Sunday, October 29, 2017

Free Speech and hate speech-2

I can understand that most of the people will be upset with what the white supremacists, alt right and neo Nazi will preach in the name of free speech but in their zeal to drown out any voice that negates their world view, there has been increasing efforts not to give space to the above mentioned people and thus stifle the free speech that is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. I know some speech will hurt the feeling of some people or even majority of people but that does not mean we ban the speech and stifle free exchange of information and ideas, if you want to fight hate speech with hate speech of your own by banning the opposite view, you are also committing hate speech. In a free society like the U.S. if you don’t like what other person is saying, you have to come up with your own speech to counter their argument, not resort to banning what they person has to say. Now there has been tremendous effort by the anti hate speech people to ban speakers who are known white supremacist even in places which have been known earlier to have liberal attitude towards free speech. This is not how the democracy works, although some people may not agree with me on this one, but the best way to go about this is to allow what that person says and then decide if you like their speech or you don’t like it, banning ti will not solve the problem because in the age of internet, they will always find audience of their speech of hate. Let them speak out in the open as it is also their right to say what they want to say, provide counter argument to them and then move on.

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