Campus hate speech on trial

PurposeHate speech in recent times has become a troubling development. It has different meanings to different people in different cultures. The anonymity and ubiquity of the social media provides a breeding ground for hate speech and makes combating it seems like a lost battle. However, what may constitute a hate speech in a cultural or religious neutral society may not be perceived as such in a polarized multi-cultural and multi-religious society like Nigeria. Defining hate speech, therefore, may be contextual. Hate speech in Nigeria may be perceived along ethnic, religious and political boundaries. The purpose of this paper is to check for the presence of hate speech in social media platforms like Twitter, and to what degree is hate speech permissible, if available? It also intends to find out what monitoring mechanisms the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have put in place to combat hate speech. Lexalytics is a term coined by the authors from the words lexical analytics for the purpose of opinion mining unstructured texts like tweets.Design/methodology/approachThis research developed a Python software called polarized opinions sentiment analyzer (POSA), adopting an ego social network analytics technique in which an individual’s behavior is mined and described. POSA uses a customized Python N-Gram dictionary of local context-based terms that may be considered as hate terms. It then applied the Twitter API to stream tweets from popular and trending Nigerian Twitter handles in politics, ethnicity, religion, social activism, racism, etc., and filtered the tweets against the custom dictionary using unsupervised classification of the texts as either positive or negative sentiments. The outcome is visualized using tables, pie charts and word clouds. A similar implementation was also carried out using R-Studio codes and both results are compared and a t-test was applied to determine if there was a significant difference in the results. The research methodology can be classified as both qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative in terms of data classification, and quantitative in terms of being able to identify the results as either negative or positive from the computation of text to vector.FindingsThe findings from two sets of experiments on POSA and R are as follows: in the first experiment, the POSA software found that the Twitter handles analyzed contained between 33 and 55 percent hate contents, while the R results show hate contents ranging from 38 to 62 percent. Performing a t-test on both positive and negative scores for both POSA and R-studio, results reveal p-values of 0.389 and 0.289, respectively, on an α value of 0.05, implying that there is no significant difference in the results from POSA and R. During the second experiment performed on 11 local handles with 1,207 tweets, the authors deduce as follows: that the percentage of hate contents classified by POSA is 40 percent, while the percentage of hate contents classified by R is 51 percent. That the accuracy of hate speech classification predicted by POSA is 87 percent, while free speech is 86 percent. And the accuracy of hate speech classification predicted by R is 65 percent, while free speech is 74 percent. This study reveals that neither Twitter nor Facebook has an automated monitoring system for hate speech, and no benchmark is set to decide the level of hate contents allowed in a text. The monitoring is rather done by humans whose assessment is usually subjective and sometimes inconsistent.Research limitations/implicationsThis study establishes the fact that hate speech is on the increase on social media. It also shows that hate mongers can actually be pinned down, with the contents of their messages. The POSA system can be used as a plug-in by Twitter to detect and stop hate speech on its platform. The study was limited to public Twitter handles only. N-grams are effective features for word-sense disambiguation, but when using N-grams, the feature vector could take on enormous proportions and in turn increasing sparsity of the feature vectors.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study show that if urgent measures are not taken to combat hate speech there could be dare consequences, especially in highly polarized societies that are always heated up along religious and ethnic sentiments. On daily basis tempers are flaring in the social media over comments made by participants. This study has also demonstrated that it is possible to implement a technology that can track and terminate hate speech in a micro-blog like Twitter. This can also be extended to other social media platforms.Social implicationsThis study will help to promote a more positive society, ensuring the social media is positively utilized to the benefit of mankind.Originality/valueThe findings can be used by social media companies to monitor user behaviors, and pin hate crimes to specific persons. Governments and law enforcement bodies can also use the POSA application to track down hate peddlers.

