hate speech thesis statements

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On Thesis Statements

The thesis statement.

This is not an exhaustive list of bad thesis statements, but here're five kinds of problems I've seen most often. Notice that the last two, #4 and #5, are not necessarily incorrect or illegitimate thesis statements, but, rather, inappropriate for the purposes of this course. They may be useful forms for papers on different topics in other courses.

A thesis takes a position on an issue. It is different from a topic sentence in that a thesis statement is not neutral. It announces, in addition to the topic, the argument you want to make or the point you want to prove. This is your own opinion that you intend to back up. This is your reason and motivation for writing.

Bad Thesis 1

Bad Thesis 2 : This paper will consider the advantages and disadvantages of certain restrictions on free speech.

Better Thesis 1 : Stanley Fish's argument that free speech exists more as a political prize than as a legal reality ignores the fact that even as a political prize it still serves the social end of creating a general cultural atmosphere of tolerance that may ultimately promote free speech in our nation just as effectively as any binding law.

Better Thesis 2 : Even though there may be considerable advantages to restricting hate speech, the possibility of chilling open dialogue on crucial racial issues is too great and too high a price to pay.

A thesis should be as specific as possible, and it should be tailored to reflect the scope of the paper. It is not possible, for instance, to write about the history of English literature in a 5 page paper. In addition to choosing simply a smaller topic, strategies to narrow a thesis include specifying a method or perspective or delineating certain limits.

Bad Thesis 2 : The government has the right to limit free speech.

Better Thesis 1 : There should be no restrictions on the 1st amendment if those restrictions are intended merely to protect individuals from unspecified or otherwise unquantifiable or unverifiable "emotional distress."

Better Thesis 2 : The government has the right to limit free speech in cases of overtly racist or sexist language because our failure to address such abuses would effectively suggest that our society condones such ignorant and hateful views.

A thesis must be arguable. And in order for it to be arguable, it must present a view that someone might reasonably contest. Sometimes a thesis ultimately says, "we should be good," or "bad things are bad." Such thesis statements are tautological or so universally accepted that there is no need to prove the point.

Bad Thesis 2 : There are always alternatives to using racist speech.

Better Thesis 1 : If we can accept that emotional injuries can be just as painful as physical ones we should limit speech that may hurt people's feelings in ways similar to the way we limit speech that may lead directly to bodily harm.

Better Thesis 2 : The "fighting words" exception to free speech is not legitimate because it wrongly considers speech as an action.

A good argumentative thesis provides not only a position on an issue, but also suggests the structure of the paper. The thesis should allow the reader to imagine and anticipate the flow of the paper, in which a sequence of points logically prove the essay's main assertion. A list essay provides no such structure, so that different points and paragraphs appear arbitrary with no logical connection to one another.

Bad Thesis 2 : None of the arguments in favor of regulating pornography are persuasive.

Better Thesis 1 : Among the many reasons we need to limit hate speech the most compelling ones all refer to our history of discrimination and prejudice, and it is, ultimately, for the purpose of trying to repair our troubled racial society that we need hate speech legislation.

Better Thesis 2 : None of the arguments in favor of regulating pornography are persuasive because they all base their points on the unverifiable and questionable assumption that the producers of pornography necessarily harbor ill will specifically to women.

In an other course this would not be at all unacceptable, and, in fact, possibly even desirable. But in this kind of course, a thesis statement that makes a factual claim that can be verified only with scientific, sociological, psychological or other kind of experimental evidence is not appropriate. You need to construct a thesis that you are prepared to prove using the tools you have available, without having to consult the world's leading expert on the issue to provide you with a definitive judgment.

Bad Thesis 2 : Hate speech can cause emotional pain and suffering in victims just as intense as physical battery.

Better Thesis 1 : Whether or not the cultural concept of free speech bears any relation to the reality of 1st amendment legislation and jurisprudence, its continuing social function as a promoter of tolerance and intellectual exchange trumps the call for politicization (according to Fish's agenda) of the term.

Better Thesis 2 : The various arguments against the regulation of hate speech depend on the unspoken and unexamined assumption that emotional pain is either trivial.

Thirty years of research into hate speech: topics of interest and their evolution

• Open access
• Published: 30 October 2020
• Volume 126 , pages 157–179, ( 2021 )

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• Alice Tontodimamma 1 ,
• Eugenia Nissi 2 ,
• Annalina Sarra 3 &
• Lara Fontanella 3  

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The exponential growth of social media has brought with it an increasing propagation of hate speech and hate based propaganda. Hate speech is commonly defined as any communication that disparages a person or a group on the basis of some characteristics such as race, colour, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion. Online hate diffusion has now developed into a serious problem and this has led to a number of international initiatives being proposed, aimed at qualifying the problem and developing effective counter-measures. The aim of this paper is to analyse the knowledge structure of hate speech literature and the evolution of related topics. We apply co-word analysis methods to identify different topics treated in the field. The analysed database was downloaded from Scopus, focusing on a number of publications during the last thirty years. Topic and network analyses of literature showed that the main research topics can be divided into three areas: “general debate hate speech versus freedom of expression”,“hate-speech automatic detection and classification by machine-learning strategies”, and “gendered hate speech and cyberbullying”. The understanding of how research fronts interact led to stress the relevance of machine learning approaches to correctly assess hatred forms of online speech.

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Introduction

In recent years, the ways in which people receive news, and communicate with one another, have been revolutionised by the Internet, and especially by social networks. It is a natural activity, in societies where freedom of speech is recognised, for people to express their opinions. From an era in which individuals communicated their ideas, usually orally and only to small numbers of other people, we have moved on to an era in which individuals can make free use of a variety of diffusion channels in order to communicate, instantaneously, with people who are a long distance away; in addition, more and more people make use of online platforms not only to interact with each other, but also to share news. The detachment created by being enabled to write, without any obligation to reveal oneself directly, means that this new medium of virtual communication allows people to feel greater freedom in the way they express themselves. Unfortunately, though, there is also a dark side to this system. Social media have become a fertile ground for heated discussions which frequently result in the use of insulting and offensive language. The creation and dissemination of hateful speech are now pervading the online platforms. As a result, countries are recognising hate speech as a serious problem, and this has led to a number of International and European initiatives being proposed, aimed at qualifying the problem and developing effective counter-measures.

A first issue, for the identification of a content as hateful, is that there is no universally accepted definition of hate speech, mainly because of the vague and subjective determinations as to whether speech is “offensive” or conveys “hate” (Strossen 2016 ). A comprehensive overview of different definitions can be found in Sellars ( 2016 ) who derives several related concepts that appear throughout academic and legal attempts to define hate speech as well as in attempts of online platforms. The identified common traits refer to: the targeting of a group, or an individual as a member of a group; the presence of a content that expresses hatred, causes a harm, incites bad actions beyond the speech itself, and has no redeeming purpose; the intention of harm or bad activity; the public nature of the speech; finally, a context that makes violent response possible. Sellars ( 2016 ) stresses, however, how the identified traits do not form a single definition, but could be used to help improve the confidence that the speech in question is worthy of identification as hate speech.

In addition to the ambiguity in the definition, hate speech creates a conflict between some people’s speech rights, and other people’s right to be free from verbal abuse (Greene and Simpson 2017 ). The complex balancing between freedom of expression and the defence of human dignity has received significant attention from legal scholars and philosophers and, according to Sellars ( 2016 ), the different approaches to define hate speech can be linked to academics’ particular motivations: “Some do not overtly call for legal sanction for such speech and seek merely to understand the phenomenon; some do seek to make the speech illegal, and are trying to guide legislators and courts to effective statutory language; some are in between.” Advocates of the free speech rights invoke the principle of viewpoint neutrality or content neutrality, which prohibits bans on the expression of viewpoints based on their substantive message (Brettschneider 2013 ). This protection extends even to speech that expresses ideas that most people would find distasteful, offensive, disagreeable, or discomforting, and thus extends even to hate speech (Beausoleil 2019 ). According to Strossen ( 2016 , 2018 ) hate speech laws not only violate the cardinal viewpoint neutrality, but also the emergency principles, by permitting government to suppress speech solely because its message is disfavoured, disturbing, or feared to be dangerous, by government officials or community members, and not because it directly causes imminent serious harm. On the other hand, Cohen-Almagor ( 2016 , 2019 ) insists that it is necessary to “take the evils of hate speech seriously” and that “certain kinds of speech are beyond tolerance.” The author criticizes the viewpoint neutrality concept arguing that a balance needs to be struck between competing social interests because freedom of expression is important as is the protection of vulnerable minorities: “people must enjoy absolute freedom to advocate and debate ideas, but this is so long as they refrain from abusing this freedom to attack the rights of others or their status in society as human beings and equal members of the community.” An alternative remedy to censoring hate speech could be to add more speech, as suggested by the UNESCO study titled “Countering On-line Hate Speech” (Gagliardone et al. 2015) which argues that counter-speech is usually preferable to the suppression of hate speech.

The rising visibility of hate speech on online social platform has resulted in a continuously growing rate of published research into different areas of hate speech. The increasing number of studies on this subject is beneficial to scholars and practitioners, but it also brings about challenges in terms of understanding the key research streams in the area. Previous surveys highlighted the state of the art and the evolution of research on hate speech (Schmidt and Wiegand 2017 ; Fortuna and Nunes 2018 ; MacAvaney et al. 2019 ; Waqas et al. 2019 ). The survey of Schmidt and Wiegand ( 2017 ) describes the key areas that have been explored to automatically recognize hateful utterances using neural language processing. Eight categories of features used in hate speech detection, including simple surface, word generalization, sentiment analysis, lexical resources and linguistic characteristics, knowledge-based features, meta-information, and multimodal information, have been highlighted. In addition, Schmidt and Wiegand ( 2017 ) stress how a comparability of different features and methods requires a benchmark data set. Fortuna and Nunes ( 2018 ) carried out an in-depth survey aimed at providing a systematic overview of studies in the field. In this survey, the authors firstly pay attention to the motivations for studying hate speech and then they conveniently distinguish theoretical and practical aspects. Specifically, they list some of the main rules for hate speech identification and investigate the methods and algorithms adopted in literature for automatic hate speech detection. Also, practical resources, such as datasets and other projects, have been reviewed. MacAvaney et al. ( 2019 ) discussed the challenges faced by online automatic approaches for hate speech detection in text, including competing definitions, dataset availability and construction. A throughout bibliographic and visualization analysis of the scientific literature related to online hate speech was conducted Waqas et al. ( 2019 ). Drawing on Web of Science (WOS) core database, their study concentrated on the mapping of general research indices, prevalent themes of research, research hotspots and influential stakeholders, such as organizations and contributing regions. Along with the most popular bibliometric measures, such as total number of papers, to measure productivity, and total citations, to assess the relevance of a country, institution, or author, the above mentioned research uses mapping knowledge tools to draw the structure and networks of authors, journals, universities and countries. Not surprisingly, the results of this bibliometric analysis show a remarkable increase in publication and citation trend after year 2005, when social media platforms have grown in terms of influence and user adoption, and the Internet has become a central arena for public and private discourse. Furthermore, it has emerged that most of the publications originate from the discipline of psychology and psychiatry, with recurring themes of cyberbullying, psychiatric morbidity, and psychological profiling of aggressors and victims. As noted by the authors, the high representation of psychology-related contributions is mainly due to the choice of WOS core database, which excludes relevant research fields from the analysis, being its coverage geared towards health and social science disciplines rather than engineering or computer ones.

Based on these previous studies, and especially on that of Waqas et al. ( 2019 ), our research intends to enlarge the mapping of global literature output regarding online hate speech over the last thirty years, by relying on bibliographic data extracted from Scopus database and using different methodological approaches. In order to identify how online hate scientific literature is evolving and understand what are the main research areas and fronts and how they interact over time, we used bibliometric measures, mapping knowledge tools and topic modelling. All the above methods are traditionally employed in bibliometrics analysis and share the idea of using a great amount of bibliographic data to let emerge, in an unsupervised way, the underlying knowledge base. In particular, topic analysis, based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation method (LDA; Blei et al. 2003 ) is gaining popularity among scholars in diverse fields (Alghamdi and Alfalqi 2015 ). A topic model leads to two key outputs: a list of topics (i.e. groups of words that frequently occur together) and a lists of documents that are strongly associated with each topic (McPhee et al. 2017 ). Accordingly, this approach is useful for finding interpretable topics with semantic meaning and for assigning these topics to the literature documents, offering in such way a probabilistic quantification of relevance both for the identification of topics and for the classification of documents.

Our study exploits the main strengths of each method in drawing a synthetic representation of the research trends on online hate and adds value to previous quoted works, by taking advantage of topic modelling to retrieve latent driven themes. As highlighted in Suominen and Toivanen ( 2016 ), the key novelty of topic modelling, in classifying scientific knowledge, is that it virtually eliminates the need to fit new-to-the-world knowledge into known-to-the-world definitions.

The remainder of this work is structured as follows. Section “Materials and methods” describes the data source and the methods used. Section “Results” presents the bibliometric results, focusing on the yearly quantitative distribution of publications and on the latent topics retrieved through LDA. This section provides useful insights into the temporal evolution of the topics, their interactions and the research activity in the identified latent themes. A conclusion and future perspectives are given in “Conclusion” section. Finally, we report additional information on the bibliographic data set and the topic analysis results, in the online Supplementary Material.

Materials and methods

Bibliographic dataset.

For the analysis, we use a bibliometric dataset, covering the period 1992–2019, retrieved from Scopus database. This bibliographic database was selected because it is one of the most suitable source of references for scientific peer-reviewed publications.

In the same vein of Waqas et al. ( 2019 ), we focus on online hate and, for our search, we built a query that, in addition to the exact phrase “hate speech”, combines terms related to offensive or denigratory language (“hatred”, “abusive language, “abusive discourse”, “abusive speech”, “offensive language”, “offensive discourse”, “offensive speech”, “denigratory language”, “denigratory discourse”, “denigratory speech”) with words linked to the online nature (“online”,“social media”, “web”, “virtual”, “cyber”, “Orkut”, “Twitter”, “Facebook”, “Reddit”, “Instagram”, “Snapchat”, “Youtube”, “Whatsapp”, “Wechat”, “QQ”, “Tumblr”, “Linkedin”, “Pinterest”).

We have not considered specific terms linked to cyberbullying because, although if this phenomenon overlaps partially with hate speech, it encompasses a broader field. The exact query can be found in the Supplementary Material.

The bibliographic data was extracted by applying the query to the contents of title, abstract and keywords. The data for each resulting publication was manually exported on December 15, 2019.

All types of publications were included in the search, and 1614 documents related to hate speech, published in 995 different sources, were identified. This high number indicates a wide variety of research themes, and the multidisciplinary character of the subject which involves a plurality of disciplines. In particular, the top publication fields include Social Sciences, Computer Science, Arts and Humanities and Psychology. Looking at the document type, the majority is article, conference paper and book chapter.

Information about document distribution by research field is given in the Supplementary Material, along with the document distribution by source and the ranking of the most productive countries and authors.

Conceptual structure map

To investigate the structure of research on hate speech, we firstly consider an exploratory analysis of the keywords selected by the authors. The analysis was carried out through the R package Bibliometrix (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017 ), which allows to perform multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) (Greenacre and Blasius 2006 ) and hierarchical clustering to draw a conceptual structure map of the field. Specifically, MCA allows to obtain a low-dimensional Euclidean representation of the original data matrix, by performing a homogeneity analysis of the “documents by keywords” indicator matrix, built by considering a dummy variable for each keyword. The words are plotted onto a two-dimensional map where closer words are more similar in distribution across the documents. In addition, the implementation of a hierarchical clustering procedure on this reduced space leads to identify clusters of documents that are characterised by common keywords.

Topic analysis

To gain a deeper understanding of the topics discussed in the published research on hate speech, we have applied Latent Dirichet Allocation, which is an automatic topic mining technique that enables to uncover hidden thematic subjects in document collections by revealing recurring clusters of co-occurring words. The two foundational probabilistic topic models are the Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA, Hofmann 1999 ) and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Blei et al. 2003 ). The pLSA is a probabilistic variant of the Latent Semantic Analysis introduced by Deerwester et al. ( 1990 ) to capture the semantic information embedded in large textual corpora without human supervision. In the pLSA approach, each word in a document is modelled as a sample from a mixture model, where the mixture components are multinomial random variables that can be viewed as representations of topics. The pLSA model allows multiple topics in each document, and the possible topic proportions are learned from the document collection. Blei et al. ( 2003 ) introduced the LDA which presents a higher modelling flexibility over pLSA by assuming fully complete probabilistic generative model where each document is represented as a random mixture over latent topics and each topic is characterized by a distribution over words. LDA mitigates some shortcomings of the earlier topic models. Specifically, it has the advantage to improve the way of mixture models of capturing the exchangeability of both words and documents. LDA assumes a probabilistic generative model where each document is described by a distribution of topics and each topic is described by a distribution of words. The set of candidate topics are the same for all documents and each document may contain words from multiple different topics. The generative two-stage process of each document in the corpus can be described as follows (Blei 2012 ). In the first step a distribution over topics is randomly chosen; in the second step for each word in the document a topic is randomly chosen from the distribution over topics and a word is randomly chosen from the corresponding distribution over the vocabulary. Following Blei ( 2012 ), it it is possible to describe LDA more formally. Let assume that we have a corpus defined as a collection of D documents where each document is a sequence of N words, \(w_d=(w_{d,1},w_{d,2},\dots ,w_{d,N})\) , and each word is an item from a vocabulary indexed by \(\{1,\dots ,V\}\) . Furthermore, we assume that there are K latent topics, \(\beta _{1:K}\) , defined as distribution over the vocabulary. The generative process for LDA corresponds to the following joint distribution of the hidden and observed variables

The topic proportions for the d th document are \(\theta _d\) , where \(\theta _{d,k}\) is the topic proportion for topic k in document d . The topic assignments for the d th document are \(z_d\) , where \(z_{d,n}\) is the topic assignment for the n th word in document d . Both the topic proportions and the topic distributions over the vocabulary follow a Dirichlet distribution. Since the posterior distribution, \(p \left( \beta _{1:K},\theta _{1:D},z_{1:D}|w_{1:D}\right) \) , is intractable for exact inference, a wide variety of approximate inference algorithms, such as sampling-based (Steyvers and Griffiths 2006 ) and variational (Blei et al. 2003 ) algorithms can be considered.

In our analysis, we implement LDA to model a corpus where each document consists of the publication title, its abstract and the keywords. To exctract the relevant content and remove any unwanted nuisance terms, we performed a cleaning process (tokenization; lowercase conversion; special characters, and stop-words removal) of the text documents using the function provided in the Text Analytics Toolbox of Matlab (MATLAB 2018 ). For the analyses, the tokens with less than 10 occurrences in the corpus have been pruned. LDA analysis was performed through the fitlda Matlab routine available in the same Toolbox.

The results of this study involved different analyses. Firstly, we concentrated on the yearly quantitative distribution of literature, then we examined the conceptual structure of hate speech research. Next, we combined the results of topic and network analysis for highlighting the emerging topics, their interactions over time, the most influential countries and the academic cooperations in the retrieved themes.

Research activity

The evolution over time of the number of published documents shows a remarkable growth, highlighting the increased global focus on online hate. See Fig.  1 , in which the number of publications per year is displayed.

