@Godstud
@anasawad So there are crimes of hate speech because there are anti-discrimination laws(nothing new, incidentally). What's your fucking point, aside from a melodramatic fear-mongering conspiracy theory about progressives being out to get you?
And of those crimes, in the stats your article references, a third of all of them are not incitement, not discrimination, not harassment, but hate speech, i.e. opinions. (edit: a third of the speech-related crimes online, not a third of all hate crimes since those include discrimination, assaults, etc as well)
People have the right to hold and express whatever opinions they have, even if those were bad opinions, because the minute we start silencing people from expressing their opinions even if those opinions were not targetted at anyone nor inciting any violence of any sort, then not only the people, all of them, just lost their freedom of speech, freedom of beliefs, and freedom of affiliation, but also a precedent would be established that gives the state the power to silence and arrest people based on political speech, which means the minute one power-hungry politician or group reach power they can use it to crack down on their opposition.
That's how democracy ends and tyranny begins.
It might be small at first, but once the state has that power, it becomes inevitable that this power will be abused.
It's the same story every time.
Look at surveillance for example in the US, it started small, only meant to track credible threats and required tons of procedures to be able to even track or surveil a person; 20 years later, everyone is constantly watched and the state has immense powers because of that very small law that began with a very small scope.
And now, someone like Trump has the keys to that power.
You want the progressive line, listen to Bernie Sanders, long term consequences, always watch for long term consequences.
And those aren't small countries we're talking about, the UK, Germany, the US, Canada, etc are all world-leading countries, meaning the minute they go in a certain path, many countries follow.
That's why Trump's victory kicked off an entire chain of right-wing authoritarians all across.
And It's not a strawman comparing it to the early beginnings of the Baath party, read the writings of Michel Aflaq and Salah Al-Din Bitar; The laws they pushed and formulated all the way back in the 50s and 60s establishing the state's authority to censor people and media in sects-related subjects in order to reduce and prevent sectarian tensions from exploding again are the same laws that would permit Hafez Al-Assad decades latter to throw 10s of thousands in jail under the guise of keeping national unity and preventing sectarian divide, and the same laws that would cause the descent in Syria that would grow underground until it blew up in the current civil war.
Irregardless of what the intent is, you must always be careful not to concentrate too much powers in the hands of the state that could backfire whenever the wrong person or group takes over.
Try not being a condescending ass.
A bit hard when it's been 5 pages running in circles.
@Pants-of-dog
@anasawad
Quote the portions of the wiki article and the article from the UK.
Once you do that, we can look at it together.
We already did. We went through the communication act and the Network enforcement act, and the stats and the articles.
You ignored all of them.