Stop hating hate speech and start hating censorship. Hate speech is bad only if we let it affect us. Censorship is bad because someone else decides what we need to think and how we need to react.
I think this is an overly simple response to a deep problem. We are all affected by what we take in, some more than others (and certainly when we are attacked). Getting people to be unaffected (or less affected) is likely to prove untenable or impossible.
Putting the onus on the recipient also leaves us blaming the bullied. "Maybe if they'd had tougher skin they wouldn't have committed suicide."
This is in no way a deep problem. We make it deep by using psychological mumbo-jumbo, being too politically correct, getting triggered too easily, destroying the family support system...
Start taking these less seriously. Start building better functional families. You will see these problems will slowly vanish. Happy kids from happy families have extraordinary bullshit avoiding capabilities.
Yes. These negative forces feed on our negative reaction.
My rottweiler is barked upon rather aggressively by the street dogs whenever we go for walks. He does not care; does not even look at them. He has a happy family and he is happy. I learn a lot from him.
If it is a physical assault we need to engage the legal system.
If not, treat these as mind games. The opponent expects you to behave in a predictable manner. If you react violently or weakly, they win. Censorship is a weak move. It is very much possible that your opponent (possibly, a front for some government agency or a political party) expects you to want more censorship (you can guess the reasons).
Words cannot ruin our religion\race. If they can, our religion\race does not deserve to exist. A religion\race that needs the crutches of censorship is a weak religion\race.
Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me - unless they lead someone to suicide. But I guess it was their own damn fault for not being thick skinned enough. Wimps. Or when a group decides to target a person for harassment and digital stalking. Lighten up grl, boys will be boys.
I am not proposing a simple solution here, but your blithe dismissal of online abuse is comical and cruel.
This is a misunderstanding of hate speech. If leaders of a group direct harassment campaigns against another group, that speech hurts whether you "let" it or not. For example when reddit had a "fat people hate" group, they started coordinated harassment campaigns. When the subreddit was deleted, they didn't have a support group telling them that harassment was ok, and they didn't have an obvious place to coordinate even if they wanted to.
Harassment is a distinctly different action than putting out ideas that people don't like. Harassment could be done using speech, but is not a free speech issue.
You could harass someone with ideas they agree with by spamming or other means to create disturbance in social media or other forms.
Are you ok with disrupting harassment planning at all, or are you advocating for waiting for the worst to happen and just mopping up the blood after the fact?
Edit: note we're not necessarily taking about the state mandating the censorship, which potentially gets into first amendment territory. We're including service providers and ToS.
You're right, I should just accept that people are able to hurl insults towards me and start harassment campaigns and make pretty much any social media unusable for me. It's just words.
I should just ignore the thousand notifications with insults, I mean I can't block them can I? That would be some awful censorship.
Can't believe you actually compared this to a dog not barking at other dogs in another reply further down, how disingenuous.