Since 1992, it is possible to distinguish between two different phases. During the first phase from 1992 to 2010, a slow increase in publications occurred. A higher growth rate characterises, instead, the second phase, from 2010 to 2019, testifying the growing interest. This is consistent with Price’s theory on the productivity on a given subject (Price 1963 ), according to which the development of science goes through three phases. In the preliminary phase, known as the precursor, when some scholars start publishing research into a new field, small increments in scientific literature are recorded. In the second phase, the number of publications grows exponentially, since the expansion of the field attracts an increasing number of scientists, as many aspects of the subject still have to be explored. Finally, in the third phase there is a consolidation of the body of knowledge along with a stabilisation in the productivity; therefore the aspect of the curve transforms from exponential to logistic.

To verify the rapid increase in the trend of research literature related to online hate speech, we fit an exponential growth curve to the data (Price 1963 ). According to this model the annual rate of change is equal to \(20.5\%\) . Therefore, it can be said that hate speech research is in the second phase of development: an increasing amount of research is being published, but there is still room for improvement in many aspects.

Number of publications on hate speech per year: observed and expected distribution according to an exponential growth

Conceptual structure of hate speech research

The conceptual structure of the research on hate speech is represented in Fig.  2 , where authors’ keywords, whose occurrences are greater than ten, are represented on the two dimensional plane obtained through Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA).

Conceptual map of hate speech research

The two dimensions of the maps which emerged from the MCA can be interpreted as follows. The first, horizontal, dimension separates keywords emphasizing social networks and communities and hate speech linked to religion (on the right), from those related to the political aspects of the hate speech phenomenon (on the left). This dimension explains the \(39.61\%\) of variability. The second, vertical dimension, considers machine learning techniques and accounts for the \(13.55\%\) of overall inertia. In Fig.  2 are also displayed the results obtained through a hierarchical cluster analysis carried out adopting the method of the average linkage on the factorial coordinates obtained with the MCA. A very important fact is evident from the conceptual map: three clusters represent the three major areas of research involved in the matter of hate diffusion. The blue cluster shows words as “abusive language”, “cyberbullying”, “deep learning”, “text classification”, “sentiment analysis”, “social network”, terms that bring out the problem related to automatic detection. The green cluster shows words as “human rights”, “democracy”, “incitement”, “blasphemy”, words that bring out the problem related to the legal sphere. The red cluster, the most numerous, shows words as “social network analysis”, “privacy”, “youtube”, “facebook”, “online hate”, “cyberhate”, words that bring out the problem related to social sphere and social media.

Research topics in hate speech literature

Topic modelling, performed via LDA technique, provides an additional insight in structuring the online hate research into different topics. As known, LDA algorithm needs to specify a fixed number of topics, implying that the researchers should have some idea of the possible bounds of latent features in the text. In fact, there is no unique value, appropriate in all situations and all datasets (Barua et al. 2014 ). Of course, the LDA model produces finer-grained aggregations by increasing the number of desired topics while smaller values will produce coarser-grained, more general topics. On the other hand, a higher number of topics may cause the progressive intrusion of non-relevant terms among the most probable words, affecting the semantic coherence of the retrieved themes.

In our study, we run the LDA analysis by setting the number of desired topics, in turn, equal to 10, 12, 14 and, in the end, we adopted the twelve-topic solution which guarantees a fair compromise between topic interpretability and a detailed analysis.

Topic interpretation

In LDA, the topics are assumed to be latent variables, which need to be meaningfully interpreted. This is usually achieved by examining the top keywords in each topic (Steyvers and Griffiths 2006 ). Figures   3 and   4 show the most relevant words for each topic, where relevance is measured normalizing the posterior word probabilities per topic by the geometric mean of the posterior probabilities for the word across all topics. Topics are sorted according to the estimated probability to be observed in the entire data set. The most relevant terms, along with their relevance measures are provided in Section 2.1 of the Supplementary Material.

The twelve identified topics reveal important areas of online hate research in the past thirty years. They can be synthetically described as dealing with the following themes.

Word clouds for topics 1–6

Word clouds for topics 7–12

Topic 1 includes words such as “speech”, “hate”, “free”, “harm”, “freedom”, suggesting a broad discussion on the debate “hate speech” versus “free speech”. The constitutional right of freedom of expression is considered also in Topic 3, mainly characterised by words like “freedom”, “law/laws”, “rights”, “expression”,“constitutional”. Topic 2 is strictly linked with the political aspects of the hate speech phenomenon and contains terms such as “political/politics/politician”, “discourse”, “democracy”, “elections”. Topic 7 covers hate speech related to religion and extremism and is described by words such as “terrorism/terrorist”, “religion/religious”, “muslim/muslims”, “violence”, “global”,“war”, “extremism/extremist”.

The online aspect of hate is clearly highlighted in Topics 4, 6, 8 and 10. In particular, Topic 4 is related to research on social networks and communities, especially Facebook and Youtube, which are large social media providers whose inner mechanisms allow users to report hate speech. Studies in Topic 8 refer to Twitter, and it is possible to stress how they make use, above all, of content and sentiment analysis. Topic 6 covers the aspect of information diffusion on the Internet, including terms like “internet”, “information”, “media”. Finally, Topic 10 considers the problem of online deviant behaviour and cyberbullying, in which relevant words are: “online”, “exposure”, “crime/crimes”, “behavior”, “cyberbullying”, “cyberhate”.

Interestingly, the distinct hate speech targets are disclosed by Topics 5 and 11. Topic 5 deals with issues on racism, as indicated by the following sets of words: “racism”, “racist”, “race”, “racial”,“white/whiteness”, “black’; in that topic we also find, among the top scoring words, some terms associated with feminism (i.e.“feminist”, “women”, “misogyny”). Topic 11 refers to hate speech linked to gender and sexual identity since the most relevant-used words are: “sexual/sexuality”, “gender”, “gay”, “trasgender”, “lesbian”, “lgbt/lgbtq”.

Finally, Topics 9 and 12 deals with methodological aspects of hate speech analysis. In particular, Topic 9 refers to the analysis of discourse and language, as suggested by the most relevant words contained in it (“comments”, “discourse”, “language”, “emotions”, “linguistic”,“corpus”). On the other hand, Topic 12 considers machine learning techniques, in fact, within this specific topic, the terms “learning”, “detection”, “classification”, “machine”,“text” are those with the top scoring.

Topic temporal evolution

To further analyse each of the topics, we focus on their dynamic changes over the years. As previously pointed out, LDA algorithm estimates each topic as a mixture of words, but also models each document as a mixture of topics. Therefore, each document can exhibit multiple topics on the base of the words used. The estimated probabilities of observing each topic in each document can be exploited to assign one or more topics to the documents of the analysed bibliographic dataset. Specifically, in this study, we decided to assign the topics with the top three highest document-topic probabilities to each document, provided the probabilities are greater than 0.2.

The temporal evolution of the scientific productivity for each topic can be captured through Fig.  5 , where the exponential growth model has been fitted considering the number of documents published since 2000.

Number of publications for each topic: observed and expected distributions according to an exponential growth

The temporal trend of most topics agrees with an exponential growth. However, looking at Topic 1 and Topic 3, we notice how the number of publications in the last period falls below the number expected according to the exponential law considered by Price ( 1963 ) with regard to the second phase in the development of scientific research on a given subject. We saw that the content of Topics 1 and 3 is associated with generic themes of online hate speech, thus the lesser amount of related publications in the last period reflects the interest of research community in identifying new research fronts. Conversely, the number of published documents for Topic 8 shows a sudden rise starting from 2018. This conclusion holds, even if to a lesser extend, for Topic 9 where the observed productivity rises above the expected one.

The notable case in Fig.  5 regards Topic 12, dealing with the application of the dominant and new theme of machine learning algorithms to online hate speech. In the last two years, this topic exhibits an explosive growth as for the related publication volumes. A relatively more contained rise in the size of publications is recorded for Topics 10 and 11, whose contents are associated with the specific themes of cyberhate and gendered hate.

Overall, these temporal patterns seem to suggest a shift in hate speech literature from more generic themes, about the debate on freedom of speech versus hate speech, towards research more focused on the technical aspects of hate speech detection and methodologies and techniques included in the fields of linguistics, statistics and machine learning. The appearance and development of new fields of interest and innovative ideas in the research activity on hate speech is confirmed by the heatmaps provided in the Supplementary Material, which show the number of documents, by years, assigned to the identified topics.

Topic interactions

After exploring the features of the identified topics in online hate speech research, we quantitatively model their interactions and build a topic relation network. In particular, given that each document has been assigned to multiple topics, we can exploit the topic co-occurence matrix in order to understand the connections among the different themes developed in this field of research.

In Fig.  6 , we display the topic network. In the graph, the nodes are coloured according to their degree and the edges are weighted according to the co-occurences: the wider the line, the stronger the connection. Moreover, the edges whose weight is lower than the average co-occurence number have been removed. Details on the connections are provided in Section 2.3 of the Supplementary Material.

Topic co-occurence network for the publication on hate speech from 1992 to 2019

From the analysis of the links it is possible disclosing interesting relations between research fronts, which underline the multi-disciplinary nature of online hate research and the crossbreeding between different disciplines and research subjects. The strongest connection is between Topics 1 and 3, dealing respectively with the broad debate of hate speech versus free speech and the constitutional right of freedom of expression, respectively. This relation reflects the fact that both the topics are related to the boundaries of freedom of expression; accordingly, it is obvious to observe an overlapping of these two themes among documents. Through the network visualization, we see that Topic 1, being a general theme, is connected with the majority of the nodes. Other most connecting nodes are referred to the topic dealing with the questions of free speech (Topic3 ) and to the activities of hateful users on online social media (Topic 4). An interesting clique shows how closely connected are also Topics 4, 8 and 12. The interactions of this subgroup of nodes reveal the relation between computer sciences and social sciences disciplines.

The importance of the retrieved topics in the network of connections can be inferred considering the degree centrality measures shown in Fig.  7 .

Node centrality measures

Besides, closeness and betweenness centrality scores, displayed also in Fig.  7 , are of interest to quantitatively characterize the topography of the topic co-occurrence network. Specifically, closeness centrality measures the mean distance from a vertex to other vertices (Zhang and Luo 2017 ), whereas the betweenness centrality of a node measures the extent to which the node is part of paths that connect an arbitrary pair of nodes in the network (Brandes 2001 ); put in other way betweenness measure quantifies the degree to which a node serves as a bridge. It results that the thematic topics such as “social networks and communities” (Topic 4), “religion and extremism” (Topic 7) and “cyberhate” (Topic 10) are ranked first. These findings suggest that those research areas are more effective and accessible in the network and form the densest bridges with other nodes.

We also built the topic co-occurrence networks distinguishing three different stages in the historical development of online hate speech research, as displayed in Fig.  8 . The initial development stage refers to 1992–2009 and accounts for 227 publications; then there was the rapid development stage (2010–2015 years), when the results of research have been rapidly emerging with more than 450 scientific contributes published. Finally, we move into the last three years-period (2016–2019), when more than 300 papers are being published every year. As before, the connections in the network maps represent the interactions between the different research fields and, in each network, the edges whose weight is lower than the average co-occurrence number for the corresponding temporal interval have been suppressed.

Topic co-occurence networks

It can be seen that as new topics emerge, the network structure becomes richer in terms of connections, showing the most important footprints of the related research activities. Through a qualitative analysis of Fig.  8 , we observe that with advances in computer technology, especially developments in data or text mining and information retrieval, research on online hate speech based on computer sciences continues to receive more and more attention. In fact, from the analysis of links in the co-occurrence topic network, it was possible to identify, in the last period, interesting relations especially between Topics 8 and 12.

Overall, in the last thirty years, topics related to online hate research tend to arrange into three main clusters (Fig.  9 ). The fast greedy algorithm implemented in the R package igraph (Csardi and Nepusz 2006 ) was used to group the topics. The first meaningful cluster includes six topics that bring together basic themes of hate speech, covered by Topics 1,2, 3, as well as online speech designed to promote hate on the basis of race (Topic 5) and religion and extremism (Topic 7). At this group belongs also Topic 9, associated with analysis of discourse and language. In the smallest group, we find that cyberhate and gendered online hate are clustered together. Finally, Topics 4, 6, 8 and 12, in the last group, reveals that publications in this cluster deal with machine learning techniques and hateful content on online social media.

Topic clusters

Research activity in the identified topics

Influential countries in the identified topics.

Table  1 summarises the top-ten countries’ share of publication in the study of online hate speech for each of the identified clusters. Actually, for the themes of the first group (Topics 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9), owing to the presence of ex-fair scores, are displayed the first 11 publisher countries. Not surprisingly, the Anglo-Saxon States are very involved in research dealing with the general debate of “hate speech” versus “freedom of expression”. In fact, in these countries, especially in the United States, the constitutional protection of freedom of speech is vigorously defended. Conversely, other countries, mainly European countries, prohibit certain forms of speech and even the expression of certain opinions, such those to incite hatred, but also to publicly deny crimes of genocide (e.g., the Holocaust) or war crimes.

United States and United Kingdom holds the largest share of publications in the other two domains, suggesting that both these countries had a pioneering role and the strongest impact in the new strands of research focused on machine learning algorithms and text classification as a viable source for identification of hate speech as well as on investigating cyberbullying and gendered hate behaviours. Interestingly, research on automatic identification and classification of hateful languages on social media using machine learning methods emerges as an important component also in the Italian, Indian and Spanish research activity on hate speech. Finally, for the third cluster (Topics 10 and 11), we see that a not negligible number of publications on themes linked with cyberbulling and gendered hate originated from Finland, which occupies the third position in the correspondent ranking, followed by Italy and South Africa.

Country cooperation in the identified topics

The preliminary analysis in the previous subsection depicts the overall landscape of countries contribution to the studies on online hate speech. Moving forward, by taking into account authors’ affiliation, it is possible to analyse the level of cooperation between countries. It is worth noting that country research collaboration is a valuable means since it allows scholars to share information and play their academic advantages (Ebadi and Schiffauerova 2015 ), and is deemed the hallmark of contemporary scientific production. To highlight the country research collaboration in the online hate speech research field, we constructed the countries cooperation network, displayed in the Supplementary Material. In what follows, we take into account the cooperation with respect to each of the clusters identified in the “Topic interactions” section. The characteristics of international cooperation between different countries in each domain of online hate research can be argued from the network maps visualised in Figs. 10 ,   11 and   12 . We see that the United States is the major partner in international cooperation in the field of online hate speech, in all identified topic clusters. Academic cooperative connections among countries, generating research on Topics 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 and 9, primarily originate from the Unites States, United Kingdom, Germany, Brazil, Sweden and Spain. The top ranked countries by centrality, for the cluster that embraces Topics 4, 6, 8 and 12, are Unites States, United Kingdom, China, Italy, Spain, Germany and Brazil. Finally, for the research related to the remaining Topics 10 and 11, we discover a wider scientific collaboration, mainly, among United States, Spain, South Korea, Czech Republic and Germany.

Country cooperation network for topics 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9

Country cooperation network for topics 4,6,8,12

Country cooperation network for topics 10,11

In the last years, the dynamics and usefulness of social media communications are seriously affected by hate speech (Arango et al. 2019 ), which has become a huge concern, attracting worldwide interest. The attention payed to online hate speech by the scientific research community and by policy makers is a reaction to the spread of of hate speech, in all its various forms, on the many social media and other online platforms, and to the pressing need to guarantee non-discriminatory access to digital spaces, as well.

Motivated by these concerns, this paper has presented a bibliometric study of the world’s research activity on online hate speech, performed with the aim of providing an overview of the extent of published research in this field, assessing the research output and suggesting potential, fruitful, future directions.

Beyond the identification and mapping of traditional bibliometric indicators, we focused on the contemporary structure of the field that is composed of a certain variety of themes that researchers are engaging with over the years. Through topic modelling analysis, implemented via LDA algorithm, the main research topics of online hate have been identified and grouped in categories. In contrast to previous researches, designed as qualitative literature review, this study provides a broader and quantitative analysis of publications of online hate speech. In this respect, it should be noted that although topic models do not offer new insights on representing the main area of the research, it gives to our knowledge, for the first time, the possibility of discovering latent and potentially useful contents, shape their possible structure and relationships underlying the data, with quantitative methods.

As pointed out by different authors (see, among others, Yau et al. 2014 ), the combination of topic modelling algorithms and bibliometrics allows the researcher to feature the retrieved topics with a number of topic-based analytic indicators, other than to investigate their significance and dynamic evolution, and model their quantitative relations.

Our analysis has systematically sorted the relevant international studies, producing a visual analysis of 1614 documents published in Scopus database, and generated a large amount of empirical data and information.

The following conclusions can be drawn. The volume of academic papers published in a representative sample, from 1992 to 2019, displays a significant increase after 2010; thus, in the main evolution of online hate speech research, it has been possible to identify an initial development stage (1992–2010) followed by a rapid development (2011–2019). Many countries are regularly involved in publishing in this research field, even if the majority of studies have been conducted in the context of the high-income western countries; in this respect, it is notable the research strength of United States and United Kingdom. Also, the empirical findings provide evidence for the capability of countries to build significant research cooperation. The topic analysis retrieves twelve recurring topics, which can be characterised into three clusters. Specifically, the contemporary structure of online hate literature can be viewed as composed by a group dealing with basic themes of hate speech, a collection of documents that focuses on hate-speech automatic detection and classification by machine-learning strategies and, finally, a third core which focuses on specific themes of gendered hate speech and cyberbullying. Once the groups have been created and identified, the next step is to understand the evolutionary process of each of them over the years. Looking chronologically at online hate research development, we have a trace of an overall shift from generic and knowledge based themes towards approaches that face the challenges of automatic detection of hate speech in text and hate speech addressed to specific targets. The combination of topic modelling algorithms with tools of network analysis enabled to clarify topics relation and has made clear and visible the interdisciplinary nature of the field. The confluence of online hate studies into hate-speech automatic detection and classification approaches stresses how the problem of hate diffusion should be studied not only from the social point of view but also from the point of view of computer science. In our opinion, the main reason driving the shift from conceptually oriented studies to more practically oriented ones is that there is a growing demand for finding statistical methodologies to automatically detect hate speech and make it possible to build effective counter-measures. It is worth noting, however, that the observed shift does not remove the subjective nature of hate speech denotation, given that automatic detection and classification methods need ultimately to rely on a specific definition of what communication should be interpreted as offensive, dangerous and conveying hate. Moreover, supervised techniques require an annotated set of social media contents that will be used to train the algorithms to better detect and score online comments but interpretation of hatefulness varies significantly among individual raters (Salminen et al. 2019 ). There is also evidence highlighting how people from different countries perceive hatefulness of the same online comments differently (Salminen et al. 2018 ). The authors of these studies suggest that online hate should be defined as a subjective experience rather than as an average score that is uniform to all users and that research should concentrate on how incorporate user-level features when scoring and automating the processing of online hate.

An other interesting field worth of investigation is related to the producers of online hate speech. While the online behaviour of organized hate groups has been extensivily analysed, only recently attention has focused on the behaviour of individuals that produce hate speech on the mainstream platforms (see Siegel 2020 , and references herein). Finally, future study should continue to investigate tools devoted to effectively combat online hate speech. Since content deletion or user suspension may be charged with censorship and overblocking, one alternate strategy is to oppose hate content with counter-narratives (Gagliardone et al. 2015 ). Therefore, a promising line of research is the exploration of effective counterspeech techniques which can vary according to hate speech targets, online platforms and haters characteristics.

