Watching the fallout from the "right girl" debacle over the weekend, an issue that keeps coming up is freedom of speech.It goes without saying that I'm unequivocally opposed to hate speech directed against minorities. (And no, it doesn't matter if the person spewing the bile is of the minority they're attacking; it's still bigotry.) Obviously hate speech should be shut down wherever it's found in the mainstream: that includes delusional nitwits calling in to radio shows to rail against (pick a minority), hateful diatribes masquerading as "Letters to the Editor", fliers that denounce minorities, or phone lines that play racist messages. But when it comes to the internet, I'm somewhat more ambivalent.
My ambivalence doesn't stem from a belief that bigots have a right to attack minorities online, clearly they don't. I'd just be hesitant to advocate the curtailing of anyone's freedom of speech on the net, no matter how putrid their spewings, because this is the last place where expression is truly free -- we fuck with that at our peril. I worry that clamping down on hate speech online will put us on a slippery slope that ends someplace like China or Iran, where websites are routinely blocked and online criticism of the government can get a blogger tossed in jail. If less authoritarian regimes were in place in Canada and the USA my view might be less pessimistic, but at this point I think it's imperative to protect whatever freedoms we still have... even if the cost is that some abuse those freedoms.
In reality, the denizens of the net are largely not insane, and (I think) are capable of policing themselves. There are certainly more than a few nutjobs sprinkled around, but the most odious ones are far more easily identified when their freedom of speech is unchecked. Once found, they can be called out and sent a clear message that their hate-mongering is unacceptable; dropped from blogrolls, not linked to, whatever. But if their freedom of speech is curtailed, we won't even know who they are.
On the other hand, reading some of the excrement the offenders smear on their blogs must give pause to even the most hardcore libertarian. It's a real conundrum to me... I reflexively want to shut bigots down, but I also want to know who they are. Hmm.
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