The problem with ‘hate’ being a regulated designation of or label upon user-generated content is in who defines ‘hate’—who it is that does the labeling of speech.
Saying ‘mean’ things for instance, or dissenting from a cultural narrative is the very role of free speech—its aim being to break cultural norms in service of cultural progress when those norms become cumbersome, un-useful, defunct, or unduly oppressive given the gestalt of the day; to ‘be mean’ to the state, at the cost of bearing some meanness from our fellow man; for we must believe he is good at bottom if we are to believe that we are good at bottom, and to trust ourselves with the responsibility of this our most critical tool, speech.
We needed free speech in the public square, and vigorous, highly ‘offensive’ —violent, even!— public discourse and debate in order to end slavery. We needed free speech for suffrage, and gay rights, and black rights. We need free speech to free Julian Assange, and to repatriate Ed Snowden! We need the god-like capacity that lies in our speech, the divine evolutionary exaptation that it is, in order to regulate our regulators. To have those tables turned —for the regulators to regulate our speech, in the name of whatever reasoning or bogey-man storytelling or scapegoating about which they may wish to moralize to us in the name of the State’s own ends, is a perversion of the highest order and magnitude. It vests the (our) sacred and transformative logos —the very tool that created and maintains the state itself— in something static (hence, the state) rather than in the spirit of the people who with their own tongues negotiate —however vigorously— the future. To place the locus of logic in the static (statism) rather than in the dynamism of our individuated humanity is to arrest our collective potential for progress in the name of the road to it being bumpy. It is a mistake.
If corporations —especially those who work closely with governments (Google, AWS, et al) determine, classify, or define ‘hate’ speech, or more perniciously, ‘violence,’ for the entire human race (which is not an exaggeration given their global scope and monopoly on information availability), then their definition-governing mechanism (bureaucracy—government’s one true speciality) will no doubt be most heavily influenced by these, their most powerful partners; and likely not in the direction of fully open, likely offensive communication that is ultimately necessary for our collective dynamism as a culture—especially when that speech is threatening to the various powers that be and their preferred status quo—even, and especially when they become tyrannical or begin to tilt in tyranny’s direction.
Free and critical speech is at bottom course-correcting, auto-poetic, emergent from mankind, and inherently renewing of stale states when they become reflected as such in the psychic state of man himself. That to say: we know when things are going wrong and we naturally speak up. Thus to limit this mediation is a violation of natural law. To regulate speech in any manner is to bind our tongues and the ancient power we derive from them: dialogue, whereby the possessors of the precious logos, despite finding themselves at whatever odds they may, wielding their inborn divine gift for the determining between them of functional truth for the betterment of their kind; and to cede this power—the power of cultural transformation itself to some inevitably doomed-by-entropy and thereby inevitably tyrannical profit-extracting ally and arms length ne’er-do-well of the state.
For a state and its profligators, profiteers, and enforcers to sell We The People the pernicious and twisted message that she and her donor corporations, her lifeblood, must —on their own self-defined and self-regulated terms— down-regulate my speech or yours under the sinister and lying guises that each of us by the nature of our own capacity for free speech represent a greater threat to the other than do we the promise of negotiated freedom and of loving hope; why then, this state, this unholy governmental-corporate alliance is already three quarters a tyrant, technically fascist, and one to be counted by history as large a threat as the boogeyman it makes us out to be; larger even, if we’re to consider the fundamental precondition for the terror brought by those twentieth century psychic pandemic wraiths, Nazism and Communism: the restriction of free speech, the chilling of the fire present in each human soul, the muddying of the reflection of divinity in the only precious and conscious great storytelling ape, the sovereignty of the god particle in you.
Just imagine free men walking themselves into slavery and handing the keys to their shackles —their tongues— to their betters—and for no other reason than for not having read the ‘terms of use’ on the tools they’ve leased for tilling of their fields, and the sovereignty that comes along with determining one’s own fate. Soon the master owns the fields, the tools, and the worker —bound by his ignorance— all. Are you ignorant of the terms of service you’ve agreed to? Are your tools leased with a clawback clause? And if your fields are the public square, and your tools are free speech, are you really willing to cede any conditions at all to the legal snakes working on behalf of those digital plantation owners? They do call you ‘users’ and not people, after all.