We think that this work, based on solid data and computational analyses, might provide a clearer vision for researchers involved in this field, providing evidence of the current research frontiers and the challenges that are expected in the future, highlighting all the connections and implications of the research in several research domains.

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Tontodimamma, A., Nissi, E., Sarra, A. et al. Thirty years of research into hate speech: topics of interest and their evolution. Scientometrics 126 , 157–179 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03737-6

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Hate Speech

Hate speech is a concept that many people find intuitively easy to grasp, while at the same time many others deny it is even a coherent concept. A majority of developed, democratic nations have enacted hate speech legislation—with the contemporary United States being a notable outlier—and so implicitly maintain that it is coherent, and that its conceptual lines can be drawn distinctly enough. Nonetheless, the concept of hate speech does indeed raise many difficult questions: What does the ‘hate’ in hate speech refer to? Can hate speech be directed at dominant groups, or is it by definition targeted at oppressed or marginalized communities? Is hate speech always ‘speech’? What is the harm or harms of hate speech? And, perhaps most challenging of all, what can or should be done to counteract hate speech?

In part because of these complexities, hate speech has spawned a vast and interdisciplinary literature. Legal scholars, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, political theorists, historians, and other academics have each approached the topic with exceeding interest. In this current article, however, we cannot hope to cover how these many disciplines have engaged with the concept of hate speech. Here, we will focus most explicitly on how hate speech has been taken up within philosophy, with particular emphasis on issues such as: how to define hate speech; what are the plausible harms of hate speech; how an account of hate speech might include both overt expressions of hate (e.g., the vitriolic use of slurs) as well as more covert, implicit utterances (e.g., dogwhistles); the relationship between hate speech and silencing; and what might we do to counteract hate speech.

1.1 The Harms of Hate Speech

2. religious hatred and anti-semitism, 3.2 dogwhistles and coded language, 4. pornography, hate speech, and silencing, 5.1 the case for bans, 5.2 objections to bans, and some responses, 5.3 the supported counterspeech alternative, other internet resources, related entries, 1. what is hate speech.

The term ‘hate speech’ is more than a descriptive concept used to identify a specific class of expressions. It also functions as an evaluative term judging its referent negatively and as a candidate for censure. Thus, defining this category carries serious implications. What is it that designates hate speech as a distinctive class of speech? Some claim the term ‘hate speech’ itself is misleading because it wrongly suggests “virulent dislike of a person for any reason” as a defining feature (Gelber 2017, 619). That is not, however, the way in which the term is understood among most legal theorists and philosophers. Perhaps it would be useful to start with some examples.

Bhikhu Parekh (2012) lists the following instances as examples different countries have either punished or sought to punish as hate speech:

• Shouting “[N-words] go home,” making monkey noises, and chanting racist slogans at soccer matches.
• “Islam out of Britain. Protect the British people.”
• “Arabs out of France.”
• “Serve your country, burn down a mosque.”
• “Blacks are inherently inferior, lecherous, predisposed to criminal activities, and should not be allowed to move into respectable areas.”
• “Jews are conspiratorial, devious, treacherous, sadistic, child killers, and subversive; want to take over the country; and should be carefully watched.”
• Distribution by a political party of leaflets addressed to “white fellow citizens” saying that, if it came to power, it would remove all Surinamese, Turks, and other “undesired aliens” from the Netherlands.
• A poster of a woman in a burka with text that reads: “Who knows what they have under their sinister and ugly looking clothes: stolen goods, guns, bombs even?”
• Speech that either denies or trivializes the holocaust or other crimes against humanity.

Robert Post’s four bases for defining hate speech might help us organize the features of Parekh’s list:

In law, we have to define hate speech carefully to designate the forms of the speech that will receive distinctive legal treatment. This is no easy task. Roughly speaking, we can define hate speech in terms of the harms it will cause—physical contingent harms like violence or discrimination; or we can define hate speech in terms of its intrinsic properties—the kinds of words it uses; or we can define hate speech in terms of its connection to principles of dignity; or we can define hate speech in terms of the ideas it conveys. Each of these definitions has advantages and disadvantages. Each intersects with the first amendment theory in a different way. In the end, any definition that we adopt must be justified on the ground that it will achieve the results we wish to achieve. (Herz and Molnar 2012, 31)

The four definitional bases are in terms of: (1) harm, (2) content, (3) intrinsic properties, i.e., the type of words used, and (4) dignity. One could also attempt a hybrid definition by combining the ways mentioned. But, as is made clear in Post’s remarks, definitions of this sort are relative to the interests of the definer; “We must evaluate the status of ‘hate speech’ so defined in order to determine whether it achieves what we wish to accomplish and whether the harms of the definition will outweigh its advantages” (Herz and Molnar 2012, 31). The upshot is a rejection of a univocal definition that captures “the essence” of hate speech as a phenomenon.

It is important to note that many definitions of hate speech will not fall squarely within the categories Post outlines. For instance, the UN’s International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination identifies hate speech both in terms of its content and its harmful consequences. Most definitions tend to characterize hate speech in multiple ways.

Harm-based definitions conceive of hate speech in terms of the harms to which targets are subjected. Things like discrimination or linguistic violence are candidates, though some (Gelber, 2017) argue that hate speech can harm one’s ability to participate in democratic deliberation. Susan Brison (1998a) offers a disjunctive definition that centers on a kind of abuse to targets. She defines hate speech as “speech that vilifies individuals or groups on the basis of such characteristics as race, sex, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation, which (1) constitutes face-to-face vilification, (2) creates a hostile or intimidating environment, or (3) is a kind of group libel” (313). ‘Harm’ as used by Brison refers to what Joel Feinberg describes “as a wrongful setback to (or invasion of) someone’s interests” (Brison, 1998b, 42).

Perhaps an immediate reaction to disjunctive definitions of the sort Brison offers is skepticism about the definitiveness of the purported list. When we go to test the definition’s application, we invariably find contestable inclusions and exclusions. Recall the examples from Parekh at the start of this section. Something like “Arabs out of France” might be included as an instance of hate speech on Brison’s account on the grounds that it creates a hostile or intimidating environment. Should statements that communicate a similar message in a less abrasive manner also be included? Suppose “Only French Nationals should occupy France” is roughly equivalent content-wise to “Arabs out of France.” If the former is indeed a less abrasive presentation though communicating the same content as the latter, what are we to make of its status? Many will find the statement odious; many will not. And since it is certainly not a face-to-face vilification or form of group libel, classifying it as hate speech will depend on how likely it is to create an intimidating or hostile environment.

The previous objection might entice one to opt for a content-based view. Content-based views define hate speech as that which “expresses, encourages, stirs up, or incites hatred against a group of individuals distinguished by a particular feature or set of features such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, and sexual orientation” (Parekh, 2012, 40). This version makes it easier to conceive of semantically equivalent statements that differ in manner of presentation as instances of hate speech.

Content-based accounts face the challenge of determining which contents meet this standard. If the content that distinguishes hate speech from other types of speech must express, encourage, or incite hatred towards groups or individuals based on certain features, then the proponent of this view will need an account of expression. Is the speech in view that which signals the presence of a particular mental state in the speaker (i.e., hate) or that which is likely to prime feelings of animosity in a specific audience?

Another issue facing content-based approaches concerns distinguishing between speech that “respects ‘the decencies of controversy’” and that “which is outrageous and therefore hate inducing” (Post, 2009, 128). The ability to express a wide range of views, even contentious ones, is a cherished aspect of democratic societies. Failure to observe this distinction would broaden the scope of what counts as hate speech perhaps too much. In order to make this distinction, one could follow Post in tying it to “ambient social norms” that distinguish outrageous and respectful behavior. One challenge though is in determining the content of those social norms. For instance, a minority group whose opinions have little impact on the makeup of norms are unjustifiably excluded from influencing the shape of their society’s civility norms.

Definitions of hate speech based on intrinsic properties generally refer to those that emphasize the type of the speech uttered. What is at issue is the use of speech widely known to instigate offense or insult among a majority of society. Explicitly derogatory expressions like slurs are paradigmatic examples of this type of view. In general, the type of speech identified on this account is inherently derogatory, discriminatory, or vilifying.

Though attractive at first glance, classifying hate speech along these lines might prove to fall short in two ways. First, defining hate speech in this way might be too constricting. Some of the examples in our initial list would seem not to count as hate speech since they arguably lack the intrinsic features. “Arabs out of France,” for example, does not contain explicitly slurring terms. And second, this definition might prove too expansive. In cases where slurs are reappropriated by members of the target group or where artists incorporate them into a creative work, it would appear odd to count these as instances of hate speech. The concern is tied specifically to locating the issue in the terms themselves, as opposed to the use to which the terms are put.

Perhaps a final challenge to intrinsic property views can be derived from the work of Judith Butler (1997). On Butler’s account, hate speech is a kind of performative that is “always delivered twice-removed, that is, through a theory of the speech act that has its own performative power” (96). More specifically, “[w]hat hate speech does … is to constitute the subject in a subordinate position” (19). Butler locates the trouble with hate speech in its perlocutionary effects, a concept introduced by J.L. Austin that refers to the effects a speech act can have on its audience. An example of a perlocutionary effect is feeling amused at a joke or frightened from the telling of a ghost story. Unlike with intrinsic property definitions, Butler shifts focus to the nature of the acts performed rather than the terms in use. (For a critical look at Butler’s account, see Schwartzman (2002).)

Lastly, dignity-based conceptions focus primarily on the role of harms to the dignity of targets of hate speech. For instance, both Steven Heyman (2008) and Jeremy Waldron (2014) appeal to dignity in their accounts. Broadly speaking, hate speech on this kind of conception amounts to speech that undermines its target’s “basic social standing, the basis of [their] recognition as social equals and as bearers of human rights and constitutional entitlements” (Waldron, 2014, 59). This conception of hate speech will also include characterizations in terms of group defamation or group libel. Section 130 of Germany’s penal code is an example of legislation that incorporates a dignity-based conception of hate speech, prohibiting “attacks on human dignity by insulting, maliciously maligning, or defaming part of the population” (see Waldron, 2014, 8).

Worries about application follow dignity-based conceptions as well. Firstly, there may be questions about how we, in particular instances, are to distinguish between false statements about a group as a whole and those about a particular member of a group (Brown, 2017a). Presumably, only the former is consistent with an understanding of hate speech as a group-based phenomenon. Secondly, an implication of the view appears to be that it expands the range of things that would count as hate speech. Any speech that calls into question the basic standing of certain groups falls under this notion, which may make it more difficult to distinguish between contentious political speech and hate speech.

Perhaps a lesson to draw from the profusion of disjunctive definitions is a general skepticism about a definitive description of hate speech. We might concur with Alexander Brown that ‘hate speech’ is an equivocal term denoting a family of meanings (Brown 2017b, 562). According to Brown, ‘hate speech’ isn’t just a term with contested meanings, but rather, it is “systematically ambiguous; which is to say, it carries a multiplicity of different meanings” (2017b, 564). Because the expression is what is typically referred to as an essentially contested term, the hunt for a univocal or universal definition is futile.

The harms that have been attributed to hate speech comprise a long and varied list, ranging from the immediate psychological harms experienced in the moment by the person(s) targeted by an instance of hate speech, to much more long-term impacts that affect not only those targeted but whole communities, and even the strength of an entire nation.

A distinction between “assaultive hate speech” and “propagandistic hate speech” is helpful when discussing these harms (Langton 2012; 2018a; see also Gelber and McNamara (2016) who discuss “face-to-face encounters” and “incidences of general circulation”). Hate speech yelled at an individual on the street, or from a passing car, is a face-to-face encounter, and an assaultive speech act. This is, moreover, most often inter-group hate speech, where the speaker(s) are, for example, white, and the targets are non-white. On the other hand, propagandistic hate speech is often intra-group speech, spoken by members of one group to fellow ingroup members (e.g., a white person to other white people). The newsletter of the KKK, therefore, would fit into this category.

While this distinction is helpful to keep in mind, it should also not be overstated. Summarizing the results of their study which surveyed the experiences of the victims of hate speech, Katharine Gelber and Luke McNamara conclude that “the distinction between face-to-face encounters and general circulation hate speech is not always clear in the everyday experiences of racism endured by targets” (2016, 326). Any one instance of hate speech might fall into both categories. For example, it may occur in its first instance as an assaultive speech act, and then reports of the event may then take on a propagandistic aspect, as it is spread among the community. Similarly, even if an instance of hate speech is intended as a piece of propaganda, it may, when encountered by a member of the community it disparages, be akin to assaultive speech.

Still, this distinction helps reveal the wide range of the types of speech acts that are plausibly harmful, and also offers insight into how they harm. For example, Waldron (2014) focuses mainly on hate speech in its propagandistic mode, which he argues undermines the public assurance of equal social standing that members of non-dominant communities are entitled to—in his terms, their assurance of dignity. On this view, public hate speech—e.g., flyers that read ‘Muslims Out!’—is “an environmental threat to social peace, a sort of slow-acting poison, accumulating here and there, word by word” (2014, 4). Its harm is therefore one that attacks the broader society, and not just individuals targeted by hate speech.

On the other hand, the essays in the classic Words that Wound tend to focus more on what its authors term “assaultive speech,” that is, “words that are used as weapons to ambush, terrorize, wound, humiliate, and degrade” (Matsuda et al. 1993, 1). This leads them to focus more on hate speech’s ability to produce “direct, immediate, and substantial injury” (Lawrence, 1993, 57), such as “immediate mental or emotional distress” (Delgado, 1993, 93–94). On this approach, the most evident harms of hate speech are psychological. These psychological injuries scale up, however, when hate speech is endemic, and so result in the types of community or social harms highlighted by authors like Waldron. For this reason, the distinction between these approaches may be thought of as more a matter of emphasis.

This relationship between individual harms and broader social harms is also evident once we acknowledge the long-term effects of hate speech on victims, in addition to its more immediate impacts (Delgado and Stefancic, 2004, 14). Victims of hate speech may first experience “psychological symptoms and emotional distress” like heightened stress and fear in the immediate aftermath of assaultive hate speech, but they may also experience far-ranging consequences if they “modify their behavior and demeanor” to avoid receiving further hate messages, limiting their ability to participate fully in society (Matsuda, 1993, 24). Gelber and McNamara’s interview subjects confirm this complex web of effects that hate speech may cause, highlighting how “harms are often enduring and not ephemeral” (2016, 336). In this way, hate speech is both an immediate attack on one’s health and dignity, along with a threat to their community’s position in society. The cumulative effect of hate speech events, therefore, is a collection of harms located both in individuals and communities, which blurs the distinction between assaultive and propagandistic hate speech events.

Constitutive and Consequential Harms

Another distinction which is similarly helpful, but also fraught, is the distinction between constitutive and consequential harms—that is, harms that occur in the saying of some utterance of hate speech, and those that are its downstream results (see Maitra and McGowan, 2012, 6). This distinction draws on the speech act theory of J.L. Austin (1962) and has served an important role in the examination of hate speech from feminist philosophers of language (see, e.g., Langton, 1993; 2012; Maitra and McGowan, 2012; Maitra, 2012; McGowan, 2004; 2009; 2012; 2019; and others). Constitutive harms are those that correspond to what Austin called the illocutionary act , the act performed in saying X , while consequential harms correspond to perlocutionary effects , the results brought about by saying X . Most (though not all) of the harms surveyed above comprise consequential harms, as items such as psychological injury, feelings of fear, and societal withdrawal all most naturally fall into the perlocutionary effects category.

However, philosophers have also drawn attention to how hate speech can injure in a different way by indirectly affecting the positions of the social groups targeted by hate in a social hierarchy. That is, “by fixing facts about the distribution of social power, including facts about who has this power, and who lacks it” hate speech harms in a way not captured in the above account of individual injuries and their cumulative effects (Maitra and McGowan, 2012, 7). This is an immediate harm that occurs in the saying of the speech act, which (given appropriate circumstances and uptake) produces a shift in the normative landscape. It is in this way that an instance of hate speech may not only cause the injuries surveyed above but may also, for example, rank Indigenous Peoples as inferior, legitimate discriminatory behavior towards them (perhaps via incitement), or potentially silence them. (We return to the notion of silencing as an illocutionary harm of hate speech in Section 4 below.)

One reason to direct our attention towards the constitutive harms of hate speech is its potential to productively advance the debate over the legitimacy of potential restrictions. Mary Kate McGowan (2009) has made this case most explicitly. “Rather than focus on what a certain category of speech causes,” she writes, we ought to be “interested in what such speech actually does, in and of itself” (2009, 389–90). The idea here is that by focusing only on the harms caused by hate speech, we are inevitably drawn into a debate about balancing the costs and benefits of permitting or regulating speech, which often leads to an impasse. Alternatively, turning our attention to the acts hate speech constitutes can reveal features that help us avoid question of balancing harms, and opens the door to regulation. On this approach, some instances of hate speech can be seen to constitute acts of (verbal) discrimination, and should be considered analogous to other acts of discrimination—like posting a ‘Whites Only’ sign up at a hotel—that US law recognizes as illegal. As a speech act, hate speech can enact discriminatory rules in much the same way the physical sign does, and so ought to similarly be restricted (McGowan, 2012). This argument proceeds by a development of Austin’s notion of “exercitives,” which are speech acts that enact rules in a given domain, and is one example of the fruitful use of speech act theory to the philosophy of hate speech.

At the same time, however, it’s worth acknowledging that the distinction that this analysis relies on—between illocutionary acts and perlocutionary effects—is one that some argue is untenable (for one example, see Kukla, 2014). As illocutionary acts are indeterminate or incomplete without some form of audience uptake, it is difficult to articulate precisely how we ought to distinguish a speech act’s effects from its inherent qualities. Furthermore, the testimonials of victims of hate speech “suggests that there is a close and complex relationship between constitutive and consequential harms, and the harms are experienced cumulatively” (Gelber and McNamara 2016, 336–37). As such, any attempt to draw too neat of a distinction between these two types of harm risks misrepresenting victims’ experiences, and might tie the attempt to restrict hate speech unhelpfully to a philosophically contested distinction.

As a result, some caution must be applied when marking too stark of a contrast between these harms. Much like the distinction between assaultive and propagandistic hate speech, then, we can consider the distinction between consequential and constitutive harms to be analytically helpful in exploring the variety of harms attributable to hate speech, while recognizing that it is at the same time an abstraction from the on-the-ground realities of hate speech.

Religious belief is sometimes the source of putative cases of hate speech, and sometimes its target. In both cases, assessing the conceptual addition of religion to hate speech is a difficult task. Speech rooted in religious conviction is sometimes subjected to scrutiny to determine whether instances should count as hate speech or not. For instance, the Westboro Baptist Church’s demonstrations often make use of slurs and other explicitly defamatory language. This is an extreme case, which can be accommodated by extant hate speech legislation. Other cases, however, involve religious leaders making contentious statements—for instance, questioning the legitimacy or recognition of LGBT+ individuals, while claiming these are statements of love, not hate. Questions about religious speech of this sort concern whether it is simply contentious speech liberal democratic societies must tolerate or speech that runs afoul of deeply held norms that ought to be proscribed.