Part I of this Note argues that commentators like Browne and some courts have mischaracterized the harm of verbal sexual harassment as mere "offense." Rather, the true harm of a sexually hostile environment created by words and expressive conduct extends beyond offense, emotional distress, and economic displacement; at bottom, the harm is equality-deprivation. Part II explains how a sexually hostile environment is equality-depriving by arguing that words which create a sexually hostile environment must be understood in historical and social context. Words can be used not only to communicate ideas but also to perform acts of coercion and sexual abuse. Furthermore, sexually abusive speech must be understood in its institutional context. The workplace is the dominant institution in the lives of most adult citizens. It is a community that not only provides financial sustenance but also serves an identity-forming function. How a worker is perceived and treated in the workplace is related intimately to the formation of his or her self-identity. Sexually abusive speech in the workplace proves to be equality-depriving in the sense that it creates a communally shared set of meanings, a workplace ethos, that defines a harassment victim as inferior to her opposite sex counterpart. Part III argues that the workplace should be viewed as a public sphere in which the democratic process matters. Decisions that have broad societal impact are made in the workplace. If democracy in this country is to mean more than the occasional vote for a public official, workers should have a greater role and voice in workplace governance. Affording workers a greater voice in order to democratize the workplace, however, does not entail the toleration of sexually abusive expression. Such toleration would only substitute one hierarchy, management over labor, for another, male over female, or vice versa. An employee's ability to be heard in the workplace democracy must not be impeded by a workplace ethos- that devalues another employee's humanity. Part IV explores why the regulation of verbal sexual harassment in the workplace meets constitutional challenges. The regulation of sexually abusive speech in private workplaces is no more problematic from a constitutional perspective than the regulation of other types of coercive speech in the traditional labor and public employee contexts. In those contexts, courts balance free speech interests, of employees against statutory and common-law interests such as industrial harmony and workplace efficiency. Following the balancing approach adopted in the labor and public employee contexts, courts concerned about encroaching on employee free speech in hostile environment cases should balance any free speech interest in the alleged verbal sexual harassment against the compelling governmental interest in ensuring sex equality. A balancing of free speech and equality interests often should favor the prohibition from the workplace of sexually stereotyped comments, epithets, propositions, and pornography. The few cases in which the Supreme Court has simultaneously addressed the First Amendment and equality interests reveal a precedent of not forsaking equality to foster an absolutist position on freedom of speech. Part IV also argues that recent Supreme Court decisions have suggested that the restriction of sexually abusive workplace speech may be legal as a content-neutral regulation of equality-depriving conduct. Hostile environment law is constitutional because it targets equality-depriving conduct generally rather than focusing on particular messages or ideas. Finally, Part V explores the sweep of hostile environment law, and illustrates that as a content-neutral regulation of equality-depriving conduct, it is neither unconstitutionally overbroad nor vague. This Note concludes that sexual harassment in the workplace is not only sexual abuse but also constitutes equality-depriving conduct. Consequently, it can be regulated without offending the First Amendment protection of free speech.

Previous articleNext article No AccessLiberalism and Campus Hate Speech: A Philosophical ExaminationAndrew AltmanAndrew Altman Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Ethics Volume 103, Number 2Jan., 1993 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/293497 Views: 140Total views on this site Citations: 33Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1993 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Suzanne Whitten Critical Republicanism and Harmful Speech, (Oct 2021): 85–133.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78631-1_4Suzanne Whitten Questioning the Non-Interference Paradigm, (Oct 2021): 17–50.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78631-1_2Jessica Flanigan, Alec Greven SPEECH AND CAMPUS INCLUSIVITY, Public Affairs Quarterly 35, no.33 (Jul 2021): 178–203.https://doi.org/10.2307/48628247Susan J. Brison Hate Speech, (Jun 2021): 1–11.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444367072.wbiee771.pub2Gideon Elford FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION AND SOCIAL COERCION, Legal Theory 27, no.22 (Aug 2021): 149–175.https://doi.org/10.1017/S1352325221000124Seydi ÇELİK, Biruk PAULOS THE CHALLENGES OF REGULATING HATE SPEECH ON SOCIAL MEDIA IN LIGHT OF THE THEORY OF FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION, Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesi Hukuk Fakültesi Dergisi (May 2021).https://doi.org/10.52273/sduhfd..922588María Antonia Paz, Julio Montero-Díaz, Alicia Moreno-Delgado Hate Speech: A Systematized Review, SAGE Open 10, no.44 (Nov 2020): 215824402097302.https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244020973022Stavros Assimakopoulos Incitement to discriminatory hatred, illocution and perlocution, Pragmatics and Society 11, no.22 (Jul 2020): 177–195.https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.18071.assR. George Wright Freedom of Speech as a Cultural Holdover, SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2019).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3399624Grant M. 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This essay expounds on Raphael Cohen-Almagor’s recent book, Confronting the Internet’s Dark Side, Moral and Social Responsibility on the Free Highway, and advocates placing narrow limitations on hate speech posted to social media websites. The Internet is a limitless platform for information and data sharing. It is, in addition, however, a low-cost, high-speed dissemination mechanism that facilitates the spreading of hate speech including violent and virtual threats. Indictment and prosecution for social media posts that transgress from opinion to inciteful hate speech are appropriate in limited circumstances. This article uses various real-world examples to explore when limitations on Internet-based hate speech are appropriate. In October 2015, twenty thousand Israelis joined a civil lawsuit filed against Facebook in the Supreme Court for the State of New York. Led by the civil rights organization, Shurat HaDin, the suit alleges Facebook allows Palestinian extremists to openly recruit and train terrorists to plan violent attacks calling for the murder of Israeli Jews through their Facebook pages. The suit raises important questions, amongst them: When should the government initiate similar suits to impose criminal sanctions for targeted hate speech posted to Facebook? What constitute effective restrictions on social media that also balance society’s need for robust dialogue and free communication, subject to limitations reflecting a need for order and respect among people? Our essay progresses in four stages. First, we examine philosophical origins of free speech and the historical foundations of free speech in the United States. Second, we provide an overview of American free speech jurisprudence. Third, we address particular jurisprudence that provides a framework for imposing limitations on free speech in the context of social media. American history and jurisprudence embrace free speech as a grounding principle of democracy, yet simultaneously subject speech to limitations. Finally, through a comparative exploration of real-world examples, we address the narrow instance when limitations on inciteful and targeted hate speech are appropriate.

