What is hate speech?
And should the government ban it?
We asked college students at the University of Southern California.
If somebody uses a racial slur?
That's hate speech? Yeah.
I think that would be a reason to, like a crime.
What if somebody says 'Muslims shouldn't be allowed in the US.'
Yeah, that's hate speech.
What if somebody denies the Holocaust?
I, no, I don't have any understanding for that.
You shouldn't be able to blatantly lie about something, especially like the Holocaust.
A female comedian says 'men are scum?'
I don't believe that's hate speech.
'All white people are racist?'
No, I'm gonna say no.
I don't know.
The First Amendment grants absolute protection of even the most vile speech
so long as it doesn't directly incite violence.
I hate white people, all of them.
Every last iota of a cracker, I hate him.
But is the tide turning in America?
40 percent of Americans now think that the government should regulate so-called hate speech.
But it turns out that defining hate speech is easier said than done.
Everyone thinks, this is hate speech, this is hate speech.
Many who advocate hate speech laws in 2018
seem motivated by the rise of Trumpism-
'build that wall'
-and hateful rhetoric on the right.
And college campuses have become the epicenter of the free speech debate
with incidents of college students shouting down
and even physically attacking controversial speakers
becoming an increasingly common occurrence.
So we talked to students at the University of Southern California
about free speech and hate speech.
One common refrain on campus is that hateful speech is actually equivalent to violence.
Do you think hate speech by itself is an act of violence?
I do.
Yes.
No.
Your words can't, like, physically harm someone.
I think violence is more than physical, it's emotional, psychological.
If hate speech is violence, maybe it makes sense to regulate it
like Canada, Australia and most of Europe do.
Many of the students we spoke to seemed open to the idea.
I think if people can understand the power of words
then maybe hate speech as violence could help us have restrictions
that are not damaging or that could stop at a certain place.
Those kind of opinions are better said, left unsaid
because it just incites violence and hatred among everyone, you know.
Are you in favor of regulations that would stop people from doing that
or would make that a crime?
Yeah.
I would have no problem if it is regulated.
But then who determines what constitutes hate speech?
While most respondents to a recent poll agreed that hate speech is immoral,
82% said it would be difficult to ban because people can't agree on what is hateful.
Could people form a consensus around whether these things are hate speech?
Definitely not.
I think it would be really hard to agree.
And so does that give you pause
and make you think maybe the regulation would not do what I would hope it would do?
Yeah.
Like obviously that would be ideal if something like that could be into place
I just don't really see how it would be.
So for, I'll give you an example,
so there was a french comedian and he was jailed for an anti-Semitic joke
would you support that type of action?
No.
Advocates of hate speech laws often say
that racists cloak themselves in the veil of free speech to attack vulnerable populations.
Having free speech is a great right for everyone,
but when the more powerful have it, I mean, it's going to obviously work to their advantage
more than the less powerful.
But social media provides examples of how speech codes often backfire
and hurt the very minorities they're intended to protect.
Facebook and Twitter are private companies
free to ban whatever they deem to be hate speech.
But their attempts to do so have resulted in bans of feminists
saying that 'all white men are trash.'
and the platform suspended rapper Lil B for posting that
'white people are the only ones who really love they guns you can tell they are violent people.'
Hateful speech might be hurtful, stupid or just plain wrong.
But if we deprive ourselves of the opportunity to hear it
we also lose the opportunity to rebut it.
And the person who's willing to speak forbidden words gains a special power.
When Austria imprisoned historian David Irving for Holocaust denial,
he was greeted with a hero's welcome by a crowd of ten thousand in Budapest
shortly after his release.
The government had turned him into a martyr.
In America attempts to shut down or shout down speakers
have almost certainly backfired as well,
by boosting the visibility of provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos.
They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists,
and some I assume are good people.
Trump saying any of these things should definitely be regulated
because he has so much influence and him saying these things in speeches and stuff.
Trump saying things about minorities like Hispanics and women and Muslims.
Does it concern you that if the government is the one that is regulating these things
that people like Trump would be the one deciding what is protected speech and what is not?
Yeah, of course that's another concern.
Granting the government the power to decide what's acceptable to say
presumes that what brings us closer to the truth is not the free exchange of ideas
but the wise decision making of politicians.
And many of the college students we spoke to agreed
that being exposed to challenging and even threatening ideas
is an important aspect of the intellectual journey.
And what do you think about people shutting down speakers on campuses?
I don't like that at all, honestly I follow a lot of what goes on at Berkely
where they, like, protesting not having these far right speakers come.
I think that's dangerous, to be perfectly honest.
Here at USC and and on college campuses
it's important that we hear everything that we possibly can
whether that be something that we don't like or something that rubs us the wrong way,
I think it's important that we hear it because we're going to go out into the world
and we're going to hear it there and it's important that we're able to hear it here
and form our own opinions, our own ideas.