Some wonder whether religious sensibilities should be afforded special protection from offense. Amnon Reichman (2009), for instance, notes that some Israeli scholars have argued that providing special protection for religious beliefs is a good idea “so as not to push [religious] believers into having to choose between the authority of the state and the authority of their religion (namely, the authority of God)” (338). This relies on an assumption that religion is an institutionalized normative regime in competition with a legal regime where clashes over religious beliefs threaten the social fabric of society. It is in turn prudent to mitigate such clashes in order to avoid situations of unrest like the incidents involving comedic cartoons of Mohammed in the Dutch newspaper Jyllands-Posten and the French publication Charlie Hebdo .

It is not clear, however, that religious beliefs warrant special protection over other forms of belief that may be just as strongly held. Clashes over deeply held political beliefs can pose a similar threat to the social fabric as religious beliefs. Thus, there is no reason to think the same concern should not apply quite broadly. Providing certain types of speech special protection on these grounds would threaten to introduce quite repressive legislation on speech in general.

Holocaust denial, denial of the Armenian Genocide, and the denial of other crimes against humanity have also been the subject of special legislation, especially in Europe. As Michael Whine (2009) notes, 16 European states, as well as Israel, have criminalized Holocaust denial (543). In these contexts, at least one rationale for banning speech that denies or trivializes the Holocaust concerns its role in inciting hatred (Altman, 2012). One possible justification for such legislation rests on claims about what denial speech is. According to Martin Imbleau (2011), denial speech poses as an historical endeavor but is really propaganda. The denier’s aim is to “eradicate the awareness of the truth that prevents the resurgence of past criminal ideologies” (2011, 238). But if this is the rationale, it potentially opens up justifications for much broader application since similar claims might be made of other forms of propaganda. (For a general overview on Holocaust denial, see Robert Wistrich (2012) and Behrens et. al (2017).)

3. Slurs, Code Words, and Dogwhistles

As Parekh, Brison, and others have noted, hate speech can be expressed both explicitly and subtly. We can identify a few different expression-types that map onto the explicit and subtle instances, i.e., slurs , code words , and dogwhistles . The subtler forms may fall outside the scope of narrower conceptions of hate speech.

Perhaps the type of expression most often cited as the paradigm case of hate speech is slurs. Slurs are typically characterized as a type of insult that targets race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ability, politics, immigrant status, geographic region, and other categories. Much of the literature on slurs focuses primarily on the semantic and pragmatic properties of this linguistic class, with the expectation that such analyses also provide an account of how they in fact derogate their targets. There are, of course, competing accounts, some of which may be better suited than others for the purposes of legal and ordinary concepts of hate speech.

Before delving into competing accounts, it is good to put a working definition of ‘slur’ on the table. Typically, slurs are understood as conventionalized ways of demeaning and derogating individuals or groups of individuals and are contrasted with a co-referring neutral counterpart (Jeshion, 2013a; 2013b; Camp, 2013; Cepollaro, 2015). For instance, the following differ in regard to offense but are otherwise taken to make similar claims,

For many, (3.1) is regarded as offensive whereas (3.2) is simply a descriptive statement. The expression ‘cracker’ in (3.1) is a slur, while ‘white people’ in (3.2) is its purported neutral counterpart.

Though there seems to be widespread consensus that slurs have or could have neutral counterparts, not everyone shares this sentiment. Lauren Ashwell (2016), for example, denies that neutral counterparts (which she refers to as ‘neutral correlates’) play an essential role in identifying slurs. Ashwell claims that gendered slurs like ‘bitch,’ ‘slut,’ and ‘sissy’ derogate in ways similar to racial and ethnic slurs like ‘n***er,’ ‘k*ke,’ ‘cracker,’ and ‘sp*c,’ yet lack neutral counterparts. As a result, a definition need not include reference to neutral counterparts. In fact, making neutral counterparts central to defining slurs renders one incapable of accounting for terms that function similarly to slurs yet lack this purportedly central feature.

Ashwell makes a compelling case for the claim that gendered slurs lack neutral counterparts. Her larger claim that counterparts’ inessentiality for defining slurs has implications for pragmatic and semantic accounts that are also worth taking seriously. According to Ashwell, both sorts of accounts depend on the existence of neutral counterparts in their explanations of slurs.

Existing pragmatic accounts of slurs’ derogating capabilities are in particular trouble, for they tend to hold that a slur’s semantic contribution to a sentence is identical to the contribution that its neutral correlate would have had if it were used instead. This kind of account also leaves open the possibility that the slur could be sanitized—cleansed of its derogatory aspect—without semantic meaning change. … Existing semantic accounts, however, are not much better off—they are also structured to require the existence of a neutral correlate. (2016, 229)

For Ashwell, pragmatic and semantic accounts of slurs structurally require neutral counterparts, and so simply cannot jettison them. One response proponents of these kinds of accounts could give is that the gendered insults Ashwell highlights might exhibit properties that call their status as slurs into question. It could be open to these theorists to suggest that the terms they have identified as a matter of fact do carry neutral counterparts, that this is part of what distinguishes them as a class. And while the expressions Ashwell identifies seem to pattern in some ways like slurs, they also exhibit features that make them dissimilar. Thus, there is no need to wedge all insulting expressions into one class; there is room to expand our classifications in a way that preserves clarity.

Another important issue about slurs is their power to offend. Part of what makes them prime candidates for paradigmatic instances of hate speech is a widespread belief in their offensive potency. Indeed, much of the literature on slurs simply assumes they are offensive without offering much (if any) defense of that claim. It is not always clear whether the reader is supposed to understand offense as the provocation of a disliked mental state or as the violation of widely-accepted public norms.

Renée Bolinger (2017) discusses three ways to understand the claim that slurs are offensive:

• An audience actually took offense at a slurring utterance;
• The utterance warranted offense;
• Whether or not offense was warranted, it was rational for the audience to take offense.

The sense of ‘offense’ in (1) tracks how audiences actually respond at the moment of utterance. This could not be the sense in which offense is understood for at least two reasons. First, doing so would make the claim ‘slurs are offensive’ too strong. Since we would be tracking cases of actual offense, we would be focusing on particular uses of slurs, explaining what makes those utterances offensive rather than explicating the offensiveness of a linguistic class. As a result, the most natural interpretation of the claim would be that slurring utterances are invariably offensive, i.e., the use of slurs always provokes disliked mental states.

This, of course, raises a couple of questions. To begin with, does the strong claim deny the existence of non-offensive slur uses? Given things like linguistic reappropriation, some instances of indirect reports, and even instances of direct reports—especially by members of the slur’s targeted group—in which it is possible to utter slurs without provoking a disliked mental state in the speaker’s audience, the claim is obviously false. Further, there are also questions about who constitutes the audience . Is the relevant audience the one intended by the speaker? Everyone who witnesses the utterance? Only those who are present in the utterance situation? Because the claim must now be understood to be about particular slur utterances rather than the linguistic type, the claim must reflect the diversity of reactions provoked by different tokenings of slurs. A second reason is related to the questions about the audience: does everyone in the audience have to be offended, or is it sufficient if one, some, or a few are? What is the scope of the claim with respect to offended reactions? The answers to these questions will likely render the strong version of the claim untenable and weaker versions suspect. Thus, it is probably not the sense of ‘offense’ one should start with.

The sense expressed in (2) concerns moral justification for taking offense. Bolinger identifies three grounds for warranted offense at an utterance: intention, inappropriateness, and associations. A speaker may intend to offend, often doing so with expressions that are taboo, and thus considered inappropriate. Vulgar expletives like ‘fuck,’ ‘dick,’ or ‘shithead’ are typically viewed as inappropriate terms, at least in certain “polite” settings. Some expressions, like slurs, are not only inappropriate, but also carry associated attitudes and/or practices that amplify their offense. The swastika and confederate flag, for example, are both deeply associated with oppressive and genocidal practices towards Jewish people and African Americans, respectively.

This sense of offense still concerns one’s response to something, though it is not simply about how one reacts but one’s warrant to do so: “An utterance may warrant, but fail to actually generate offense merely because either there is no hearer, or the hearer fails to find the utterance offensive (perhaps because she shares the offensive attitude, fails to take it seriously, or misinterprets the utterance)” (Bolinger, 2017, 441). Bolinger notes that the associational offense category in particular is the one that is often the subject of hate crime legislation (ibid., 442). Such terms are often backed by formal social institutions, “adequately visible practices,” or a combination of both.

In (3), Bolinger uses ‘rational’ or ‘license’ to refer to the epistemic justification an audience has in taking offense at a slurring utterance. Here a gap opens up between what an audience member may be warranted in taking offense at as opposed to when it may be rational to do so. For instance, if a non-native speaker used a slur to refer to someone and we come to find out they were ignorant of the expression’s status as a slur, the target would still have been rational to take offense even if unwarranted. Undoubtedly, any of the three senses discussed may factor into an explanation of a given slur’s offense. However, theories of slurs are more appropriately aimed at capturing warranted and rational offense.

Consider again the following pair of statements:

The most straightforward explanation of the difference between (3.1) and (3.2) is that ‘cracker’ differs in some semantic respect from ‘white people’. Two of the most well-known versions of this approach are from Chris Hom (2008) and Elisabeth Camp (2013). On Hom’s account, ‘cracker’ as opposed to ‘white people,’ contains derogatory content. Slurs’ derogatory content is determined by the social institutions that undergird them, which consists of two components: an ideology and a set of practices . Hom defines an ideology as “a set of (usually) negative beliefs about a particular group of people” (431). As for the set of practices, these are racist practices that “can range from impolite social treatment to genocide” (ibid.). The two components combine to produce slurs’ semantic content, which contains a normative claim about the way individuals ought to be treated, because of possessing certain characteristics in virtue of being a member of an identifiable social group. (For alternative accounts of the relationship between slurs and ideology, see Kukla (2018) and Swanson (2015, Other Internet Resources).)

The pair of sentences in the example used here is illustrative of an observation many will have noticed when considering different examples. The slur in (3.1) is typically experienced as less offensive than ones that target members of marginalized groups. Language users recognize variation in offensive potency among slurs, some being more offensive than others. Hom refers to this as derogatory variation . Difference in the virulence of those backing racist institutions explains variation in offense on Hom’s account. Thus, ‘cracker’ is less offensive than slurs like ‘n***er,’ ‘sp*c,’ and ‘f*g’ because the racist and homophobic institutions backing them are much more virulent. (One might also wonder if there is any racist institution backing slurs for members of dominant groups at all.)

One objection raised against Hom’s view is that the semantic content he proposes of slurs is overwrought (Jeshion, 2013b). Robin Jeshion argues that Hom’s view “attributes highly specific sets of ideologies and modes of treating the group, yet it is doubtful that anything so semantically rich and well defined is semantically encoded in the slur” (318). That is, it is doubtful the racist means anything this racialized. Jeshion denies that slurs express anything as robust as Hom claims.

Camp offers an alternative semantic account in which slurs bear a close relationship to a perspective , which are “open-ended ways of thinking, feeling, and more generally engaging with the world and certain parts thereof” (2013, 335–336). According to Camp, a speaker’s slur use “signals a commitment to an overarching perspective on the targeted group as a whole” (ibid., 337). The perspective is a negative one that highlights certain characteristics or properties specifically associated with particular groups, ones that are presumed to warrant certain affective and evaluative responses.

What makes slurring perspectives a semantic feature for Camp is that they do not “merely signal … allegiance to a certain perspective,” but do so “in an overt and nondefeasible way, precisely in virtue of employing that expression” (ibid., 340). The use of a slur inserts a willful and noncancelable way of thinking about the target into a conversation. This is codified in the expression itself, and not something audiences “figure out” through the use of pragmatic mechanisms. This appears to be bolstered by the fact that one typically cannot erase a slur’s derogation by following up with a statement intending to do so, e.g.,

The tension of the contrast is one an audience might generally think finds its source in the meaning of the slur itself, rather than from features that emerge from the way language is used in a particular context. Further, as we saw in Jeshion’s objection to Hom’s view, the information slurs manage to convey isn’t very specific. This point is consistent with the open-ended nature of the perspectives Camp associates with slurs.

Though Camp’s account represents a marked improvement, critics still see shortcomings they believe should give us pause. Geoff Nunberg (2018), for instance, argues that Camp’s characterization of perspectives is too vague to capture the more specific colorings of slurs for specific groups: “Whatever distinguishes redskin from injun or nigger from coon , it’s more precise and richer than simply a disposition to think about the referents in certain ways” (Nunberg, 2018, 260–261). According to Nunberg, what is central for how slurs work is not the perspective the user employs to think about their target, but the allegiance it signals to a group or community disposed to think negatively of the target.

To take an obvious case, when you call a woman a shiksa you’re not just allying yourself with a disposition to think about gentile women in certain ways, but with the people who have that disposition. That group affiliation is primary and prior to the perspective it evokes: you can use shiksa appropriately without having any specific views of gentile women at all, but not without identifying with Jews. (ibid., 261)

For some theorists, the accounts offered by Hom and Camp leave out what they regard as an important aspect of slurring, namely, the role attitudinal expression plays in their derogatory power. These views agree that the difference between slurs and their purported counterparts is located in the realm of semantics; the previous accounts just leave out an important aspect. Jeshion (2013a) identifies three components of slurs’ semantics: (i) a truth-conditional component, (ii) an expressivist component, and (iii) an identifying component. The truth-conditional component of slurs corresponds to the same group referenced by its purported neutral counterpart. The expressivist component captures slurs’ ability to express contempt towards members of socially relevant groups in virtue of their group membership. Finally, the identifying component ascribes a property to the group that is seen as central to its identity. Mark Richard (2010) also proposes a view in which negative attitudes are included in the explanation of what slurs express. Jeshion and Richard’s accounts are typically referred to as expressivist views.

One issue expressivist views have been thought to have trouble with is derogatory variation . Derogatory variation refers to the sociolinguistic datum that slurs vary in their offensive potency. If we represent degrees of offense on a scale, slurs like ‘n***er’ and ‘k*ke’ are higher up on the scale than slurs like ‘cracker’ and ‘wop.’ Expressivist views have typically attributed one sort of attitude to slurs— contempt —which seems inadequate to capture the complexity of their offense profiles. For instance, consider co-referring slurs that vary in offense. Expressivist accounts appear to lack the resources to account for this variation. Thus, expressivism fails as an account of slurs for this reason.

Jeshion (2013a) attempts to answer this objection by arguing that her expressivist view “is only incompatible with versions of derogatory variation that stipulate that the variation derives from the semantics” (243). Jeshion maintains that focusing on slurring terms rather than particular utterances of those terms causes us to reflect on various factors at play that contribute to their power to offend. In effect, such focusing obscures the various factors brought to bear on judgments of offensiveness. Thus, Jeshion claims we ought to think our intuitive judgments about varying offense support the following thesis:

Derogatory Variation-Utterance : Utterances of different slurring terms engender different degrees of intensity of offensiveness. (2013a, 244)

Jeshion argues that this thesis is compatible with her account because weaponized uses of slurs are offensive for several reasons: semantic, pragmatic, sociocultural, and historical. As a result, there should be no expectation that a semantic view like hers need explain derogatory variation semantically.

Inferentialism describes slurs in terms of the kinds of inferences they license. Proponents of this kind of view include Robert Brandom (1994), Michael Dummett (1993), Lynne Tirrell (1999) and Daniel Whiting (2008). Tirrell, for instance, remarks that the “meaning of a word or expression is a matter of its various actual and possible sentential roles” (1999, 46). In characterizing the meaning of the now-outdated slur ‘boche,’ Dummett remarks,

The condition for applying the term to someone is that he is of German nationality; the consequences of its application are that he is barbarous and more prone to cruelty than other Europeans. We should envisage the connections in both directions as sufficiently tight as to be involved in the very meaning of the word: neither could be severed without altering its meaning. (1993, 454)

On Dummett’s account, to know the meaning of ‘boche’ is to make the inference from the referent being German to his being barbarous and more prone to cruelty than other Europeans.

Inferentialism also has its challenges. Timothy Williamson (2009), for example, opposes inferentialism by charging that it has difficulty explaining how non-bigots, who are not disposed to draw negative inferences, still understand their use. “We find racist and xenophobic abuse offensive because we understand it, not because we fail to do so” (257). We should note the inferentialist is not without resources to respond to Williamson’s charge. For example, Brandom’s (1994) inferentialism determines understanding in terms of grasping the broad network of inferential connections in which an expression is situated. An important implication is thought to be that different speakers will understand the expression similarly while associating it with different inferential roles, escaping Williamson’s charge that one must be disposed to draw slurring inferences to understand the term (see Steinberger and Murzi, 2017). However, Brandom’s view is itself controversial (For further objections to inferentialism, see Anderson and Lepore (2013b); Hornsby (2001).)

The last view we mention here is a stark alternative to the previous accounts, opting for a socioculturally-driven explanation. According to Luvell Anderson and Ernie Lepore, slurs are prohibited expressions whose tokenings provoke offense from those who value and respect their prohibitions: “What’s clear is that no matter what its history, no matter what it means or communicates, no matter who introduces it, regardless of its past associations, once relevant individuals declare a word a slur, it becomes one ” (2013a, 39). The prohibition is meant to apply not only to uses but mentions of expressions as well, including direct and indirect reports.

One objection raised against prohibitionism comes from Camp (2018). Camp asserts that though the view is simple and powerful, “it threatens to work too well” by failing to account for some complexities. In particular, Camp claims “slur’s truth-assessibility and projective behavior are more variable than [prohibitionism] predicts” (2018, 33). She believes, for instance, that it is sometimes easy to “quarantine” a slur’s offensiveness within a report like,

John thinks that the s**cs will have taken over the whole neighborhood in another couple years. But of course, I think it’s great that we’re developing such a vibrant Latino community.

The offense of the slur in this statement is judged to be relativized to John rather than the person reporting it.

Which view of slurs one adopts has implications for how one conceives of their harm. For instance, adopting a content-based view of slurs may encourage one to adopt a content-based definition of hate speech, which suggests that the harm produced is in the message being communicated. Adopting an expressivist view, on the other hand, could lead one to lean more towards an intrinsic property account. (For further alternative accounts to the ones mentioned in this section, see Popa-Wyatt & Wyatt (2017), Bach (2018), Croom (2011), Kirk-Giannini (2019), and Neufeld (2019).)

In addition to slurs, which are explicitly derogatory, researchers have also focused on more implicit forms of derogatory communication. Tali Mendelberg (2001), Ian Haney Lopez (2015), Jennifer Saul (2018) and Justin Khoo (2017) detail the use of racially coded language— dogwhistles— to access existing racial resentment while making surreptitious racial appeals. Saul provides a useful set of distinctions for thinking about dogwhistles: they can be explicit or implicit , and further, intentional or unintentional . Saul uses the work of linguist Kimberly Witten to define an overt intentional dogwhistle as,

a speech act designed, with intent, to allow two plausible interpretations, with one interpretation being a private, coded message targeted for a subset of the general audience, and concealed in such a way that this general audience is unaware of the existence of the second, coded interpretation. (2018, 362)

Saul illustrates this kind of dogwhistle with an example from George W. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech:

The phrase ‘wonder-working power’ is meant as an overt intentional dogwhistle for Evangelical Christians. According to Saul, there are two possible messages Evangelicals can take away from Bush’s utterance. The first message is simply a translation:

Yes there’s power, the power of Christ, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people. (362)

The second message is that Bush identifies with them, that he speaks their language. Saul thinks both are instances of overt intentional dogwhistles.