Neo-Gnosticism and the American Dissident Right

In a trio of cases handed down on the same day in 1950, the Supreme Court denied constitutional free speech protection to civil rights picketing and labor picketing. The civil rights case, Hughes v. Superior Court, has often been portrayed as an early test case about affirmative action, but it originated in repression of an alliance of radical labor and civil rights activists exasperated by the legislature's repeated failure to enact fair employment law. Seeking a people's law like the labor general strikers and sit-downers of the 1930s and the civil rights sit-inners of the 1960s, they insisted that the true meaning of free speech was the right to speak truth to power. Courts and Congress forced the labor movement to abandon direct action even as it became the defining feature of the civil rights movement. The free speech rights consciousness they invoked challenged the prevailing conservative conception of rights and law. Direct action was a form of legal argument, a subaltern law of solidarity. It was not, as civil rights protest is often portrayed, a form of civil disobedience. What happened during and after the case reveals how the subaltern law and formal law labor and civil rights began to diverge, along with the legal histories of the movements.

Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action, and the Anti-Discrimination Principle: The Philosophical Basis for the Legal Prohibition of Discrimination

The First Amendment, at least in the Supreme Court, hasn’t been much of a friend to labor unions. Among the few First Amendment rights that the Supreme Court has expanded in the labor union context recently is the right of union represented employee to refuse to pay fees to the union that represents them. Notwithstanding reasons to believe the contemporary First Amendment is more likely to be foe than friend of labor, history suggests the contrary. This essay explains why, making three arguments. First, social movements exist only where and when there is a robust commitment to free speech, and workers have real power only when labor has the capacity to be a social movement. Second, labor gained power as a social movement by engaging in protest and it started down the path to losing power when, in a series of cases decided between 1941 and 1960, the Supreme Court largely eliminated constitutional rights to picket and boycott. In the early 1960s, just when the Court finished creating the labor protest exception to the free speech clause, it extended First Amendment protection to civil rights and antiwar protest. Just as civil rights protesters drew on the sit down strike pioneered by labor in the 1930s, the Supreme Court found a First Amendment right to engage in civil rights protest by drawing on the cases that labor unions had won in 1939 and 1940. Third, the literature on the role of lawyers for social movements between the 1930s and now suggests the importance of law to how lawyers advise their clients. The only hope for the future of the labor movement is in cultivating a spirit of protest. Without the right to engage in robust protest, labor lawyers are in a difficult place when they advise their clients, and can do little to create the legal space to enable workers and social justice activists to launch a new round of free speech fights of the sort that brought the labor movement into power in the 1930s.

Laws prohibiting religious vilification (or religious ‘hate speech’) are controversial and often criticised. On the one hand, it seems obviously wrong that someone should be insulted and humiliated on the basis of his or her religious commitments. But how far should the law go in putting controls on freedom of speech? Critics charge that religious vilification laws amount to an undue restriction of freedom of speech, and in fact may generate, rather than reduce, acrimonious religious debate in multicultural and multi-faith societies.

