As legislators and platforms tackle the challenge of suppressing hate speech online, questions about its definition remain unresolved. In this review we discuss three issues: What are the main challenges encountered when defining hate speech? What alternatives are there for the definition of hate speech? What is the relationship between the nature and scope of the definition and its operationability? By tracing both efforts to regulate and to define hate speech in legal, paralegal, and tech platform contexts, we arrive at four possible modes of definition: teleological, pure consequentialist, formal, and consensus or relativist definitions. We suggest the need for a definition where hate speech encompasses those speech acts that tend towards certain ethically proscribed ends, which are destructive in terms of their consequences, and express certain ideas that are transgressions of specific ethical norms.

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The redemptive function of science is a central facet of contemporary late-modern mythology, which due to the preeminent discursive hegemony of scientism generally goes more or less unexamined. A kind of redemptive scientism has popularly been acknowledged as simply real and unquestionably true, whereas neither the rationale nor the character of these narratives are sufficiently critically examined. Arguably, the trust in scientific redemption has waned in later years, which due to the narratives' dominant role risks engendering profound effects upon culture and society in general, yet these consequences are difficult to understand since we are insufficiently familiar with the myths that cause them. The purpose of this article is to exemplify the reproduction of such secular eschatologies within the framework of the futurology literature from a period which strongly affirmed and celebrated them. This will hopefully enable us to better understand their character, entrenchment, and ideological consequences, as well as what may follow from a developing rejection of them.