We like to think we have freedom of speech. Doesn’t the First Amendment guarantee this to us? But some states have “hate speech” laws on the books. New York is considering a law, already passed in California that requires social media companies to report “hate speech.” This is the “Stop Hiding Hate Act” and has been passed by the State’s Assembly. Here is an account of the measure from Vince Chang, who favors it:
“Under pressure from the ADL [Ant-Defamation League] and other groups, internet platforms have voluntarily adopted measures to regulate hate speech. The ADL described some of the measures that have been taken:
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Facebook prohibited Holocaust denial content, hired a vice president of civil rights, changed parts of its advertising platform to prohibit various forms of discrimination; expanded policies against content that undermined the legitimacy of the election; and built a team to study and eliminate bias in artificial intelligence. Due to pressure from ADL and other civil rights organizations, Twitter banned linked content, URL links to content outside the platform that promotes violence and hateful conduct. Reddit added its first global hate policy, providing for the removal of subreddits and users that “promote hate based on identity or vulnerability.”[12]
Despite these efforts, one analysis showed that major social media platforms fail to take down more than 80% of antisemitic posts on their platforms. The Center for Countering Digital Hatred reported that 80% of 700 posts containing “anti-Jewish hatred,” which had collectively been viewed 7.3 million times, were not removed. The research covered Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube. Facebook was said to have failed to act on 89% of posts.
In an attempt to respond to internet hate speech, New York legislators have introduced the Stop Hiding Hate Act, legislation that has passed the New York Senate and is pending in the Assembly. This bill would require large social media companies to disclose their policies and moderation practices for online hate speech. The legislation is modeled after a similar law in effect in California.
The Stop Hiding Hate Act presents difficult issues relating to the First Amendment. For reasons set out below, we believe that the act does not violate First Amendment principles as set out in the preponderance of case law. Legislation that establishes disclosure standards rather than content-based regulation generally survives First Amendment standards.” See this.
In addition to this law, the Hate Crimes Modernization Bill, also in New York, adds writing graffiti and “false reporting” to the list of hate crimes.
If these laws were enforced, then if you “stir up hatred” against “protected” groups, the law would come after you. And any form of criticism could count as “hatred”. For example, if you read the Bible at a “Gay Pride” parade or at an abortion mill, this is hatred. This isn’t a hypothetical in a number of other countries, and I want to focus especially on the Scottish Hate Speech Act.
Let’s first look at an official summary of the Scottish act, from the Scottish parliament site:
“Hate crime is the phrase used to describe behaviour which is both criminal and based on prejudice.
There are already laws in place to protect certain groups from hate crime.
This Bill aims to do three things. It updates these existing laws and pulls most of these laws into one Bill. It also adds to the groups currently specifically protected by hate crime laws.
Criminal courts can generally take into account any prejudice when sentencing a person. Also, people are protected from hate crime through specific laws that apply.
People are currently protected by specific laws on the basis of:
- disability
- race (and related characteristics)
- religion
- sexual orientation
- transgender identity
This Bill adds age to that list and allows sex to be added at a later date.
The Bill creates a new crime of stirring up hatred against any of the protected groups covered by the Bill.” See this.
The bill was enacted in 2021 and came into force on April 1, 2924
The supporters of this Act want to create a community that is united in supporting “diversity.” Do you see the contradiction? If you oppose what these people call “diversity,” then you are not part of the united community. In other words, only those who accept what we say are free and have rights. As George Orwell said in 1984, “Freedom is Slavery.” Let’s look at what they say in their own words:
“Scotland’s diversity is its strength; and all communities are valued and their contribution welcomed. Hate crime and prejudice threaten community cohesion and have a corrosive impact on Scotland’s communities as well as broader society. Hate crime and prejudice is never acceptable and the Scottish Government is committed to tackling it. 10. This legislation provides an essential element of the Scottish Government’s ambitious programme of work to tackle hate crime and build community cohesion. Anyone who has experienced or witnessed a hate crime is encouraged to report it to the police or to one of the third-party reporting centres that are in place across Scotland. 11. A cohesive society is one with a common vision and a sense of belonging for all communities; a society in which the diversity of people’s backgrounds, beliefs and circumstances are appreciated and valued, and similar life opportunities are available to all. It is through this lens that the Scottish Government has considered the recommendations from Lord Bracadale’s ‘Independent Review of Hate Crime Legislation in Scotland’1 in order to inform the modernisation and reform of hate crime legislation in Scotland.” See this.
