorithm engineering can be best conceptualized as (...) a type of environmental engineering aimed at making the online environment more hospitable to human use, in particular by safeguarding the conditions that allow for trust. (shrink)