> "Hate," is a weak substitute because it is so vague we can apply it to anything
That is a big stretch. Hate can't be applied to many things, including disagreements like this comment.
But it can be pretty clearly applied to statements that, if carried out in life, would deny another person or peoples' human rights. Another is denigration or mocking someone on the basis of things that can't or shouldn't have to change about themselves, like their race or religion. There is a pretty bright line there.
Malice (per the conventional meaning of something bad intended, but not necessarily revealed or acted out) is a much lower bar that includes outright hate speech.
> but really, you can see when someone is actuated by it.
How can you identify this systematically (vs it being just your opinion), but not identify hate speech?
Hate absolutely can, and is, applied to disagreements: Plenty of people consider disagreement around allowing natal males in women's sport is hateful. Plenty of people consider opposition to the abolishment of police is hateful. Plenty of people immigration enforcement hateful. I could go on...
> Plenty of people consider disagreement around allowing natal males in women's sport is hateful. Plenty of people consider opposition to the abolishment of police is hateful. Plenty of people immigration enforcement hateful.
Those things aren't deemed hate speech, but they might be disagreed with and downvoted on some forums (i.e. HN), and championed on others (i.e. Parler) but that has nothing to do with them being hate speech. They are just unpopular opinions in some places, and I can understand how it might bother you if those are your beliefs and you get downvoted.
Actual hate speech based on your examples is: promoting violence/harassment against non-cisgender people, promoting violence/harassment by police, and promoting violence/harassment by immigration authorities against migrants.
Promoting violence and harassment is a fundamentally different type of speech than disagreeing with the prevailing local opinion on a controversial subject that has many shades of gray (that your examples intentionally lack).
> Promoting violence and harassment is a fundamentally different type of speech than disagreeing with the prevailing local opinion on a controversial subject that has many shades of gray (that your examples intentionally lack).
Plenty of people disagree, and do indeed claim that not letting a transgender woman compete against natal females is harassment towards transgender people. Heck, I've even seen people claim that this is genocide.
I don't really care about these topics, but the point is that many people do not, or perhaps cannot, distinguish between "hate speech" and and opinions they disagree with. Contrary to your claim that "hate can't be applied to many things, including disagreements like this comment", hate speech is often applied to dissenting opinions.
> Plenty of people disagree, and do indeed claim that not letting a transgender woman compete against natal females is harassment towards transgender people. Heck, I've even seen people claim that this is genocide.
It's a ridiculous claim but so what? It has no teeth anyways.
Nobody gets suspended from mainstream social media for simply expressing opposition to transgender gender athletics.
They get suspended for actually harassing transgender athletes.
You might get demonetized for that opinion, but getting paid to express an unpopular opinion isn't a right.
From that same article it says that he was banned for "Promoting, encouraging, or facilitating the discrimination or denigration of a group of people based on their protected characteristics". That is harassment, not expressing an opinion.
All you did was repeat the banned individual's own opinion about why they were banned. Of course, you are free to think Twitch is lying about its reasons for the ban, but you've offered no evidence of that.
According to that article, the individual also had a history of encouraging the murder of protestors by white militias on Twitch, so sounds like they had plenty of grounds on which to ban him already, and perhaps they finally just got around to it.
It undermines your argument to use someone like that as an example.
> From that same article it says that he was banned for "Promoting, encouraging, or facilitating the discrimination or denigration of a group of people based on their protected characteristics". That is harassment, not expressing an opinion. All you did was repeat the banned individual's own opinion about why they were banned. Of course, you are free to think Twitch is lying about its reasons for the ban, but you've offered no evidence of that.
And what was the nature of that "harassment"? The fact that he didn't agree with the orthodoxy around natal males in women's sports. You're acting out the the exact dynamic I'm talking about: dissenting opinions are labeled harassment or denigration and become bannable offenses. Then people get banned for the "harassment" that is holding a verboten opinion, with no actual harassment taking place. And this is by far from the only example [1].
You're asking me to prove a negative. Who was harassed? Twitch didn't say, and no one can seem to identify a harassment target. When did this harassment occur? Again, nothing is specified. If you can identify a harassment victim it'd be good of you to do so.
