(Why) We Need to Treat Online Hate Much More Seriously

What We Should Have Learned from the Christchurch Massacre

One of the things that we should have learned over the last few days, the hard way, from the Christchurch massacre, is this: we need take online hate seriously. Lethally seriously. Because it has real consequences. We are giving it a free pass, treating it as a kind of roguish, cute, adolescent boyishness, boys will be boys — but it isn’t, because some boys, inspired by others, end up mass murderers. We need to take it seriously— in a certain kind of way and context. Let me explain.

Most of the civilized world has hate speech laws. Britain, Germany, France, Canada. They very in intensity and focus. But the gist goes something like this. It’s illegal to join certain kinds of groups, which express certain kinds of sympathies, or proffer certain kinds of mindsets. Chief among these are supremacism and fascism.

Why? Why did hate speech laws emerge? When did they emerge? In the wake of the last World War, sensible countries realized that certain kinds of speech are far beyond the boundaries of civilization. That in fact, far from expanding freedom, these kinds of speech trample on freedom. They deny it, abjure it, erase it, and make a mockery of it. And not just freedom — justice, fairness, and equality, too…