The Hate Debate episode of "More Perfect" podcast

I listened today to an episode of the Radiolab podcast called More Perfect. This podcast studies the past Supreme Court rulings to see how they were made and how they have changed history. After doing an episode on Citizens United, they decided to have a second podcast on the topic of freedom of speech in which they debated whether hate speech on the internet should be limited by law. They also debated whether social media sites should limit hate speech.

In both debates the speakers were intense, they were outraged, and they spoke contemptuously about the arguments made by the other side.

In both debates, the speakers seemed to agree on this:

White supremacy and Nazi groups are the reasons for this question to come up.

They agreed that these groups and their ideology is dangerous. So the first debate centered on whether hate groups should be shut down and kept from speaking out publicly. The second was on whether social media sites should be stopping the activity of these groups on social media.

In the first debate, the main question was whether the government would take laws that limit hate speech and use them to control legitimate dissent.

In the second, the question was more about the end results of social media limiting speech. 

• Social media allows the people more likely to join hate groups to find each other and to organize. 
• It allows those who disagree with hate groups to find them and engage them in discussion/debate. 
• The algorithms used to take down hate speech on social media also often end up taking down articles reporting about hate speech and its effects.

In the second debate, they allowed questions from the audience. One young man very quietly told the speakers that he used to believe some of the things that they found abhorrent.

He had changed his beliefs

because he posted about them on social media and others respectfully challenged him. He now was much more open... much less hateful. He spoke of having become friends in the process with Megan Phelps, a young woman who left Westboro Baptist Church because people who disagreed with her engaged her on social media. The young man hoped that social media would remain open because of his belief that dialogue was the way forward. If people are kept from dialogue, they become more isolated and less likely to change or grow.

The opponent of free speech on social media began to rebut this audience member calmly, but by the time he was a couple of sentences into his thoughts he was again yelling. He said he had spent the last twenty years trying to be the calm advocate who politely engages with people and educates them about the ways their beliefs harm others and themselves. It was time for people to just educate themselves. He did not want to be the gentle educator anymore for anyone. He doesn’t owe that to the world and it is time for him to be able to have the crazy talk just be stopped because it is wrong. Period.

At the moment when he talked about how long he had been working to make people understand, it was then that I began to understand his rage.

He is African American. He knows with his body as well as his mind the the results of hate speech and the slowness of change. He is harmed by hate speech. After years of trying to quietly and respectfully educate people, hate speech has still become more common and more hateful. Those most harmed by it, most vulnerable to those who would act on that hate, like this presenter, must be able to say they don’t want to have to engage with it respectfully anymore. What he is saying is we can’t change enough people quickly enough because the opportunity to organize on social media has enabled and emboldened them to become more organized and more violent. He wants Nazi’s stopped before they are driving cars into crowds of pedestrians.

The debate was set up badly. In order to have a fair debate about this issue, I think both presenters needed to have the same amount of risk in the game. The white presenters, who both presented on the side of less control of Nazis and white supremacists, presented convincing arguments for how the government in the past has taken laws made to limit bad things and used them to also limit legitimate dissent.

But they lost credibility because they are less at risk than the person who was presenting the alternate viewpoint.

I'd like to hear another debate about hate speech with both sides represented by people who have something big to lose.

I agree with the young man that dialogue and understanding are a means to changing opinions. But the people who have been bearing the brunt of that dialogue, who have been doing more than their share of educating, and who also have the most to lose from the hate...they should not be shamed for being done.

Others can step up to the plate.