A covert dogwhistle, according to Saul, is “a dogwhistle that people fail to consciously recognize” (2018, 365). She is particularly interested in how covert intentional dogwhistles work in tandem with what psychologists have referred to as racial resentment , a belief system that is measured by the degree to which participants agree to the following four claims:

• Blacks no longer face much discrimination;
• Their disadvantage mainly reflects their poor work ethic;
• They are demanding too much too fast;
• They have gotten more than they deserve. (2018, 364 quoting Tesler & Sears 2010, 18)

According to Mendelberg, racial resentment remains widespread among white Americans even though explicitly racist appeals have come to be viewed as outside the bounds of acceptable political speech. (At least, that seemed to be the case up until the 2016 presidential election cycle.) White voters, on this model, tend to shy away from accepting explicitly racist proposals because they do not want to think of themselves as racist. The existence of racial resentment allows for the skilled intentional use of utterances that are unrelated to race on the surface yet access negative racial attitudes in a targeted audience, nudging them towards a particular course of action--e.g., voting for a preferred candidate.

An example of a covert intentional dogwhistle is the infamous Willie Horton ad used by the George H. W. Bush campaign in 1988. The ad targeted a prison furlough program in place during Michael Dukakis’s term as governor of Massachusetts. It presented a picture of Horton, an African American man, who while out on furlough raped a white woman and stabbed her husband. Though there was no explicit mention of race, it was clear to many that the ad drew on racial tropes about Blackness and criminality to stoke fear in white voters. In support of the interpretation that this was a covert dogwhistle, Saul notes that once the specter of race was raised about the ad, its effectiveness started to wane (2018, 366). The implication is that while the explicit appeal to racial resentment was a losing strategy, implicit appeal in the form of covert dogwhistles could be put to powerful use.

The unintentional dogwhistle is defined as an “unwitting use of words and/or images that, used intentionally, constitute an intentional dogwhistle, where this use has the same effect as an intentional dogwhistle” (2018, 368). Dogwhistles of this sort are passed on by unwitting others while achieving similar effects of the original intentional one. A special case of unintentional dogwhistles, what Saul calls amplifier dogwhistles , occurred when reporters and TV producers played the Willie Horton ad repeatedly. Presumably, the repeated presentations continued to make the associations between Blackness and criminality and, thus, continued to stoke fear and racial anxiety in significant portions of the white viewing public. For Saul, dogwhistles are therefore best understood functionally, and the difference in speaker-intentions between intentional and unintentional dogwhistles matters only insofar as we define them—their effects, in other words, are often identical.

The use of implicit means like dogwhistling—in both its covert and overt forms—can make the conceptualization and detection of hate speech more difficult. Undoubtedly, this poses a challenge for defining hate speech since dogwhistles are often designed to be innocuous. But what is it that explains the effects often attributed to dogwhistles? That is, how is it possible for language to work in this way?

Perhaps there is good reason to think something about dogwhistles’ meaning explains their effects. Consider, first, an ambiguity thesis that states code words have at least two meanings, a racial and a non-racial meaning. The expression ‘inner city’ in

purportedly expresses two meanings: (i) densely populated, high crime, urban areas, or (ii) poor African American (Khoo, 2017, 40). An ambiguous expression can be used in an utterance to produce a statement that leaves undetermined which interpretation is intended by the speaker.

One worry, however, is that terms like ‘inner city’ are not actually ambiguous. Khoo argues these terms do not behave like genuinely ambiguous expressions. Compare the following two sentences,

A reading of (3.6) is supposed to sound coherent given that ‘funny’ can mean ‘humorous’ or ‘strange’ whereas (3.7) is supposed to sound odd, even contradictory. If ‘inner-city’ were genuinely ambiguous in the way described above, we should be able to use it to mean ‘African American’ and get a coherent reading of (3.7).

A second view posits two dimensions of meaning for code words, at-issue and not-at-issue content. At-issue content is the main point of a speaker’s utterance, the directly asserted content that is foregrounded whereas not-at-issue content is projective , meaning it is able to survive embedding under operators like negation and modals (Tonhauser, 2012). Consider,

The at-issue content of (3.8) is represented by (a) and the not-at-issue by (b):

• John does not smoke.
• John used to smoke.

Note the difficulty in directly denying the not-at-issue content. If one were to follow an utterance of (3.8) with,

you would presumably find this odd and incoherent. A much more elaborate statement is needed to deny the not-at-issue content.

Applying this to view to ‘inner-city’ in (3.5), we end up with:

• At-issue : A poor, densely populated, high-crime, urban area.
• Not-at-issue : Those living in such areas are mostly African American.

Because the racial component of (3.5) is not-at-issue, we have a reasonable explanation for why the following pair of sentences clash,

An objection to this view is that code words do not display non-cancelability the way not-at-issue content typically does; “someone cannot disavow commitment to the not-at-issue content of a sentence S that she utters merely by following up her utterance by asserting the negation of that content” (Khoo, 45). Consider,

The juxtaposition of sentences in (3.11) is supposed to strike the reader as contradictory while those in (3.12) should not.

According to a third view, code words are neither ambiguous nor multidimensional, but possess only nonracial meaning. What explains the phenomenon associated with terms like ‘inner city’ is the presence of an antecedent belief in the audience member that then allows them to infer the racial component. For example, an audience member may already believe

Pre-existing Belief (PB): The inner city is mostly populated by poor African Americans,

so that when hearing a politician proclaim (3.5), the audience member comes to infer

Racial Inference (RI): The food stamp program will primarily benefit poor African Americans.

A contrasting view that draws on the same simple semantics is what Khoo calls the association-driven theory of code words. On this view, there is “an association between ‘inner city’ (or the concept INNER CITY) and the concept AFRICAN AMERICAN (or maybe just RACE) which then primes racist beliefs and prejudices” (2017, 50).

Khoo’s account is simple and compelling, but we may still wonder whether it is too liberal. For instance, expressions like ‘thug,’ ‘illegal alien,’ ‘welfare queen,’ and ‘terrorist’ seem to behave like the terms Khoo identifies as code words, yet they are generally understood to be explicitly racial in nature. Patrick O’Donnell (2017) argues that the aforementioned expressions are not code words but racialized terms . O’Donnell characterizes the difference between racialized terms and code words in the following way:

• Racialized terms involve direct or predicative relations between a term and a racialized group whereas code words involve indirect inferential or associational relations, and
• Racialized terms elicit racial resentment by making salient race-specific interpretive options, whereas code words function by making salient race-neutral interpretive options (2017, 28).

O’Donnell agrees with Khoo that code words are picked out according to their contextual cognitive-pragmatic role, while claiming that this role differs between code words and racialized terms.

Determining whether dogwhistles or coded language count as merely contentious claims that must be tolerated or as hate speech subject to regulation has implications for broader discussions. The subtlety of coded language, for instance, calls its status as hate speech into question. The impact coded language has on an audience lacks the kind of immediacy often attributed to hate speech. Lawrence (1993), for example, notes that hate speech is often experienced by targets as a slap in the face. On the other hand, Mendelberg’s account suggests coded speech can incite racial resentment, and so it may be more aptly considered similar to propagandistic hate speech, discussed above. (For more on this point, see Jason Stanley (2015).) This would appear to get us closer to how hate speech is purported to function, namely, by inciting racial hatred. Whether it is close enough is of course open for debate.

That hate speech and pornography are discussed so frequently together in philosophy might, at first glance, seem surprising. But given the overlap made in the arguments made by anti-porn feminist about pornography and anti-racist theorists about racist hate speech, the two are now intimately linked—for better or for worse. (One important fact that led to this development is, of course, the ruling that pornography is protected by the US first amendment as speech [see Miller v. California (1973)].) According to anti-porn feminists, much of what is said of racist hate speech and the harms that befall its targets also applies, with the appropriate changes, to pornography and women—including, it’s worth emphasizing, women of color.

Many of the important initial moves in this literature were crafted by feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon, along with Andrea Dworkin. One of MacKinnon’s most significant claims that has received sustained philosophical attention is the idea that (degrading and misogynist) pornography silences women. With some modifications, a similar claim may be applied to hate speech, namely, that hate speech silences its targets. However, as the literature has focused on the case of pornography and women, it’s worth examining these arguments in detail first.

This silencing argument begins with MacKinnon’s observation that there are “words that set conditions” for other speech acts’ successes or failures (1993, 63–68; see also Hornsby and Langton, 1998, 27). That is, there are some speech acts that fix the possibility of other speech acts. In other words, they make it possible for some persons to perform some speech acts, and make it impossible for others. This is most evident in formal settings, like a legislature, where the formal rules determine who may speak when, and in what manner. Pornography, the argument continues, does just this. It sets rules of behavior that, in effect, inhibit the speech of women. The result of which is that the speech acts of pornography—performed by those who produce and distribute it—create a climate that undermines women’s capacity to perform certain speech acts of their own. The speech of some (pornographers), therefore, curtails the speech of others (women).

In an influential account of the phenomena of silencing, Langton (1993) deploys speech act theory to examine the case of sexual refusal. According to the silencing argument, pornography depicts women as not (genuinely) refusing sexual advances with utterances of ‘no.’ Indeed, according to the myths perpetuated by pornography (among other social influences), a woman’s ‘no’ is not a refusal, but rather part of an elaborate sexual script. As a result, when a woman says ‘no’ in a non-pornographic context, intending to refuse a man’s sexual advances, she may find herself unable to be heard—that is, her words won’t have the force and effect she intends, and her hearer will not take her to be refusing. She may find herself silenced in this particularly horrendous way, unable to use the standard methods of refusing another’s sexual advances. The claim is that this occurs as a result of pornography silencing women’s refusals in the context of sex. It renders their words powerless.

In making this argument, Langton relies on the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts, and, correspondingly, locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary silencing. A couple examples will explain these distinctions quickly:

When X says, ‘Shoot him!’ they are, we can see quite quickly, both saying something: ‘shoot him!’ and at the same time doing something: ordering the hearer to fire. In Austinian terms, we can say that X performs the locutionary act of making an utterance with a certain meaning, and at the same time is performing an illocutionary act of ordering the hearer to fire. In addition to these two things, the speaker is also, with their words, bringing about a number of effects, which Austin termed the ‘ perlocutionary act.’ In this case, leading to some unfortunate soul to be shot. (Adapted from Langton, 1993, 295, and Austin, 1962, 101)

To be clear, these three acts—locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary—all occur as part of a single utterance and serve to bring out different aspects of any speech act. Austin (and many after him) paid particular attention to the illocutionary act of an utterance, as this, he said, corresponds to the force of an utterance. That is, what someone is doing with their words.

With this in mind, we can see that there are, in fact, many ways one could silence someone. You could literally gag or threaten someone to prevent them from speaking at all, which would achieve a type of locutionary silencing. Alternatively, you could let them say what they wish, recognize what act they are performing, but prevent them achieving their goals, and in doing so achieve a type of perlocutionary silencing. Finally, a third alternative occurs when one speaks and is prevented not only from achieving their intended effects, but also is prevented from performing the very action they intend to perform (Langton, 1993, 315). It is this third alternative—illocutionary silencing—that is said to occur when a man fails to even recognize a woman’s ‘no’ as a refusal, owing at least partially to the influence of pornography.

The specific mechanics of silencing—along with the underlying theory that best explains the phenomena—is subject to much dispute in the literature, and numerous accounts with different essential features have been offered (see Langton (1993); Langton and West (1999); Hornsby (1994); Hornsby and Langton (1998); Maitra (2009); McGowan (2004, 2009, 2014); Mikolla (2011; 2019), among others).

Laura Caponetto (2021) distinguishes four different types of silencing, demonstrating the breadth of the concept. First, there is essential silencing, which consists in the hearer’s failure to recognize the illocutionary point of a speech act. Second, there is authority silencing, where a hearer fails to acknowledge a speaker’s authority in a relevant domain. Third, there is sincerity silencing, when the speaker’s utterance is inaccurately taken as insincere. Fourth and finally, there is seriousness silencing, which consists in the hearer’s failure to acknowledge the speaker’s words as appropriately serious. Given these fine-grained ways of understanding silencing, a broad, comprehensive definition of silencing may be put as follows:

Illocutionary Silencing A speaker S putting forth a speech act A addressed to a hearer H is illocutionarily silenced iff (i) H fails to recognize the obtaining of some conditions for A ’s success; (ii) S ’s attempt at A -ing meets the conditions that H fails to recognize; (iii) normal input and output conditions are met; (iv) the recognition failure on H ’s part is systematic. (Caponetto, 2021)

In nearly all discussions of silencing, one common piece of contention concerns the notion of ‘uptake.’ On different understanding of what uptake consists in—ranging from the hearer’s recognition of a speaker’s intent, or the type of speech act being performed, up to the material consequences of a speech act—we are led to different conclusions about whether a speaker was silenced or not. Disagreement about the conditions of uptake poses difficulty, therefore, for many accounts of silencing. Drawing on these difficulties, Samia Hesni (2018) has argued that the standard account of silencing needs significant retooling, in part because the necessary distinction between illocutionary silencing and perlocutionary silencing cannot hold, as it relies on a problematic—and arguably conceptually untenable—notion of uptake (Hesni, 2018, 957). In an attempt to avoid these difficulties, we might prefer an account of silencing that uses a Gricean, rather than Austinian or Searlian framework, bypassing the need to fully differentiate the illocutionary from the perlocutionary (see Maitra, 2009).

While much of this literature is explicitly focused on pornography’s potential to silence women in the realm of sexual refusal, the notion that racist hate speech may similarly play a silencing function has also been put forward. For example, in a classic paper on the topic, Lawrence wrote that:

Racist speech … distorts the marketplace of ideas by muting or devaluing the speech of Blacks and other despised minorities. Regardless of intrinsic value, their words and ideas become less saleable in the marketplace of ideas. An idea that would be embraced by large numbers of individuals if it were offered by a white individual will be rejected or given less credence if its author belongs to a group demeaned and stigmatized by racist beliefs. (Lawrence, 1993, 78–79)

Using the above framework, we might therefore say that racist hate speech can itself constitute words that set conditions for the success of other speech acts, and in doing so undermines the speech of its targets—and in some cases, effectively silencing them. That is, racist hate speech may, in cultivating an environment hostile to the voices (and lives) of many, can lead to both locutionary and illocutionary silencing in a way that threatens their freedom of expression. And as is noted above in the section on the harms of hate speech, one long-term consequence of racist hate speech may be the target’s partial withdrawal from certain aspects of public life, including public discourse (West, 2012, 237). One further harmful effect of hate speech, then, is its targets’ silence.

Another way in which racist hate speech might silence is more immediate. Returning to the distinction between propagandistic hate speech on the one hand, and assaultive hate speech on the other, where the latter consists in hate speech uttered directly to its target, we may note that hate speech often serves as a type of attack. So, despite the common refrain of ‘more speech’ offered as advice, conceiving hate speech as a personal attack demonstrates how it, in fact, threatens the speech rights of its targets. As Lawrence puts it: “The visceral emotional response to personal attack precludes speech” (1993, 68). He goes on:

Attack produces an instinctive, defensive psychological reaction. Fear, rage, shock, and flight all interfere with any reasoned response. Words like ‘nigger,’ ‘kike,’ and ‘faggot’ produce physical symptoms that temporarily disable the victim, and perpetrators often use these words with the intention of producing this effect. (ibid.)

So, in both cultivating an environment in which the speech of marginalized groups is systematically devalued, or in serving as an immediate threat, hate speech can be said to silence its targets.

As is the case with pornography and silencing, the details of the mechanisms that sustain this type of silencing, along with what particular type of silencing racist hate speech results in, are subject to dispute. But, just like in the pornography debate, the plausibility of the silencing argument lies partly in how it reframes the overall question surrounding regulation. Rather than simply being a source of harm that merely infringes on the equality rights of its targets, if hate speech silences then it also infringes on the speech rights of its targets (West, 2012). As a result, it is not simply a question of balancing the speech rights of hate speakers against the wellbeing of their targets, but of competing claims to (substantive, and not just formal) freedom of expression. And given the importance that most liberal democracies place on freedom of expression, the challenge presented from hate speech is of central importance. For this reason, the silencing question is one of the most disputed aspects of hate speech and has generated great attention.

5. Counteracting Hate Speech

On the presumption that hate speech is harmful—both particularly harmful for the members of targeted groups, and also generally harmful to democracy—the natural question that follows is: what should we do about it? This question, however, rests on several sub-questions—some empirical, some conceptual—that themselves admit of rich dispute. For example, depending on how one conceives of the value and point of free expression—to better seek the truth, to respect autonomy, to ensure democracy, etc.—different answers to the hate speech question will seem more worthwhile than others. The same consideration applies to empirical matters as well, which are often difficult to properly assess in the absence of uncontroversial data. This means that relatively straightforward empirical questions—does genocidal speech pave the way to actual genocidal violence; do governments abuse hate speech regulation to punish political rivals and disfavored minorities; and others—rarely receive unanimous agreement. Despite these challenges, many theorists have addressed the question of how to counteract hate speech, and what form that response ought to take.

We can divide the most common answers into three broad categories: (1) legally restrict it in some form, as a justified exception to free expression; (2) permit it on the basis of free expression, holding that the harms of censorship outweigh the harms of hate speech; or (3) permit it, but take explicit measures to undo the harm of hate speech.

First, the case for banning hate speech. While this position may be anathema to many (especially in the United States), it is the consensus position of most democratic nations around the globe, as well as the explicit position of the United Nations. In the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights , Article 20 requires a ban on hate speech—or, in their words, “any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law” ( Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ; see also, Article 4 of Convention on Racial Discrimination ). It is worth noting the position of the United Nations and other democracies on hate speech in part because of the contrast they serve for the dominant position in the United States, which recognizes some exceptions to the right to free expression (e.g., obscenity, libel, child sexual abuse material), but not generally on the basis of (racial) hate. Moreover, these exhortations to criminalize hate speech from the United Nations sit alongside commitments that maintain the importance of freedom of expression. For instance, Article 20, quoted above, is immediately preceded by Article 19, which affirms right to freedom of expression ( Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ).

The standard justification offered for restrictions on freedom of expression are based on the necessity of (a) respect of the rights or reputations of others; and (b) reasons of national security or of public order. In other words, a ban on hate speech may be thought to follow from the recognition of the harms it presents, both to the dignity of minority-members of a nation, as well as their physical safety. This position maintains, then, that restrictions on hate speech are a legitimate—and necessary—exception to an otherwise wider understanding of free expression. (For some theorists, it’s worth noting, hate speech is best not understood as the type of speech that free speech protections are meant to include—e.g., it serves no purpose in the pursuit of truth—and so is not in fact an exception to a free speech principle, but simply not included in a proper understanding of the scope of free speech.) This view naturally follows from the understanding that multiple values and rights must be balanced against each other. This is true both of countries that explicitly prohibit hate speech in order to protect minority rights, as well as in more ‘speech-friendly’ nations like the United States, where speech that is aimed at and likely to result in “imminent lawless action” may be legitimately restricted (see Brandenburg v. Ohio ).

