Freedom of speech at the intersection of racist speech and online political hate speech

Abstract

Freedom of speech is a topic that continues to be addressed, rightly so, by researchers and scholars in debates about contentious topics such as hateful or racist speech. The volume of scholarship and literature is too vast to fully address here, but there are a few sources that one might turn to first in deconstructing the interdisciplinarity of freedom of speech and communication in this context. A start might be with Barendt's (2005) volume, simply titled 'Freedom of Speech'. Although slightly dated at this point, this text provides the necessary background knowledge on free speech, including legal frameworks and philosophical arguments that ground freedom of speech, particularly in Anglo-American literature. Another key source rests with Weinstein and Hare's ( 2009) edited volume, 'Extreme Speech and Democracy', which provides a comprehensive canvas on transgressive and violent speech, including topics such as hate speech, incitement to religious hatred and incitement to terrorism. More recent sources could be on political 'hate spin', which is the combination of incitement to hatred with fabricated offence as a propaganda tool (George, 2016), and debates on terrorism, racism and politics in the aftermath of the Parisian terrorist attacks at the Charlie Hedbo office in 2015 (Titley et al., 2017).These are sources that would set the stage for sitting down with the two books paired for this review essay, Online Political Hate Speech in Europe: The Rise of New Extremisms and Is Free Speech Racist? The former deals with hate speech that takes place online and within the sphere of politics, and the latter deals with a wider discussion of racism and free speech. Both books focus primarily on the European context, where free speech is a value under responsibility, but also discuss the American free speech context, where free speech is an absolute value with fundamental protections provided by the First Amendment of the US Constitution, that allows even the most extreme and 006798E JC0010.