One of the most aggressive groups in trying to silence others for has speech consists of so-called ”trans” people. If you don’t agree with them that you can become a man or woman just by “identifying” yourself as one, you can be prosecuted. This is the “democratic community” in action. The prosecutions are by no means confined to religious and political conservatives. Leftwing “gender critical” feminists, who think that a woman is a woman, have been prosecuted. Jonathan Turley tells us what happened to one of them:
“There is a free speech fight brewing in Scotland where a prominent feminist, Marion Millar, 50, has been charged with the crime of “malicious communication” due to tweets criticizing gender self-identification. We have previously discussed how feminists are being accused of hate speech and discrimination in these debates. Indeed, Millar is accused of being a “terf” (a trans-exclusionary radical feminist) by critics due to her opposition to allowing males to declare themselves to be females. She could now face two years in jail.
We have been discussing the continuing erosion of free speech protections in the United Kingdom (here and here and here and here and here and here and here). Once you start as a government to criminalize speech, you end up on a slippery slope of censorship. What constitutes hate speech remains a highly subjective matter and we have seen a steady expansion of prohibited terms and words and gestures. As noted in a prior column, free speech appears to be dying in the West with the increasing criminalization of speech under discrimination, hate, and blasphemy laws.
Scotland has adopted particularly chilling limitations on free speech. These controversies often involve the criminalization of political or ideological viewpoints.
What is particularly concerning in this case is that Millar was not told which of her tweets were deemed “malicious.” Millar has thousands of tweets and was told that the charge is based on tweets between 2019 and 2020. She was simply ordered to the police station and told that social workers would be sent to care for her young twin boys, who are autistic. After she emerged from the station, she quoted the novelist Salman Rushdie: “Nobody has the right to not be offended. That right doesn’t exist in any declaration I have ever read.”
Millar has been a prominent critic of self-identification as a threat to women and feminist values. This includes criticism of the Gender Recognition Act and the Hate Crime Bill. New provisions include crimes for “stirring up hatred” in statements about different groups. Scotland emphasized that it must be intentional but the language was still criticized as a further criminalization of political speech. The charges against Millar do not appear to have been brought under the new law.
There are believed to be six tweets that were cited in the complaint, including pictures of the green, white and purple suffragette ribbons tied around trees to support Millar’s cause. The accuser reportedly said that the ribbons looked like nooses and were therefore threats.
Such charges are rife with subjectivity. Indeed, the term “terfs” captures the problem in criminalizing such speech. Terfs are being attacked in the media in articles that tend to include anyone who opposes transgender laws. The labeling creates a chilling effect for those who might want to speak out against aspects of these laws or policies. For some feminists, gender self-identification creates dangerous situations for women and negates core elements of feminist values. For others, this opposition is a denial of their identification and characterizes them as dangerous or potentially criminal.
As will come as no surprise to readers on this blog, my default is with free speech. Both sides should be able to address these issues in a public debate. The effort by some to criminally charge advocates like Millar is to silence rather than to respond to opposing viewpoints. Such speech limitations tend to grow with time. Once groups taste the ability to silence others, it becomes an insatiable appetite for censorship and criminalization of speech.” See this.
J.K. Rowling is one of the most famous writers in the world, and everybody knows her Harry Potter stories. But she has some Twitter posts that do not take the “trannies” with the seriousness they think is due to them, and they want her prosecuted under the Scottish Bill. She has dared them to prosecute her, and so far they haven’t. But ordinary citizens won’t be so lucky. Jonathan Turley explains the story:
“We have previously discussed the growing anti-free speech movement in Scotland with the expanding criminalization of political and religious speech. The new Scottish law is a perfect nightmare for free speech, expanding the potential of a jail sentence for merely insulting language. In response, author JK Rowling has taken a stand and dared the Scottish police to come and arrest her for criticizing transgender status.
The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 illustrates how these laws create a slippery slope of speech criminalization as more and more speech is banned. We previously discussed the law when it was first introduced.
The new crime covers “stirring up hatred” relating to age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity or being intersex. That crime covers insulting comments and anything reasonably “that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening or abusive.”
It is enough that a person is found to have likely understood that the comments would be abusive or insulting as opposed to intending to be abusive or insulting.
For that ill-defined crime, you can be sent to jail for seven years. Police officers are currently being given a two-hour training program to enforcing the law.