Scientific and social scientific evidence has informed judicial decisions and the making of constitutional law for decades, but for much of U.S. history it has also served as a rhetorical device to justify inequality. It is only in recent years that scientific and statistical research has helped redress discrimination—but not without controversy. Scientific Evidence and Equal Protection of the Law provides unique insights into the judicial process and scientific inquiry by examining major decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, civil rights advocacy, and the nature of science itself. Angelo Ancheta discusses leading equal protection cases such as Brown v. Board of Education and recent litigation involving race-related affirmative action, gender inequality, and discrimination based on sexual orientation. He also examines less prominent, but equally compelling cases, including McCleskey v. Kemp, which involved statistical evidence that a state’s death penalty was disproportionately used when victims were white and defendants were black, and Castaneda v. Partida, which established key standards of evidence in addressing the exclusion of Latinos from grand jury service. For each case, Ancheta explores the tensions between scientific findings and constitutional values

Debates over hate speech, pornography, and other sorts of controversial speech raise issues that go to the core of the First Amendment. Supporters of regulation argue that these forms of expression cause serious injury to individuals and groups, assaulting their dignity as human beings and citizens. Civil libertarians respond that our commitment to free speech is measured by our willingness to protect it, even when it causes harm or offends our deepest values. In this important book, Steven J. Heyman presents a theory of the First Amendment that seeks to overcome the conflict between free speech and human dignity. This liberal humanist theory recognizes a strong right to freedom of expression while also providing protection against the most serious forms of assaultive speech. Heyman then uses the theory to illuminate a wide range of contemporary disputes, from flag burning and antiabortion demonstrations to pornography and hate speech.

This paper aims to analyze the harmful effects of hate speech based on race, ethnicity, and religion on targeted groups and social integration, and to explore constitutionally justifiable standards for regulating such speech. In particular, it focuses on the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). The ECtHR excludes extreme forms of hate speech that threaten the core values of the Convention—such as tolerance, social peace, and non-discrimination—from the scope of protection under Article 17 (prohibition of abuse of rights). For other expressions, it applies a proportionality review under Article 10(2), assessing whether the restriction is “necessary in a democratic society.” This paper systematically analyzes the main assessment factors articulated by the Court in cases such as Pavel Ivanov, Belkacem, and Sanchez, including the context of the expression, the speaker’s intent and status, and whether the expression contributes to public debate. These criteria offer significant implications for the constitutional evaluation of hate speech in South Korea, particularly regarding expressions targeting immigrants and religious minorities, which are on the rise. The Korean Constitution guarantees freedom of expression while also affirming human dignity as a fundamental right. Therefore, restrictions on hate speech should not be understood solely as infringements on free speech. Rather, they may be viewed as a legitimate means of balancing rights in order to preserve democratic order and community integration in a multicultural society. Through an analysis of major ECtHR rulings on hate speech, this paper seeks to examine the constitutional standards for determining the permissibility of such restrictions.

Different legal cultures have a variety of approaches to regulating hate speech, ranging from the American libertarian approach to the German positive liberty approach. There are current phenomena linked with the increasing levels of online hate speech. Cyberspace could be a good place to show the effectiveness of human rights. One view is to affirm that rights should be the same on- and offline while the other view is to defend that rights must be interpreted differently on internet. There is a European regulation on online hate speech, but the American approach is not to regulate this issue. The point has been made in some Court cases that the Law is local but the internet is global. The restrictive rules on hate speech from one country can be easily left behind on the net. We are, therefore, faced with two possibilities: a) A change in how Law and human rights are currently conceived; b) Maintain the current situation, accepting the flaws in an imperfect system. Likewise, some people argue that cyberspace should not be rule free and laws must be enforced against internet users as they are for the rest of the citizens. Hate speech has a ‘silencing effect’ -Fiss- for the members of minorities and this justifies some kind of regulation. The liberty/equality dilemma on free speech sometimes requires a solution in terms of protection of minorities. This view is near to the European approach and far from the American, but the net is single space and is global. Human rights must be conceived globally but in a sense compatible with the protection of minorities.