However, most advocates for legally restricting hate speech believe that its proper scope is wider than what US law currently allows. Parekh, for example, rejects the position that hate speech may only be restricted when there is “imminent danger” of violence on the grounds that this understanding is too short-sighted. Moreover, he says,

no action occurs in a historical vacuum, and every action produces consequences not inherently but against a particular background. … Imminent danger occurs against, and is imminent because of, the prevailing social climate, and consistency demands that we concentrate our efforts not only on fighting the immediate source of danger, but also on changing the climate. (2012, 45–46)

On the understanding that the threat of hate speech is not exhausted by cases that concern “imminent danger,” we might then ground the prohibition of hate speech on the basis that this may reduce speech that causes harm to its targets, beyond those most immediately affected. Of course, there is also an important role to be played by non-legal means (e.g., moral and social pressure) in erasing or reducing these harms, so legal bans are best understood as part of a broader approach to the ills of hate speech. Furthermore, advocates of bans describe the expressive dimension of these laws as themselves providing a reason in favor of legislation (Waldron, 2014). The law, in this sense, serves as a public statement on a community’s values, and has educational and symbolic importance in itself (Parekh, 2012, 46). (For an overview of expressive theories of law, see Anderson and Pildes, 2000.) A ban on hate speech, therefore, is intended both to reduce harms directly, by decreasing instances of hate by the threat of law, as well as indirectly, by shaping the community’s moral norms through an expression of value.

Though many would agree that hate speech can have destructive effects, and that there is a moral imperative on the state to cultivate something like respectful relations between its members, objections to hate speech bans abound. In a wide-ranging response to these concerns, Parekh (2012) considers (and rejects) six common objections to the prohibition of hate speech. These six objections are: (1) that the harm of hate speech, while real, is relatively minor and a small price to pay given the interest of democratic nations; (2) that bans are not the answer, but rather “better ideas” and “more speech” are; (3) that a prohibition would have a dangerous “chilling effect” and that hate speech bans are a slippery slope to all sorts of unwanted restrictions; (4) that bans give the state too much power to judge the content of speech and decide what can or cannot be said, threatening state-neutrality, skewing political debate, and infringing on individual liberty; (5) that bans are an objectionable form of paternalism or moral authoritarianism, and is incompatible with the assumption that humans are responsible and autonomous individuals and that society is made up of free and equal citizens; and finally, (6) that bans are ineffective at changing attitudes and removing the hate from the hate speaker’s heart, with the result that bans have the effect of moving extremists underground, alienating them from wider society, and in doing so rendering us ignorant of their violent potential and impotent to engage in effective de-radicalization.

Each of these concerns merits more space than can be given to them here. Still, considering these objections to bans and the responses available, even briefly, is illustrative of the theoretical concerns bans on hate speech bring forth (see the list of references for fuller development of the relevant theoretical and empirical issues). Again following Parekh (2012, 47–54), we can approach these objections as follows.

In response to (1), the objection that the interests of a vibrant democracy outweigh the harms imposed by hate speech, it may be argued that hate speech does not embody the values of free speech but, in fact, undermines them by promoting irrational fears and hatred over reasoned arguments and public scrutiny. How powerful one takes this response to be depends directly on what one takes the value and justification of a right to free expression to be, which is of course a matter of dispute.

One response to (2), the common ‘more speech’ objection, is to note that the “marketplace of ideas” is not neutral, and likely requires some regulation (just like a marketplace of other goods). This is what a ban does, and so may be considered to be helping ensure ‘fair competition’ by countering prevailing prejudices, and encouraging greater participation from the members of communities targeted by hate speech. In other words, bans on hate speech may promote greater freedom of expression, by preventing the type of silencing considered above.

While acknowledging the worries of (3), namely that of a ‘chilling effect’ or a ‘slippery slope,’ represent an important objection, we may respond by noting that the problems these signal rest on the vague wording and inconsistent or biased application of hate speech bans. They are not, therefore, direct objections to hate speech bans as such. The remedy, therefore, lies in correcting these aspects of a ban, rather than abandoning it altogether. Moreover, the appeal to a ‘slippery slope’ may be inapt, as it implies that once one type of speech is prohibited, society cannot help but prohibit even more types. But we have no clear reason to suppose that this is the case, as existing bans on defamation have not led to bans on fair critical comment, for example.

The worries at the core of objection (4) represents a well-founded fear of the state, and so must be taken seriously. But, to defenders of hate speech bans, its understanding of the threat that hate speech bans pose to state-neutrality is nonetheless flawed. It fails to recognize that the state often already judges the content of speech (e.g., in banning commercial fraud, criminal solicitation, public displays of obscenity) and often elides neutrality when it speaks in favor of certain positions (e.g., the value of human dignity, equality, liberty). While any defense of hate speech bans must reckon with the possibility of further empowering the state, opponents ought not misrepresent the status quo, exaggerating the reality of state-neutrality.

Objections grounded on the threat of paternalism or moral authoritarianism, like (5), are similarly serious. However, one response on behalf of bans would be to point out how autonomy is always exercised under certain conditions and requires various external circumstances for its development and use. When appealing to personal autonomy, therefore, we should not idealize too greatly so that its real-world exercise is ignored. Rather, the threats that racism and bigotry pose for autonomy must also be acknowledged, alongside praise for our rational faculties.

One response to (6), that bans are ineffective at changing attitudes, is to admit the law cannot change attitudes (like hatred) directly and maintain that this is no knock against the law, and indeed is no problem for hate speech bans. The aim of these bans, in most cases, is not to prevent hatred but to prevent the harm that the public expression of hate can cause. The indirect effects of such a law, however, are an empirical matter, and it is unlikely they admit of a single, general answer, but are highly context-dependent. The subject of the practicability of hate speech bans deserves special attention, however. Opponents to bans may worry that the suppression of hate speech is likely to backfire, not only by failing to reduce hatred, but by increasing the sense of oppression and victimization that many bigots thrive on, leading to an escalation of racist violence (Baker, 2012, 77). Again, as an empirical hypothesis, it cannot be settled simply from the armchair. Still, a further response available on behalf of hate speech bans would be to question the legitimacy of this objection. If, by hypothesis, bans generated an increase in violence, it would still be the responsibility of the state to manage this violence effectively. The role of the state is not exhausted by implementing a ban, but must be seen alongside its enforcement.

This, however, leads to a slightly different objection. The opponent of bans may worry that the enforcement of laws against hate speech would divert the state’s energies away from more effective measures against hated, such as “those directed at changing material conditions in which racism festers, material conditions of both the purveyors and targets of hate” (Baker, 2012, 77). That is, the energies and resources that would be directed towards establishing and enforcing hate speech bans may be better spent on alternative policies. The guiding thought rests on two important points. First, that the intended ends of hate speech bans (e.g., reduction in the harms of hate speech that fall on those targeted by it, mitigation of the expansion of racist attitudes, lessening occurrences of violent hate crimes) may be more effectively achieved via different means, such as reducing inequality, improving social safety nets, political empowerment, and more. Second, though the state can do more than one thing at once, it is nonetheless working with limited resources, and efficiency is a value. That these alternative policy options may indeed be more effective is an unresolved empirical matter. And it remains an open question whether indirect approaches like this would fail to achieve the expressive ends of hate speech bans, which more directly communicate to those targeted by hate speech that they are valued members society.

Many of the claims made above, both on behalf of bans and in opposition, raise theoretical and empirical issues whose proper examination spans many articles and books. Suffice to say that the debate over bans is a highly contested one, and each position rests on an understanding of such issues as the value of free expression, the harm of hate speech, the likely effects a ban might have in a particular context, and so on. For instance, one who believes that free expression is valuable in part because of its role in democratic decision-making may maintain that specifically political speech deserves increased protections, and that some of what others regard as hate speech might fall into this category, escaping regulation. Alternatively, one may view the immunity for political speech as perhaps a red herring. On the speech act theoretic framework outlined above, some forms of racist hate speech are functionally identical to a ‘Whites Only’ sign hanging in a public restaurant (McGowan 2012; McGowan and Maitra 2009). The latter expresses a political opinion in the same way as the former expression does, but it is also regarded as unlawful racially discriminatory. The same considerations—legal sanction—might therefore apply to the verbal utterance as the written sign, and the appeal to the political content of the message is irrelevant.

The preceding summarizes the two main positions in the debate over hate speech: on the one hand, there are those who defend prohibitions, and on the other, those who maintain hate speech as protected under a wide conception of freedom of expression, and so oppose laws that aim at its prohibition. A third position aims to avoid some of the impasses that haunt this debate. On this view, this impasse is the result of a failure by those who oppose hate speech bans (and, as a result, tend to favor ‘more speech’) to acknowledge the strength of one of the main arguments from those who advocate for bans, namely, that hate speech is a type of assault that often renders one unable to respond. This, along with a failure of those who defend bans from considering non-punitive options for mitigating the harms of hate speech, leads to stalemate. On this understanding, both sides of the debate over bans see the only alternatives as either increased governmental powers to punish, or absent that, ‘unsupported’ counterspeech on the part of those targeted by hate speech (see Gelber, 2012a; 2012b).

By contrast, the “supported counterspeech” alternative aims to recognize the specific harms inflicted by hate speech and provide state support to empower those who are harmed. Gelber, an advocate for this alternative, places it within the capabilities approach originally developed by Amartya Sen (1992) and Martha Nussbaum (2000; 2003). “If hate-speech acts harm their targets’ capacity to develop human capabilities,” Gelber says, then “this is what needs to be remedied” (2012a, 54). The impetus for this approach therefore begins from the idea that we must think about remedies to hate speech beyond restrictions and punishment, as neither of these approaches achieve the goal of empowering the target of hate speech. (This is especially true of the latter, punishment, which also carries with it all the negative consequences that anti-carceral advocates have noted.) The supported counterspeech policy is therefore not focused on hate speakers, but rather the targets of hate speech more directly.

The core of this approach lies in an enlarged conception of counterspeech as well as a commitment by the state to provide the material conditions necessary for this speech. In practice, this would mean that the state is committed to responding to an incident of hate speech by empowering its targets to engage in more speech, after the fact. The specific forms this support may take will depend on the conditions of different contexts, along with calibration for the specifics of the incident it is meant as a response to, as well as the needs of the particular communities. Still, to give a sense of what this may entail, examples of the sort of supported counterspeech that this position recommends include things such as: assistance in the production of a community newsletters, op-eds, radio broadcasts, or television advertisements; the development of antiracism awareness programs, or anti-hate-speech workshops; subsidizing community-led art projects; etc.

In each case, the aim of supported counterspeech is to empower the targets of hate speech, and to increase their capacity for engaging in counterspeech. The goal is thus to undo (as much as one can) the specific harms of hate speech, while avoiding the pitfalls of “private remedies” (as critiqued by Matsuda, 1993). While supported counterspeech could be taken as either an alternative to bans or a supplement to them, it remains an under-explored avenue for considering responses tailored to the particular harms of hate speech.

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Theory and hypotheses, study 1: survey experiment, study 2: quasi-experiment, study 3: panel study, general discussion, data availability statement, hate speech prosecution of politicians and its effect on support for the legal system and democracy.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2021

• Supplementary materials

This study examined if and for whom prosecution of politicians for hate speech undermines support for the legal system and democracy. Three research designs were combined to investigate the case of Dutch politician Geert Wilders, who was convicted for hate speech against minorities in 2016. First, an experiment showed that observing a guilty verdict decreased support among ‘assimilationists’ who oppose the multicultural society. This deterioration of support was found among the entire group of assimilationists, regardless of whether they voted for Wilders. Secondly, a quasi-experiment demonstrated that assimilationists who were interviewed after Wilders' conviction indicated less support than those who were interviewed before the verdict and compared to a pre-test. Thirdly, a nine-year panel study suggested that these effects accumulate into long-term discontent. This case therefore demonstrates that hate speech prosecution can damage the democratic system it is intended to defend.

The fundaments of liberal democracy include both freedom of speech and the protection of minorities. Although these principles are often interrelated, they can collide when politicians make controversial public statements about minorities (Bleich Reference Bleich 2011 ; Brems Reference Brems 2002 ). Such statements may fall under the rubric of hate speech, which is legally prohibited in most established democracies. The prosecution of politicians for hate speech has become a widespread phenomenon in recent decades (Fennema Reference Fennema, Koopmans and Statham 2000 ; Jacobs and Van Spanje Reference Jacobs and Van Spanje 2018 ).

Although such legal action is intended to protect democratic values, it seems conceivable that this is not how everyone perceives it. Some may instead view hate speech trials as politically motivated assaults on democratic rights to free speech and representation. Such discontented citizens may for example include those who support the prosecuted politician or sympathize with his or her statements. Consequently, hate speech prosecution might alienate part of the population from liberal democracy in general and the legal system in particular. This study examined this possibility by looking at the case of Geert Wilders. As the leader of the Dutch anti-immigration party ‘PVV’, Wilders has been prosecuted for statements about Islam and Moroccans since 2009 and was convicted in 2016.

This study specifically examined political support , which refers to citizens' evaluations of their political system and its institutions (Easton Reference Easton 1975 ). A low level of political support is believed to be problematic for democracy because it reduces democratic participation. For example, people who negatively evaluate political institutions are less likely to vote or engage in other participatory activities (Aberbach and Walker Reference Aberbach, Walker and Crecine 1970 ; Hooghe and Marien Reference Hooghe and Marien 2013 ). Instead, those who feel themselves excluded politically are more likely to engage in noninstitutional politics, violent protest, or even attacks (Hooghe and Marien Reference Hooghe and Marien 2013 ; Katsanidoua and Eder Reference Katsanidou and Eder 2018 ; Muller, Jukam and Seligson Reference Muller, Jukam and Seligson 1982 ). A lack of political support consequently has the potential to undermine the legitimacy and stability of democratic governance (Linz and Stepan Reference Linz and Stepan 1978 ). If hate speech prosecution indeed diminishes citizens' political support, it could therefore damage the democratic system, even though one of the purposes of hate speech prosecution is precisely to defend liberal democratic values. In this regard, hate speech prosecution is often viewed in the context of ‘militant democracy’, which is the idea that liberal democracies need (legal) instruments to defend themselves against anti-liberal and anti-democratic threats (Capoccia Reference Capoccia 2005 ; Capoccia Reference Capoccia 2013 ; Loewenstein Reference Loewenstein 1937 ). Moreover, the prosecution of hate speech against ethnic minorities may invoke discontent particularly among those who oppose the multicultural society, which is a group that is already characterized by an alarmingly low level of political support. Indeed, negative attitudes about multiculturalism are arguably the strongest correlate of political discontent in many Western democracies (for example, Citrin, Levy and Wright Reference Citrin, Levy and Wright 2014 ; Elchardus and Smits Reference Elchardus and Smits 2002 ).

Despite this potential importance, the extensive literature on hate speech (for example, Brown Reference Brown 2015 ; Waldron Reference Waldron 2012 ) and legal prosecution against politicians and parties (for example, Askola Reference Askola 2015 ; Capoccia Reference Capoccia 2005 ; Minkenberg Reference Minkenberg 2006 ) has never rigorously assessed how it may affect political support. Vice versa, research on the impact of court decisions on political support (for example, in the case of the US Supreme Court; Grosskopf and Mondak Reference Grosskopf and Mondak 1998 ; Kritzer Reference Kritzer 2001 ) has never examined the prosecution of politicians for hate speech. The only exception is a study by Van Spanje and De Vreese ( Reference Van Spanje and De Vreese 2014 ), which revealed that opponents of the multicultural society indeed lowered their satisfaction with democracy after a Dutch court decided to prosecute Wilders in 2009. In the absence of an experimental design, it however remains uncertain if this decline was indeed caused by Wilders' prosecution. Furthermore, this study was limited to satisfaction with democracy as outcome variable.

The present study therefore aimed to confirm this earlier finding and expand upon it by examining evaluations of both the legal system and democracy using three different research designs. First, a survey experiment randomly exposed participants to news about an upcoming conviction of Wilders and then compared their evaluations of the legal system and democracy to a control condition. Secondly, a quasi-experiment compared respondents who completed a survey immediately after Wilders' conviction with others who participated just before this event, taking scores on a pre-test into account. Thirdly, a nine-year panel study examined if the events in Wilders' prosecution coincided with shifts in political support during the entire period in which these events took place. This combination of methods allowed us to simultaneously unravel the causal mechanisms under controlled circumstances (that is, internal validity), while also verifying how these mechanisms translate to a real-world context and time span (that is, external validity). This study furthermore examined if hate speech prosecution erodes political support only among the accused's electorate (that is, Wilders' voters), or more broadly among everyone who supports the idea behind his or her statements (that is, opponents of the multicultural society). Finally, this study investigated if citizens who reject the accused's statements (that is, proponents of the multicultural society) reversely raise their political support in response to the legal action. This resulted in a comprehensive analysis of the effects of legal prosecution of a politician on support for the legal system and democracy.

Could Hate Speech Prosecution Undermine Political Support?

The European Court of Human Rights ( 2017 ) defines hate speech as ‘all forms of expression which spread, incite, promote or justify hatred based on intolerance and indignity of all human beings.’ An impulse to the prosecution of hate speech was given in 1965, when the United Nations adopted the ‘International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination’ (ICERD). In August 2020, this convention had been ratified by 182 countries (UN OLA 2020 ). As mandated by this convention, most European democracies have implemented legislation that prohibits hate speech (cf. Fennema Reference Fennema, Koopmans and Statham 2000 ). A considerable number of politicians has since been prosecuted based on these laws, including Jesper Langballe in Denmark, Flavio Tosi in Italy, and Jussi Halla-aho in Finland (for example, Askola Reference Askola 2015 ). In the Netherlands and Belgium alone, more than 50 politicians have been prosecuted in recent decades (Van Donselaar Reference Van Donselaar 1995 ; Vrielink Reference Vrielink 2010 ). Specifically, the ICERD was ratified by the Netherlands in 1971. Wilders was prosecuted based on legislation that dates back to 1934 and that was adjusted following that ratification (Snijders and Shoemaker Wood Reference Snijders, Shoemaker Wood and Gitlin 2018 ).

The concept of political support refers to citizens' evaluations of their political system and its institutions (Easton Reference Easton 1975 ). David Easton ( Reference Easton 1965 ) distinguished three objects of support: the community, the regime, and the authorities. Easton ( Reference Easton 1975 ) furthermore conceptualized that support can range from specific (that is, support for an institution) to diffuse (that is, attachment to the system). Pippa Norris ( Reference Norris 1999 , Norris Reference Norris 2011 ) further specified this framework by proposing five dimensions of political support that range from diffuse to specific: (1) belonging to the nation-state, (2) agreement with core principles and normative values upon which the regime is based, (3) evaluations of the regime's overall performance, (4) confidence in regime institutions and (5) approval of incumbent office holders. Norris ( Reference Norris 2006 , 6) furthermore proposed that measures of citizens' satisfaction can be used as indicators of ‘public evaluations of how well autocratic or democratic governments work in practice’. The current study therefore examined evaluations of the legal system and democracy as indicated by citizens' confidence and satisfaction. Evaluations of democracy fall under Norris' third dimension (that is, evaluations of the overall performance of the regime), whereas evaluations of the legal system are part of the fourth dimension (that is, confidence in regime institutions).