This presumption of the reigns of control is incredibly hubristic—to assume the responsibility and the role of dictating what words may be said. It’s akin to somehow ‘knowing’ that there will never again in human history arise the necessity to incite a revolution—this is prevention of such an event, not a hopeful prediction of its unlikeliness. Sometimes we need a Revolution—hasn’t history shown us that in large systems, the lesser angels of our nature tempt us into tyrannical behavior? Have you not read Solzhenitsyn’s accounting of the line of good and evil running right through every man’s heart? And does that line not particularly cross the politicians’, bureaucrats’ and financiers’ hearts in a queer way?
If tech companies essentially control language, then they are quite literally the State itself, in that they take on the role of maintaining the status (‘state-us’) quo by defining the verbal boundaries of ‘acceptable’ language —what can and cannot be said— and they hereby control the very ideas that are even available to the minds (via their services and the delivery of what we say and write online on top of their services) of their global user bases…which again, include virtually all human beings—or in the least, those who want access to speak in the public square. Restrict speech and you restrict ideas—particularly the idea of rebellion at bottom. And make no mistake in presuming otherwise: that is the goal; to either restrict or redefine ideas for the maintenance of power.
Acceptable language? Acceptable to whom?! Acceptable to the state—that is who. Do not delude yourself in hope of a friendly state. Try not paying them and see how friendly they are with you—try speaking against them and see how that goes for you. This is a deadly serious matter in as much as a government is willing to use violence to protect itself, and subsequent to its violence is willing to moralize against and demonize your character to the more boundary-respecting of its citizenry via its propagandistic mechanism: the corporate media (who not incoincidentally plays its own particularly profitable role in the maintenance of controlled outrage for the state’s purposes of permanent division and conquering, of bread and circuses, of pablum).
Is society so good and so perfect; is our government so good and so perfect a reflection of our better angels, that we dane to allow the stifling of speech and thereby even the potential for dissent from these men’s ideas and their rules? Surely not. Surely this will go poorly, and will violate the inalienable natural rights (natural law) of the sovereignty of the individual upon whose laurels our great western society rest.
Surely again in the future, a version of our government will attempt to do away with —to one degree or another— the idea of natural rights and to govern in the name of ‘the common good’ (and most likely, currently, in the sugary but historically deadly name of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’).
Surely if the pretense for our natural rights to be restricted lies within the terms of service of these behemoths to whom we have ceded far more power than we know over the domain of the public square—our domain by natural law, then in times where the position of the State is particularly threatened by the free speech of its citizens, they (the ‘terms of service’) will be used toward the state’s —the techno-state’s— ends: the stifling of dissension. The government is a much larger, more valuable, and more influential partner to these platforms than you or I.
Do you think Google will defend your right to offensive (even-if-necessarily-so, in your opinion) speech as an individual; or, in a pinch, will it side with the government with whom it has hundreds of billions of dollars of contractual —not to mention natural, rational, and profitable alliances? Are the hearts of men not corruptible?
Regulate not our speech—in any way. For with it we may do some harm, but without it we will surely enslave ourselves out of a forgetfulness, a disregarding, and a disrespect for the hard won lessons of our Great Ancestors.
To reserve “the right” to update their terms of service in perpetuity is to reorient the default mode of freedom, Populist Will, for its own convenience, the techno-state is taking your right, not reserving theirs to speak and thereby think freely; for if free thinking arises from loosing harsh and accurately aimed words, and where words are forbidden, there lies the death of thought and the death of the sacred logos in man himself.
But what of scale considerations?
The nation is by default playing a moral game, regulating small tyrannies upon the majority by its guarded (and currently fenced) hilltop minority.
Should we not then have recourse to national scale of our voices and to national public squares in order to check and balance this distant behemoth’s entropic tendencies?
Our minds are largely built around a tribal interpersonal connection capacity —Dunbar’s number— and do not yet effectively navigate the social pressures implied at much larger a scale.
The state has its own built up, evolutionary adaptation if you will to scale problems, and organizes systems semi-effectively at such scale. So it may be more ‘naturally’ suited to operate as such than we as individuals. Or you may say it sucks at scale and ruins everything it touches. But the government is comprised of individuals, and as this technological leap has saddled them thus far, it has shown the statist-organization-principle to be quite a failure as an apparatus for performing its primary function as defined by its founding documents: the self restriction implied by the intentional negating of its own rights to infringe upon ours: We The People, not ‘we the users.’
We need hate speech, because we need to be able to hate our government, to say it out loud, and to modify it to our satisfaction in the protection of our rights; and if it will not give way, we need hate speech in order tear it to the god damned ground according to its very own founding principles.
Until further notice, to the would-be regulators of the divine sword, the human tongue: step on snek; see what happens, motherfuckers.