Prophet or Example: A Review of The Republic According to John Marshall Harlan TONY A. FREYER In Americans’ search for a useable past John Marshall Harlan occupies a unique place. No other member ofthe Supreme Court authored so many dissents that were precursors ofdoctrines that decades later became part of the nation’s ruling constitutional law. Thus Harlan holds a historic place because he appears to be a true constitutional prophet. This identification began with the Brown decision of 1954. Appointed to the Court by Republican Rutherford B. Hays in 1877, just as the party ended Reconstruction and active support ofthe freedman’s civil rights in the South, Justice Harlan went on to author dissenting opinions that vigorously affirmed a “color-blind” Constitution. His lone dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), rejecting the Court’s embrace ofthe doctrine that separate but equal public facilities did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, formally declared the “color-blind” principle. Much ofHarlan’s opinion tracked closely the logic the Court followed to reverse Plessy in Brown. From then on, lawyers, judges, and law school students routinely viewed Harlan in prophetic terms. Many scholars have helped to explain Harlan’s seemingly prophetic vision, but Linda Przybyszewski offers the most original and per­ suasive understanding yet. Harlan maintained the “color-blind” idea in most cases concerning civil rights, but not all. In the CivilRights Cases of 1883, the Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875. On the basis ofthe Equal Protection Clause, Con­ gress had enacted the law to forbid racial dis­ crimination in “public accommodations” such as hotels, theaters, and restaurants. Only Harlan dissented, asserting vigorously that his col­ leagues’ repudiation ofcongressional purpose perverted the true meaning ofthe Equal Protec­ tion Clause. Eighty one years later, Title II of 326 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which the Court upheld the same year, endorsed the spirit of Harlan’s dissent. Here again, Harlan seemed to be ahead ofhis time. Yet shortly before his dissent in the Civil Rights Cases, Harlanjoined a unanimous Court in upholding the conviction of black Alabam­ ian Tony Pace under a law that punished blacks more severely than whites for interracial co­ habitation and adultery. Concurring without opinion, Harlan did not attempt to explain why he sanctioned the double standard. Three years after the Plessy dissent expressly stated the “color-blind” principle, moreover, Harlan reached his most puzzling result in a race case. The opinion for the Court in Cumming v. Rich­ mond County School Board (1899) held that a local Georgia public school board’s closing of a black high school, while it kept open the school forwhites, did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Harlan noted that the board’s policy did not deny blacks educational opportunities because they could attend a private high school that indi­ rectly received some tax support. Even so, the Court’s most adamant opponent of “separate but equal” had sanctioned that very doctrine in the field ofpublic education. During the years that followed, Harlan nonetheless affirmed the spirit ofthe earlierdis­ sents. When the Court upheld a Kentucky law that declared illegal the policy ofracial equality private Berea College had maintained for over forty years, Harlan passionately dissented. Also, not long before his death in 1911, Harlan joined a Court majority that declared illegal the practice ofdebt peonage in Alabama and other southern states. Initially, when the Court let stand the states’ brutal system because it pur­ portedly involved labor contracts, Harlan dis­ sented. As later litigation revealed the evils of the system and the Court changed its position accordingly, Harlan was vindicated. Outside the field of race, Harlan’s opin­ ions engendered similar puzzles. Throughout his judicial career Harlan staunchly defended the principle ofequal citizenship for ethnic and racial minorities under the Constitution. In Elk v. Wilkins (1884) the Court denied voting rights to a Native American who paid taxes and was otherwise assimilated into white society. Harlan dissented on the grounds that the Constitu­ tion established a national citizenship that in­ cluded all bonafide residents ofAmerican states and territories. Harlan’s most publicized affirmation of a more liberal...

Judicial interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause have undergone a major transformation over the last fifty years. A Supreme Court once suspicious of the democratic losses of discrete and insular minorities, now closely scrutinizes their democratic victories. A Court once active in structuring the democratic process to be inclusive of racial and other minorities, now views minority representation in the political process as essentially irrelevant. A Court once deferential to exercises of congressional power that enhanced the equal protection rights of minorities, now gives Congress much less leeway.What explains these shifts? An easy explanation is that the Supreme Court has simply become more conservative. But what underlies this conservatism? In this Article, I argue that the Court’s own evolving conception of politics underlies the changes in the meaning of equal protection. In the past, the Court saw politics through the lens of pluralist theory, the crucial defect of which was the risk that minorities would be politically marginalized. That understanding has given way to a public choice conception in which the Court presumes these same minorities to be too politically powerful. In essence, one form of judicial distrust of democratic politics has replaced another.I argue that two primary sources produced this renewed distrust: changing conservative views of the position of minorities in politics and a conservative legal movement that rejected pluralism in favor of public choice theory as the most accurate description of the operation of politics. I conclude by identifying important normative questions that this theory raises for constitutional law scholars and by offering a prescription for civil rights advocates seeking to influence judicial interpretations of the Equal Protection Clause.