Have you ever noticed how these days, during a public crisis, be it a pandemic or rioting in the streets, that the knee jerk reaction of Western politicians is to recommend further restrictions on speech? So now, with the rioting in the UK, we see Keir Starmer coming out and saying that we have to get tough on hate speech and we have to prosecute people who have been guilty of sharing hateful content or content that could “incite hatred.”
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There are two problems with all of this:
First, nobody actually knows what hate speech is because nobody is prepared to give a clear definition of hate speech.
The second problem is that there's no reason to believe that governments or public officials are competent to distinguish between acceptable and reasonable public discourse, and unacceptable and unreasonable discourse. Why would you believe that a politician would be in a position to impartially arbitrate public political debate'? - the same politicians who make self-serving claims, disingenuous claims, and often false claims in the public sphere.
If you're prepared to hand the keys to freedom of expression to your politicians, then with all due respect, you must be very, very naive because that assumes that your political representatives have a kind of moral and epistemic superiority and can stand above the flow of public discourse and decide which interventions are true or false or hateful or non-hateful, or morally responsible or irresponsible.
Do we want that sort of society? Do we want a society in which there's a special class of people who are constantly erasing and preemptively censoring discourse that they don't like or that they find offensive? Is that the sort of society we want to live in?
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These Days, the Knee-Jerk Reaction to a Public Crisis is to Further Restrict Speech