Social media posts inciting hate and division have “real world consequences” and there is a responsibility to regulate content, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, insisted on Friday, following Meta’s decision to end its fact-checking programme in the United States.
the law shouldn’t dictate this because that would require rigid definitions of misinformation and minorities. are Nazis minorities? What about Israelis? Or Palestinians?
is spreading a rumor misinformation? What if it is later found out to be true?
Fascist speech is not hard to point out. Advocating for the removal of the human rights of minority groups should result in legal punishment. Advocating for violence against minorities should result in legal punishment.
No one is born a Nazi. You should not be able to exist in society as a Nazi. You should face legal action for being a Nazi. We hung people at Nuremberg over this. We have already long since had established definitions of what inciting genocide is, of what spreading fascism is.
What is tiring about this conversation is that you have to balance real historically documented dangers of tolerating fascists, versus the theoretical dangers of whatever some internet person thinks might happen in an imaginary future.
I mean, it’s a tough call, right? “Regulating food sounds nice in theory but what if it gives some future government the power to ban pizza haha gotcha”.
the main problem I have with the government doing this is that they would be the ones to define who the minoritys are. If I remember correctly the US consider veterans to be a protected class, what if a government decided to extend minority status to those that themselves (as part of their “culture”) codified intolerance to existing protected minorities (such as certain religions with respect to homosexuality)?
I mean I’m not advocating for that though. I don’t think it’s impossible to restrict specifically fascist rhetoric. I don’t think it’s impossible to make it illegal to advocate for genocide of racial and gender minorities.
if the (US and many others) governments weren’t run by fascists I might agree, but I know that politics change and facist, homophobic, racists are always going to have a chance to be elected in a democratic (republic) system.
If this is already true then how does making it illegal to be a Nazi change that? If Nazis will already get into power (and then restrict non-nazi or anti-nazi speech), then what exactly is the risk of making it illegal to espouse Nazi ideology?