There are at least four reasons to expect that the prosecution of politicians for hate speech could diminish political support. Although it should be emphasized that it was not an aim of this study to determine which of these explanatory mechanisms best explains the impact of hate speech prosecution, we distinguish these four processes to theorize what groups of citizens may be affected. The first mechanism can be derived from the simple idea that citizens evaluate institutions and democracy more favorably when things go their way. Easton ( Reference Easton 1965 ) used the term ‘output failure’ to refer to instances in which political support is diminished because authorities are unable or unwilling to meet citizens' demands. Any important decision by a political institution therefore has the potential to strengthen support among those who get what they want and to weaken it among those who disagree with the outcome (Arnesen Reference Arnesen 2017 ; Bartels and Johnston Reference Bartels and Johnston 2013 ). A similar phenomenon can be observed after elections, when voters of winning parties generally report a greater satisfaction with democracy than supporters of the losers (for example, Dahlberg and Linde Reference Dahlberg and Linde 2017 ). Likewise, American citizens typically lower their evaluations of the US Supreme Court when they disagree with a decision (Grosskopf and Mondak Reference Grosskopf and Mondak 1998 ; Kritzer Reference Kritzer 2001 ). In the case of hate speech prosecution, those who sympathize with the accused's ideas may therefore lower their evaluations of the legal system and democracy simply because they disagree with the undertaking.

Whereas the former reasoning would apply equally to any other controversial decision by an institution, the second reason why hate speech prosecution may undermine political support is both more specific and more fundamental. The decision to prosecute a politician for hate speech is not merely a decision that people can disagree with, but also something that affects the core of their democratic rights. People who agree with the idea behind the accused's statements may regard that they are no longer free to express their views or to elect someone who represents their convictions. Wilders has for example consistently framed his prosecution as a political trial against the democratic rights of his voters (Van Noorloos Reference Van Noorloos 2014 ). Directly after his conviction on 9 December 2016, he released a video in which he put it as follows: ‘I have a message for the judges who convicted me. You have restricted the freedom of speech of millions of Dutch citizens and thereby in fact convicted everyone. Nobody trusts you anymore’ (Video Wilders 2016 ).

This quote by Wilders also illustrates the third reason why hate speech prosecution could damage political support, namely that politicians provide important cues to their supporters about what political views to adopt (for example, Bakker, Lelkes and Malka Reference Bakker, Lelkes and Malka 2019 ; Lau and Redlawsk Reference Lau and Redlawsk 2001 ). Most people may not have direct experience with the legal system and hence rely on messages from opinion leaders to determine their trust in the institution (Caldeira and Gibson Reference Caldeira and Gibson 1992 ). When the prosecuted politician repeatedly states that the legal system is corrupted, this could therefore persuade many sympathizers to also distrust it. Accordingly, research shows that anti-establishment parties can fuel political distrust (Rooduijn, Van der Brug and De Lange Reference Rooduijn, Van der Brug and De Lange 2016 ; Van der Brug Reference Van der Brug 2003 ). This may apply in particular to citizens who psychologically identify with the accused's party, since the extensive literature on party identification demonstrates that this group is most likely to echo a party's message (Campbell et al. Reference Campbell 1960 ; Carsey and Layman Reference Carsey and Layman 2006 ).

The fourth reason why hate speech prosecution could erode political support is that it may politicize the legal system. Institutions usually enjoy more support when they are seen as independent authorities and less when they are perceived as ‘political’ (for example, Elchardus and Smits Reference Elchardus and Smits 2002 ). It is likely for this reason that the legal system is generally among the most trusted institutions whereas for example political parties are often distrusted (for example, Dekker and Den Ridder Reference Dekker, Den Ridder, Van der Meer, Van der Kolk and Rekker 2018 ). Gibson, Caldeira and Spence ( Reference Gibson, Caldeira and Spence 2003 ; Gibson Reference Gibson 2007 ) for example argued that the legitimacy of the US Supreme Court has largely been unaffected by partisan and ideological polarization because citizens distinguish courts from other political institutions due to legitimizing judicial symbols. As Gibson ( Reference Gibson 2007 , 516) put it: ‘The message of these powerful symbols is that courts are different, and owing to these differences, courts are worthy of more respect, deference, and obedience – in short, legitimacy.’ The prosecution of politicians may however detract from the legal system's apolitical reputation by drawing it closer to the political arena in the eyes of the public. In other words, citizens may intuitively approach an institution with a more critical attitude when it is subject to conflict over divisive societal issues.

Only four empirical studies have so far investigated the impact of the prosecution of politicians for hate speech on public opinion and only one of these focused on political support. This three-wave panel study by Van Spanje and De Vreese ( Reference Van Spanje and De Vreese 2014 ) followed Dutch citizens in the weeks before and after the 2009 court decision to prosecute Wilders for hate speech. It revealed that citizens who reject the multicultural society lowered their evaluation of democracy during this period. This decline was stronger among those who were aware of the court's decision compared to others who were unaware, which tentatively suggests a causal effect of the ruling. In the absence of an experimental design, this causal inference however remains uncertain and this study only examined satisfaction with democracy as outcome variable. Indirectly related to the issue of political support, a second study used a similar design to demonstrate that Wilders' electoral support surged substantially in the polls after the court's decision to prosecute him (Van Spanje and De Vreese Reference Van Spanje and De Vreese 2015 ), while a third study examined the explanatory mechanisms of this effect (Jacobs and Van Spanje Reference Jacobs and Van Spanje 2019 ) and a fourth study investigated the role of news media in this electoral impact (Jacobs and Van Spanje Reference Jacobs and Van Spanje 2020 ). Based on our theoretical reasoning and these few earlier findings, we postulated our first hypothesis as follows:

Hypothesis 1: Hate speech prosecution of politicians decreases evaluations of the legal system and democracy among citizens who support the idea behind the accused's statements.

For Whom Would Hate Speech Prosecution Undermine Political Support?

If hate speech prosecution indeed damages political support, this raises the question for whom this is the case. The four aforementioned explanatory mechanisms lead us to different expectations about how many citizens may be affected. Based on the first (simple disagreement) and second reasoning (restriction own political freedoms), we may expect that hate speech prosecution reduces political support among everyone who supports the idea behind the accused's statements. In the case of Wilders, this would imply that political support diminishes among everyone who opposes the multicultural society, whom we refer to as assimilationist s. Regardless of whether or not they voted for Wilders, assimilationists may perceive that their freedom of speech is being restricted. Even assimilationists who disapprove of Wilders' choice of words may therefore oppose his prosecution.

Based on the fourth account (politicization of the legal system) the affected group could be even broader. The legal system could lose some of its status as an apolitical authority for every citizen due to the prosecution of a politician, even for those who reject the accused's views and applaud the prosecution. Following the third account (opinion leadership), the affected group could however also be narrower. Only citizens who support the accused's party are likely to take cues from it about what institutions to trust. Those who merely agree with the accused's statements, but vote for a different party, will probably not follow him or her as an opinion leader. Particularly in a multiparty context, the group that actually votes for a party can be considerably smaller than the group that agrees with it on a particular issue. For example, about one-third of Dutch citizens reject immigration (for example, Van der Brug and Van Spanje Reference Van der Brug and Van Spanje 2009 ), but only 10–15 per cent votes for the PVV.

The only earlier study on hate speech prosecution and political support examined attitudes about the multicultural society, but not vote choice, as a moderator (Van Spanje and De Vreese Reference Van Spanje and De Vreese 2014 ). Although this study revealed a decline in political support among assimilationists after a court decision to prosecute Wilders, it consequently remains uncertain if this effect could have been driven entirely by PVV voters. The current study aimed to provide clarity on this issue by examining if hate speech prosecution diminishes political support only among the accused's electorate, or more generally among everyone who supports his or her views. Based on this earlier finding, our tentative expectation was that the latter would be most likely. We therefore formulated our second hypothesis as a stricter version of our first hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2: Hate speech prosecution of politicians decreases evaluations of the legal system and democracy among citizens who support the idea behind the accused's statements, regardless of whether they voted for his or her party.

Could Hate Speech Prosecution Strengthen Political Support?

Although hate speech prosecution may damage political support for some, it could potentially raise it among others. An obvious candidate to endorse the prosecution is the community that the alleged hate speech was aimed against. In the case of Wilders' second trial, people in the Netherlands of Moroccan descent may for example perceive that the legal system is effectively protecting their rights as an ethnic minority. A much larger group that may applaud the prosecution however consists of everyone who rejects the accused's views. Proponents of multiculturalism, whom we refer to as multiculturalists , will likely welcome Wilders' prosecution as an instrument to defend multicultural values such as tolerance of diversity. As such, their evaluations of the legal system and democracy may be strengthened by the endeavor. Theoretically, this can be viewed as an effect of citizens simply agreeing with the court's decision. Indeed, research on the US Supreme Court reveals that Americans commonly improve their evaluations of this institution when they agree with a decision, even though this favorable response is not as strong as the loss of support among citizens who disagree (Grosskops and Mondak Reference Grosskopf and Mondak 1998 ). Table 1 provides an overview of how different groups of citizens may respond based on each of the four hypothesized mechanisms.

Table 1. Overview of explanatory mechanisms and their possible implications for political support

The only previous study on this topic (Van Spanje and De Vreese Reference Van Spanje and De Vreese 2014 ) failed to provide a conclusive answer to the question of whether those who oppose the accused's views increase their political support in response to hate speech prosecution. It showed that multiculturalists' satisfaction with democracy decreased, rather than increased, in the weeks after the court's decision to prosecute Wilders. This decline was however weaker among multiculturalists who were aware of the court's decision compared to multiculturalists who were unaware, which suggests that the court's decision may nonetheless have had a positive impact among this group. The current study therefore aimed to provide a clearer picture of multiculturalists' response to hate speech prosecution by examining the following hypothesis:

Hypothesis 3: Hate speech prosecution of politicians increases evaluations of the legal system and democracy among citizens who oppose the idea behind the accused's statements.

Finally, some citizens may reject or endorse hate speech prosecution based on universal principles. For example, some multiculturalists may nonetheless reject Wilders' prosecution out of a fundamental belief that free speech should never be restricted. Conversely, some assimilationists may support his prosecution because they believe minorities ought to be protected. Because such universal principles can work in both directions, they are not a reason to expect a structural increase or decrease in support for a particular group of citizens.

The Case Under Investigation

The present study examined the case of Geert Wilders (see, for example, Van Noorloos Reference Van Noorloos 2014 ), who is the founder of the anti-immigration Freedom Party (PVV). The PVV was the first Dutch anti-immigration party to enjoy durable electoral success with 5.9 per cent of the votes in 2006, 15.5 per cent in 2010, 10.1 per cent in 2012, and 13.1 per cent in 2017. Alongside his more general critique of multiculturalism and European integration, Wilders is best known for his rejection of Islam. In 2007, he referred to Islam as ‘a fascist ideology’ and proposed to ban the Quran. Several people pressed charges and, although the public prosecutor initially decided not to instigate legal proceedings, an Amsterdam court ordered in 2009 that Wilders was to be prosecuted for these statements. The proceedings commenced in 2010 and resulted in a full acquittal in 2011. A second prosecution started after a political rally for the 2014 municipal elections, where Wilders asked his supporters if they wanted ‘more or fewer Moroccans’. The mob answered by chanting ‘fewer’, after which Wilders responded, ‘We will arrange it.’ The public prosecutor decided to prosecute Wilders for these statements in December of 2014 and the proceedings started in March of 2016. On 9 December 2016, the court ruled that Wilders was guilty of hate speech. A sentence was however not imposed.

Although this examination was a case study of one politician, the same mechanisms and effects may characterize other prosecutions for hate speech. The extent to which our findings generalize to other cases depends on the relevant characteristics of both the Dutch context and the specific case of Wilders. With regard to context, the immigration debate in the Netherlands is very typical of the divide over this issue that exists throughout Western Europe. For example, the Netherlands is about average compared to other West European countries in terms of the size of its immigrant population (Eurostat, 2019 ), the vote share of anti-immigration parties (Mudde Reference Mudde 2013 ), and public support for multiculturalism (Bohman and Hjerm Reference Bohman and Hjerm 2016 ). Moreover, the number of previous hate speech prosecutions in the Netherlands is not exceptionally small or large compared to other countries (Fennema Reference Fennema, Koopmans and Statham 2000 ; Jacobs and Van Spanje Reference Jacobs and Van Spanje 2018 ). Consequently, we see no obvious reasons why the prosecution of politicians for hate speech would have a different impact on political support in the Netherlands than in most other West European countries.

With regard to the specific case, three core characteristics may delimit generalizability. First, Wilders was prosecuted for statements that related to immigration and the multicultural society. The reasoning and analyses in this study therefore focussed specifically on citizens' attitudes about multiculturalism. Other attitudes may matter when politicians are prosecuted for other hate speech. For example, attitudes towards homosexuality may have played a similar role regarding the trial of Dutch MP Leen van Dijke for defamation of homosexuals in 1998–1999. A second core characteristic of the Wilders case is that he was the leader of a major political party. As a result, his prosecution was covered extensively by Dutch media and Wilders may have had a substantial ability to influence public opinion. The dynamics might have been very different for a leader of a minor party, such as Hans Janmaat in the Netherlands, Udo Voigt in Germany and Daniel Féret in Belgium. A third relevant characteristic of the Wilders case is that his statements seem sufficiently ambiguous to allow for different interpretations. The incident in which Wilders asked his supporters if they wanted ‘more or fewer Moroccans’ may have been perceived as extremely offensive and dangerous by his opponents, whereas Wilders' supporters may have viewed it as ‘simply a question’ about immigration policy. Combined with the fact that public opinion is highly divided on the underlying immigration issue, this ambiguity of Wilders' statements may therefore have contributed to a more polarized public opinion about his prosecution and a stronger potential to damage political support. Some caution is therefore warranted in generalizing our findings to cases in which the prosecuted statements were more universally rejected. An example is the prosecution of Jean-Marie Le Pen, whose antisemitic references to the Holocaust were widely condemned across the French political spectrum, as indicated by Le Pen's suspension from his own party. Other examples include the cases of Nick Griffin in Britain and Günter Deckert in Germany, who were also prosecuted for Holocaust revisionism.

In sum, we see little reason why hate speech prosecution would affect political support differently in most other West European countries or in other cases that resemble the Wilders case on relevant characteristics. Our findings may generalize in particular to other cases in which the accused's statements relate to immigration, the defendant is the leader of a major political party, and the prosecuted statements are ambiguous enough to divide public opinion on their acceptability. An example that resembles the Wilders case on all three characteristics is the prosecution of Marine Le Pen. As the leader of Front National, Le Pen was prosecuted in 2015 for a comparison that she made in 2010 between Muslim prayer and Nazi occupation. Indeed, the Wilders case seems to be indicative of a growing phenomenon that the leaders of anti-immigration parties explore the boundaries of what is legally permissible by making ambiguous statements about immigrants that their sympathizers would generally still find acceptable.

The first of our three studies was a survey experiment integrated into an online questionnaire. The 1,070 participants were drawn from an existing panel of Dutch citizens aged 18 and over. This panel achieved national representativeness by combining random selection (48 per cent of respondents) with more targeted methods (for example, snowball sampling) to recruit sufficient respondents from demographic groups with lower response rates. The experiment was conducted in the two weeks leading up to the court verdict on 9 December 2016.

As part of the online survey, participants first answered questions about all moderating variables including their vote choice and attitudes about the multicultural society. They were then asked to read two news articles. The first article, about a discovery in a museum, was the same for all participants. The second article was about the upcoming verdict in Wilders' trial. If and how this article was presented was manipulated across eight experimental conditions to which respondents were randomly assigned.

The first was a not guilty condition (N = 140), in which respondents read that a verdict in Wilders' hate speech trial was upcoming and that he was to be acquitted according to both legal experts and sources close to the court. A guilty condition (N = 683) was contrarily confronted with a message that Wilders was about to be convicted for hate speech according to these same sources. The sentence that Wilders would receive was randomly manipulated across respondents in this condition: conviction without a sentence, a fine, community service, a suspended prison sentence or a combination of the former. Our design furthermore included a control condition (N = 247) in which respondents were not presented with any predictions about Wilders' verdict. Half of these respondents read a story that the outcome of Wilders' upcoming trial was still completely unsure, while the other half was not presented any news about the prosecution at all.

After this experimental manipulation, respondents continued the survey with questions about a number of variables, including evaluations of the legal system and democracy. This part of the survey also included a manipulation check in which respondents were asked how likely it was that Wilders was to be acquitted on a scale from 1 (very unlikely) to 7 (very likely). The not guilty condition scored an average of 4.8 on this scale, while this was 4.3 for the control condition and 3.8 for the guilty condition. This significant difference (F(2, 1,067) = 25.77, p < 0.001) indicates that the manipulation was successful. At the end of the survey, all respondents were debriefed with the message that the predictions about Wilders' trial were completely fictional. Prior ethical clearance had been obtained from the Institutional Review Board of the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences of the University of Amsterdam.

To measure support for the legal system, our study included two different evaluations of this institution. The first asked respondents to indicate their confidence in the legal system on a 7-point scale, while the second asked respondents to rate their satisfaction on a similar scale. Confidence and satisfaction are theoretically viewed as highly related, but nonetheless distinct, aspects of political support (Norris Reference Norris 1999 ). Our respondents however did not appear to make this distinction, since the correlation between confidence and satisfaction was 0.71 in this experiment and even higher in the quasi-experiment and panel study discussed below. We therefore combined both aspects of support into a single scale with a highly satisfactory Cronbach's alpha of 0.83. Support for democracy was measured using a single item that asked respondents to rate their satisfaction on a 7-point scale, since no measure on confidence in democracy was available to us.

Attitudes about the multicultural society were measured using four items on a 7-point scale. An example of an item is ‘Foreigners and ethnic minorities should completely adjust to Dutch culture.’ The items were averaged into a scale that had an acceptable Cronbach's alpha of 0.72. Based on respondents' z-scores on this scale, we divided them into three equally large attitude groups: multiculturalists (z-score below −0.43), moderates (z-score between −0.43 and 0.43) and assimilationists (z-score above 0.43). This approach allowed us to ensure that the sample size and statistical power were comparable and sufficient in all three groups. Furthermore, placing the cutoff for the assimilationist group at the 33rd percentile corresponds to the observation that roughly one-third of citizens clearly opposes immigration and multiculturalism in typical survey items (for example, Van der Brug and Van Spanje Reference Van der Brug and Van Spanje 2009 ). An overview of all survey items and descriptive statistics is displayed in Appendix 1.

Strategy of analysis

Due to our experiment's between-subjects design, with only a post-test of the dependent variables, the analyses consisted of a comparison between the guilty condition and the control condition. The not guilty condition was not used to test our hypotheses, because the theory did not provide us with clear expectations about how respondents in this condition would react to the stimulus. Instead, this condition was included as an exploratory reference with a smaller number of respondents. The aforementioned random variations in Wilders' sentence in the guilty condition were also excluded since the present study has no research questions on the differential impact of various sentences. Likewise, we made no distinction between the two random variations within the control condition (that is, no prediction about the verdict or no news about the trial). All analyses were conducted using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression with heteroscedasticity robust standard errors.