> According to that article, the individual also had a history of encouraging the murder of protestors by white militias on Twitch, so sounds like they had plenty of grounds on which to ban him already, and perhaps they finally just got around to it.
If this was the case, the ban would have been for incitement to violence, a separate ToU clause Twitch uses to ban people who call for violence. Not discrimination or denigration of a group on the basis of protected characteristics. Furthermore, these comments occurred two years before the ban - your comment makes it sound like this happened the week before he commented about Thomas. In case you're wondering, in reference to people defending themselves from arsonists (the exact words were, "dipshit protesters that think that they can torch buildings at 10 p.m.") not shooting actual protestors. It continues to amaze me how 10 seconds can be edited to portray someone in a completely opposite light of reality. If you're interested in this creator's leanings, just take a look at a recent video [2].
Espousing dissenting opinions absolutely does get people banned. The reasons cited are harassment, but no harassment victim is identified because holding the prohibited opinion is now considered harassment even if no individual is actually harassed.
> How can you identify this systematically (vs it being just your opinion), but not identify hate speech?
What I think distinguishes malice is the prosecution example. Where if someone makes an argument about you personally, and they are unable to abstract the idea from you personally as an individual, that is acting with malintent toward you.
Antagonizing someone personally by trying to scandalize them in the eyes of others (performatively, as though in front of a judge or jury, or public opinion) is not discourse, it's just persecution and animus. The modern internet version in the form of, "hey everybody, this person is an X!" is probably malice in its more pure form, with a spectrum of dilutions that are variations of, "surely you aren't tainting yourself with this taboo!" after that. It's a purity game, but really a proxy for the 'deadly sin' of wrath and the secular concept of animus. In this sense, it's something that with reflection we recognize ourselves as capable of and learn to moderate it within ourselves.
Hate is something we only recently started accusing others of. I do think it's part of a substitute, secular, belief that persuades people they cannot ever be good, so instead we can repent of our recieved worthlessness by giving up our moral agency and becoming _anti-bad_, all while accepting poor treatment and even demanding it for others because the people we have animus for are also equally bad. The only hope is that by redemption through criticism, some are less worthless than others, but that's the upside. It's like a profoundly false religion whose core tenant is that you believe in the universality of hate, and then be against it. Things are shaped by the forces they oppose, and I think indexing on hate has had the effect of moralizing malice. When we start with the premise that we are all interchangeable group elements without moral agency, and we must redeem ourselves by becoming above criticism, that is a system of slavery with the reins in the hands of the most zealous critics - who happen to be other living people, and not a relationship with a self or an ideal. This whole cycle is based on this _anti-bad_ negative definition that mostly seems to moralize malice in its followers. Back in the day they had to call them sins because they felt good, but really weren't.
Anyway this isn't your outgroup either, it's us. In terms of detecting it, I think ML is just on the cusp of doing it as well or better than most people and that's the future of forum moderation. This question of whether we can observe intent is going to be a big one. It's a huge topic.
What was normal was not hate, and hate - as an extreme emotion - was never normal, but if belief in hate is the root of one's entire ontology, there isn't common ground with someone who doesn't have that princple. Acts of hate absolutely occurred, especially systemic ones that resulted in genocides, but what was considered normal was not hate. We have adapted the word to mean something it did not previously. Just like we don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity, I'd say the same thing about modern hate and self-interest.
The instances of the other examples have only barely been reduced by identifying them, and in many cases, it has licensed behaviours that don't fit the definition, and it has empowered a layer of people who have jobs effectively managing and extracting value from them now, imo. Like malice, I reject hate, and in doing so, I also reject indexing on it as the axiom for a positive morality.
That is a big stretch. Hate can't be applied to many things, including disagreements like this comment.
But it can be pretty clearly applied to statements that, if carried out in life, would deny another person or peoples' human rights. Another is denigration or mocking someone on the basis of things that can't or shouldn't have to change about themselves, like their race or religion. There is a pretty bright line there.
Malice (per the conventional meaning of something bad intended, but not necessarily revealed or acted out) is a much lower bar that includes outright hate speech.
> but really, you can see when someone is actuated by it.
How can you identify this systematically (vs it being just your opinion), but not identify hate speech?