Rowling has been the target of a global campaign due to her rejection of transgender laws and policies. Many on the left have unleashed book bans and burnings. I have been critical of that campaign. Even third parties who have supported Rowling’s right to free speech have been targeted in cancel campaigns.
On April 1, Rowling posted a reference to various trans campaigners and other individuals as women. She then ended the thread with “April Fools! Only kidding. Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren’t women at all, but men, every last one of them.”
She stated “Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal.”
Even if meant as a joke, Scottish censorship laws have never been a laughing matter with comedians raising objections.
That could clearly fall within the law. The law is so broad that it allows arbitrary enforcement. To that end, Rowling made it plain:
“I’m currently out of the country, but if what I’ve written here qualifies as an offence under the terms of the new act, I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment.#arrestme.”
The decline of free speech in the United Kingdom has long been a concern for free speech advocates. A man was convicted for sending a tweet while drunk referring to dead soldiers. Another was arrested for an anti-police t-shirt. Another was arrested for calling the Irish boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend a “leprechaun.” Yet another was arrested for singing “Kung Fu Fighting.” A teenager was arrested for protesting outside of a Scientology center with a sign calling the religion a “cult.”
We also discussed the arrest of a woman who was praying to herself near an abortion clinic. English courts have seen criminalized “toxic ideologies” as part of this crackdown on free speech.
Scotland has now pulled ahead in the race to the bottom of speech criminalization. The home of David Hume and Adam Smith is now imposing laws as stringent as those founds in Iran, Russia, and China. It is a shocking denial of a right that once defined Western Civilization.
Now it is the left that is silencing others. Equity has become the new morality used to gag others. Scotland should be a warning to everyone in the United States as we face our own anti-free speech movement. This is the rock bottom of the slippery slope of speech censorship.” See this.
The new Hate Speech Act is tailor-made for busybodies and those with grievances against their neighbors. Since the modifications to the law came into effect in 2024, there have been about 8000 complaints already. Here is an account from the British newspaper The Telegraph:
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“About 8,000 hate crime reports were made in the first week of the legislation coming into force, overtaking the total of 6,927 hate crimes in the entire year of 2020-21. If the trend continued at the same rate annually, it would produce 10 times as many reported offences as assault, the most common crime in Scotland.
“Police Scotland have gone public and said that on every occasion, reports of hate crime will be investigated,” said David Threadgold, chairman of the Scottish Police Federation.
“That creates a situation where we simply cannot cope at the moment. Officers have been brought back in to do overtime shifts and the management of that is simply unsustainable.”
Police chiefs have also warned that the surge in hate crime reports could distract officers from solving other crimes such as thefts, burglaries and violent offences.
With 8,000 hate crimes reported in the first week since the new law, it was a figure that dwarfed the weekly rates for other crimes such as assaults (which were record at 1,104 a week last year), threatening behaviour (835), vandalism (712), shoplifting (548), drug possession (428) and fraud (323).
The legislation, which was passed by MSPs in 2021 but only came into force this month, makes it an offence to “stir up hatred” against protected groups such as transgender people, the disabled and the elderly.
Mr Threadgold said the scale of hate crime reports was “unprecedented” for any crime. “When you have vexatious complaints, people who look to weaponise this legislation or who make these complaints for personal gain or political point scoring, then that creates a problem for the police which can affect public satisfaction in my organisation,” he said.
“Now, the First Minister in Scotland can talk about his confidence, and Police Scotland’s ability to deal with vexatious complaints as he has done, but what we have never seen before is the scale of the complaints coming in around one piece of legislation.” See this.
The great legal scholar Dr. Wanjiru Njoya asks a very pertinent question about the hate Speech Bill:
“How can everyone in society except white men be a “vulnerable minority”? That makes no sense. At the moment the British PM, Scottish and Welsh leaders, are all allegedly from “vulnerable minority” groups. Yet they’re in power, lording it over us all with their “hate crimes.” See this.
She strikes to the root of what is at stake in this comment:
“”Good intentions may often be the mother of calamity. The new Scottish hate crime act was designed to protect vulnerable minorities” No. The intentions of “hate crime” are not good. That’s just what they tell you because they know you’ll believe anything” See this.
Let’s do everything we can to stop such draconian legislation from being enacted here and also to help our Scottish friends free themselves from this totalitarian tyranny.