We analyzed our data in four subsequent regression models, as reported in Table 2 and depicted in Figure 1 . A first model compared evaluations of the legal system and democracy between the conditions for assimilationists only. As hypothesized (Hypothesis 1), assimilationists who read a message about Wilders' upcoming conviction (that is, the guilty condition) were significantly more negative about both the legal system and democracy compared to assimilationists in the control condition. The effect sizes on a 7-point scale were considerable: 0.51 for the legal system (0.33 times the standard deviation) and 0.62 points for democracy (0.40 times the standard deviation). Our second model repeated this analysis with the exclusion of respondents who had voted for the PVV in 2012. The results were highly similar to those of the first model, which confirmed our hypothesis (Hypothesis 2) that a conviction of Wilders would have an adverse effect not only among his electorate, but among everyone who agrees with his statements. A third model repeated the analysis for multiculturalists, which revealed no significant differences between the conditions. This rejected our hypothesis (Hypothesis 3) that multiculturalists would raise their evaluations of the legal system and democracy in response to a guilty verdict. An analysis of the entire sample finally revealed that the expected interaction between condition and attitude group was not significant. This is likely due to the fact that multiculturalists did not show the hypothesized positive response.

Figure 1. Survey experiment: evaluations of the legal system and democracy by experimental condition and attitude group

Table 2. Results of the survey experiment

Note: unstandardized parameters with standard errors in parentheses. * p < 0.05. ** p < 0.01. *** p < 0.001

This survey experiment clearly demonstrated that the prospect of a guilty verdict for Wilders decreased evaluations of the legal system and democracy among assimilationists, regardless of whether they had voted for him. At the same time, we found no indication of a favorable response to the verdict among multiculturalists. These findings clearly demonstrate that prosecuting hate speech can have a causal impact on evaluations of the legal system and democracy. However, survey experiments are inevitably conducted in a rather artificial context, and their findings do not always translate to real-world events (Barabas and Jerit Reference Barabas and Jerit 2010 ). Our quasi-experiment therefore examined whether these findings could also be observed in a real-world situation when Wilders was actually convicted a few days later.

For our quasi-experiment, we used data from the LISS panel (Langlopende Internet Studies voor de Sociale Wetenschappen), a nationally representative survey of about 15,000 respondents who regularly participate in online surveys on a variety of issues, including an annual wave on political issues. Respondents were recruited as a probability sample of Dutch citizens aged 16 and over. Panel attrition was handled by selectively recruiting new participants who resemble the respondents who dropped out on key variables. The ninth annual wave on politics was released on 5 December 2016, which was coincidentally only four days before Wilders was found guilty of hate speech by a Dutch court on 9 December 2016 at 11:25 a.m. Of the 5,537 respondents in this wave, 1,671 (30.2 per cent) completed the survey in the four days leading up to the court verdict, 223 (4.0 per cent) participated on either 9 December after the verdict or on 10 December, while the remaining 3,643 (65.8 per cent) responded between 11 December 2016 and 31 January 2017.

Just as in the randomized experiment, evaluations of the legal system and democracy were measured with two survey questions. The first asked respondents to rate their ‘confidence’ in a variety of institutions on an 11-point scale, and the second did the same for their ‘satisfaction’. The unidimensionality of these items was again demonstrated, this time by a correlation of 0.87 between confidence and satisfaction for evaluations of the legal system and an association of 0.86 between both evaluations of democracy. The scales revealed a highly satisfactory Cronbach's alpha of 0.93 for the legal system and 0.92 for democracy. To avoid endogeneity within the quasi-experimental design, attitudes about the multicultural society were used from the eighth wave of the LISS panel, which was administered a year earlier. The scale consisted of eight items on a 5-point scale. An example of an item is: ‘There are too many people of foreign origin or descent in the Netherlands.’ The scale had an adequate Cronbach's alpha of 0.75. As in the randomized experiment, three equally large attitude groups (assimilationists, moderates and multiculturalists) were constructed based on respondents' z-scores.

A quasi-experiment is commonly defined as a research design that resembles a true experiment in all characteristics except complete randomization. Its core features typically include (1) a quasi-random source of variation, (2) a comparison group and (3) a pre- and post-test (Bernard Reference Bernard 2012 ). For the quasi-random variation, this study used an interrupted time-series design that examines sudden discontinuities in time trends. Specifically, we determined if Wilders’ conviction of hate speech coincided with a sudden decline in evaluations of the legal system and democracy among assimilationists at precisely 11:25 a.m. on 9 December 2016. This study compared respondents who completed the survey before the verdict (5 December until 9 December before 11:25) with those who participated within 48 hours after the verdict (9 December after 11:25 a.m. or 10 December) or more than 48 hours after the conviction (11 December 2016 until 31 January 2017). In this design, exposure to Wilders' conviction introduces a quasi-random source of variation because substantial systematic differences are unlikely between respondents who completed the survey shortly before the event and those who did so directly thereafter. This strategy, which is known as the unexpected event during surveys design , has been used in a large and increasing number of quasi-experiments in recent decades (see Muñoz, Falcó-Gimeno and Hernández Reference Muñoz, Falcó-Gimeno and Hernández 2019 for an overview).

As a second feature of the quasi-experimental design, we created a comparison group by contrasting over-time discontinuities between assimilationists, moderates and multiculturalists. If adverse effects of Wilders' conviction are strongest for assimilationists, this provides further evidence that an over-time discontinuity surrounding his conviction may be viewed as a causal effect. Finally, our quasi-experiment could feature a pre- and post-test by using the eighth wave of the LISS panel, which was administered a year earlier. Alongside general control variables (that is, age, gender and educational level), effects were therefore controlled for respondents' evaluations of the legal system and democracy at an earlier time point. This allowed us to examine if respondents lost support after Wilders' conviction compared to their own evaluations a year earlier. Data were analyzed using regression analysis with (OLS) estimation and heteroscedasticity-robust standard errors.

Before conducting our formal analyses, we explored the over-time development of the dependent variables in the days before and after the verdict as depicted in Figure 2 . This graph shows a clear decrease in support among assimilationists after the conviction and a slight uptick among multiculturalists. To examine if these patterns were significant, we specified four regression models as displayed in Table 3 . A first model compared the evaluations of assimilationists before and after the verdict. Compared to assimilationists who completed the survey before Wilders' conviction, assimilationists who participated in the 48 hours after the verdict were significantly more negative about both the legal system and democracy. This confirmed our hypothesis (Hypothesis 1) that Wilders' conviction would have an adverse effect on assimilationists' political support. The effect sizes on an 11-point scale were meaningful: 0.46 for both the legal system (0.22 times the standard deviation) and democracy (0.24 times the standard deviation). However, assimilationists who participated more than 48 hours after the conviction did not differ significantly from those who did so before the event.

Figure 2. Quasi-experiment: evaluations of the legal system and democracy before and after the verdict

Table 3. Results of the quasi-experiment

A second model repeated this analysis, but with the exclusion of respondents who had voted for Wilders' PVV in the previous parliamentary elections. This exclusion did not substantially alter the effect of Wilders' conviction on either of the two dependent variables (that is, there was no statistically significant change in effect size), although the effect on evaluations of democracy was no longer significant in this model. As such, our hypothesis (Hypothesis 2) that adverse effects of Wilders' conviction would not be limited to his electorate was confirmed. A third model repeated the same analysis for the multiculturalists in the sample. Multiculturalists who participated in the first 48 hours after the verdict did not give significantly higher or lower evaluations of the legal system or democracy compared to those who participated before the verdict. As such, our hypothesis (Hypothesis 3) that multiculturalists would improve their evaluations of the legal system and democracy after Wilders' conviction was rejected. Multiculturalists who participated more than 48 hours after the conviction contrarily revealed increased support for the legal system. The delay however suggests that this increase was due to other factors, because it is unlikely that it would take citizens 48 hours to change their views in response to Wilders' conviction.

We finally conducted an analysis on the entire sample to examine interaction effects between attitude group and the moment of completing the survey. Results revealed that assimilationists and multiculturalists indeed revealed a differential shift in their evaluations of the legal system after the conviction. By viewing multiculturalists as a comparison group, this finding supports the interpretation that the decrease in evaluations among assimilationists indeed constitutes a causal effect of Wilders' conviction. However, a similar interaction was non-significant for evaluations of democracy.

The findings of this quasi-experiment were highly similar to those of our survey experiment. Assimilationists lowered their evaluations of the legal system and democracy after Wilders was found guilty of hate speech (Hypothesis 1). However, this study also revealed that this decline may have been short-lived, as assimilationists' evaluations returned to their original levels after about 48 hours. Just as the survey experiment, this study also demonstrated that the loss of support among assimilationists was not limited to Wilders' voters (Hypothesis 2). Our third hypothesis was again rejected, since multiculturalists did not report a strengthened support (directly) after the conviction. This study therefore demonstrated that the causal effects identified in our survey experiment indeed generalize to a real-world context. Because the timeframe of this quasi-experiment was however limited to only a few weeks, our panel study examined to what extent these effects have persisted and accumulated over a more extended period.

Whereas our quasi-experiment used only a single wave from the aforementioned LISS panel, our panel study used all nine available waves. The first wave was administered between December 2007 and January 2008, while the last took place between December 2016 and January 2017. A wave from early 2015 could not be used because it did not include measures of political support. A total of 15,067 respondents participated in at least one wave and in 3.6 waves on average. The LISS panel provided us with a representative sample of Dutch citizens who were interviewed during the entire period of the first hate speech trial against Wilders and the second trial until his conviction in 2016.

Evaluations of the legal system and democracy, as well as attitudes about the multicultural society, were measured with the same items that were used in the quasi-experiment. As a control variable, support for the government and parliament were measured with the same ratings of confidence and satisfaction that were used for the legal system and democracy.

The main purpose of our panel analysis was to determine if the history of Wilders' prosecution co-occurred with changes in support for the legal system and democracy. The main independent variable was therefore a construct that reflects how many events had passed in Wilders' prosecution at each point in time. In 2008 and 2009, this variable had a value of 0 because no hate speech prosecution against Wilders had yet occurred. Because the first trial against Wilders was initiated in 2009, this variable took a value of 1 from 2010 until 2014. Because a second trial against Wilders' commenced in 2014, the value of the independent variable was raised to 2 for 2016 and 2017. This variable therefore allowed us to roughly determine if changes in political support co-occurred with the events surrounding the hate speech prosecution of Wilders.

Because over-time changes in support may occur for many other reasons than hate speech prosecution, all models controlled for a linear time trend and for respondents' support for the government and parliament in every year. Evaluations of different institutions are typically strongly interrelated (Dalton Reference Dalton 2004 ), but legal prosecution may affect evaluations of the legal system and democracy more than support for other institutions. Including support for the government and parliament in the model therefore allowed us to control to a certain extent for other events that may have affected political support more generally. All data were analyzed using fixed-effects longitudinal regression analysis with OLS estimation and heteroscedasticity-robust standard errors. In this context, a fixed-effects model (for example, Allison Reference Allison 2009 ) examines what predicts over-time variation in political support within individuals, by estimating an individual intercept for each respondent to control for all between-individual variation.

To facilitate the interpretation of our main analyses, we first explored the over-time development of support for the legal system and democracy among assimilationists, moderates and multiculturalists. Figure 3 demonstrates that no clear changes in support co-occurred with the main events in Wilders' prosecution. The only visible shifts in support seem to have occurred during his cooperation with the government coalition between 2010 and 2012.

Figure 3. Panel study: over-time development of evaluations of the legal system and democracy.

For our main analyses, we conducted four regression models as reported in Table 4 . The first model analyzed assimilationists to examine our hypothesis (Hypothesis 1) that legal action against Wilders undermined their political support between 2008 and 2017. As expected, the prosecution history had a negative effect on evaluations of the legal system. However, no such effect was found for evaluations of democracy. The second model obtained the same results after excluding PVV voters from the analyses, which confirmed our hypothesis (Hypothesis 2) that the adverse effects of legal action were not limited to Wilders' electorate. This model excluded all respondents who had voted for the PVV in any of the three general elections in which it had contested (2006, 2010, or 2012). The third model surprisingly showed that multiculturalists also lowered their evaluations of the legal system, but not democracy, as Wilders’ prosecution progressed. This finding directly contradicts our hypothesis (Hypothesis 3) that Wilders' prosecution would have strengthened support among multiculturalists. Finally, a model on the entire sample revealed the expected interaction between attitude group and prosecution history for evaluations of the legal system. Although the prosecution revealed a negative effect on support for both assimilationists and multiculturalists, this effect was substantially stronger among assimilationists.

Table 4. Results of the panel study

Following our survey experiment and quasi-experiment, this panel study again yielded support for our hypotheses that Wilders' prosecution has negatively affected political support among Dutch assimilationists (Hypothesis 1), regardless of whether they voted for the PVV (Hypothesis 2). Our main analyses revealed that his prosecution had a negative effect on evaluations of the legal system among assimilationists, even though this pattern was not visible at a descriptive level. This means that assimilationists' support for the legal system was lower after the prosecution than was to be expected based on a general time trend and based on concurrent support for other institutions (even though assimilationists did not lower their support in absolute terms). These effects were furthermore limited to evaluations of the legal system, since no similar patterns were found for evaluations of democracy. Despite these mixed findings, the results of this panel study are compatible with the idea that assimilationists' evaluations of the legal system were negatively affected by Wilders' prosecution. While our experiment and quasi-experiment demonstrated a causal effect of hate speech prosecution, this panel study provided some indication that such effects may translate into a long-term erosion of support.

This study combined three research designs to examine whether the prosecution of politicians for hate speech undermines citizens' support for the legal system and democracy. The results of each study are summarized in Table 5 . First and foremost, all three studies revealed that the prosecution of Wilders indeed damaged political support among Dutch assimilationists. Our survey experiment provided clear evidence for a causal link between hate speech prosecution and political support among this group. Such fully controlled experiments are inevitably conducted in rather artificial conditions, but our quasi-experiment revealed that these findings translate to the real-world context of a conviction. In addition, our nine-year panel study revealed the same link between hate speech prosecution and evaluations of the legal system over a much longer time span. By combining internal and external validity, these three studies together provided firm evidence for the conclusion that hate speech prosecution of a politician can damage political support among those who support the idea behind his or her statements.

Table 5. Overview of results

This study furthermore revealed that this adverse impact is not limited to the electorate of the prosecuted politician. Even after excluding Wilders' voters from the analyses, the effects among assimilationists never changed meaningfully and they remained significant in all but one instance. This suggests that hate speech prosecution can diminish political support among a very substantial number of citizens. Whereas only a limited number of people may vote for the prosecuted politician (for example, the 13 per cent that voted for Wilders in 2017), the affected group may consist of many more citizens (for example, the one third that rejects immigration; Van der Brug and Van Spanje Reference Van der Brug and Van Spanje 2009 ). This study moreover revealed downward trends in political support among respondents with a moderate stance on multiculturalism. Although these trends never reached statistical significance, this hints that the group that lowered its support in response to Wilders' prosecution may have been even larger, rather than smaller, than the 33.3 per cent of the Dutch electorate that we classified as assimilationists.

The results however refuted our hypothesis that hate speech prosecution would enhance political support among those who oppose the idea behind the accused's statements. In all but one instance, multiculturalists' evaluations of the legal system and democracy remained highly constant after Wilders' prosecution. We see two possible explanations for this stability. A first explanation is that the legal action against Wilders may not have been important enough for multiculturalists to alter their evaluations of key institutions, even if they agreed with the endeavor. This may be related to the phenomenon known as negativity bias that citizens' attitudes are often less responsive to positive information than to negative information (Pratto and John Reference Pratto and John 1991 ). Consistently, research on the US Supreme Court reveals that increases in support for this institution among citizens who agree with a decision are typically weaker than the loss of support among those who disagree (Grosskopf and Mondak Reference Grosskopf and Mondak 1998 ). As a second explanation, multiculturalists' high base levels of political support may have caused a ceiling effect so that there was little opportunity for scores to increase further. Put differently, multiculturalists may have already evaluated the legal system and democracy so favorably that they had little reason or opportunity to increase their support even further when Wilders was prosecuted.

This study departed from four theoretical mechanisms that may link hate speech prosecution to political support: (1) simple (dis)agreement, (2) restriction of own political freedoms, (3) opinion leadership of the accused politician, and (4) politicization of the legal system. We used these four accounts to derive and test predictions for different groups of citizens as summarized in Table 1 . Although it was not an aim of this study to test which specific mechanism links legal action to political support, we may get some indication by comparing the predictions for each group in Table 1 to the results in Table 5 . This comparison clearly reveals that the second mechanism best predicted our results, which hints that Dutch assimilationists may have lowered their political support due to a perceived restriction of their democratic rights to free speech and representation. This interpretation would explain why assimilationists who did not vote for the PVV lowered their support about as much as Wilders' electorate. Moreover, this account would explain why multiculturalists did not alter their support in response to the prosecution as their political rights were neither restricted nor enhanced. It however remains an important task for future research to take a more in-depth look at this explanatory mechanism.

Although this study clearly revealed that hate speech prosecution can diminish political support, an important question remains how long this decline lasts. This study shed some light on this matter by combining designs with different time spans, but it did not provide a definitive answer. The survey experiment revealed a decreased political support immediately after exposure to news about hate speech prosecution and the quasi-experiment indicated that this drop persists for at least 48 hours after a conviction. What happens after this period is less clear. On the one hand, the quasi-experiment revealed that political support returned to its initial level after about 48 hours. On the other hand, the panel study revealed that the accumulated events of Wilders' prosecution were associated with lower levels of support for the legal system among assimilationists across the nine survey years. This hints that several years of repeated exposure to news about Wilders' prosecution may have accumulated into long-term discontent among Dutch assimilationists. However, this interpretation remains somewhat speculative as a panel study allows for many alternative causal explanations. It therefore remains a crucial challenge for future research to determine for how long legal action can alter political support. Without a doubt, this matter will be crucial to understanding the potential risks of hate speech prosecution.

An obvious limitation of this examination is that it was a case study on the prosecution of just one politician. Future research will have to determine if the same patterns occurred during other instances in which politicians were prosecuted for hate speech. However, we see little reason why citizens would react very differently in other instances that resemble the case of Wilders on relevant characteristics. Such characteristics may include for example that the accused's statements relate to immigration, that these statements are acceptable to a large number of citizens, and that the defendant is the leader of a major political party. Future studies could also examine if the same impact on political support that we observed for the prosecution of a politician can also be found in other legal cases with a political dimension (for example, party bans) or for other restrictions on free speech (for example, measures against online hate speech).

The prosecution of politicians for hate speech arises out of a tension between two core principles of liberal democracy: freedom of speech and the protection of minorities. This study examined how such trials affect support for the legal system and democracy. Taken together, the findings paint a grim picture. When an anti-immigration politician is prosecuted for hate speech, the political support of assimilationists may be undermined. This is particularly concerning because this group is already characterized by substantial political discontent. Causing more reason for concern, this impact may not be limited to the electorate of the accused politician, it may not be accompanied by an increased support among multiculturalists, and it may potentially persist over an extended period. Of course, this study alone cannot answer the question if hate speech prosecutions of politicians ought to happen, which depends on a wide variety of normative and empirical considerations. Nonetheless, this study demonstrated that the impact of such prosecutions on political support is one of the concerns that may inform this normative debate. Although several important questions remain to be answered by future research, this study revealed that hate speech prosecution can potentially damage the democratic system it is intended to defend.

Supplementary material

Online appendices are available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S000712342000068X .

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Tom van der Meer, Rachid Azrout and all participants of two internal seminars at the University of Amsterdam for their comments on an earlier version of this article.

All syntax files and the dataset for replication of the survey experiment are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/VZPMC2 . The data that was used for the quasi-experiment and the panel study can be obtained from CentERdata: https://www.lissdata.nl .

Financial support

This research was supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) with a VIDI grant awarded to Dr Joost van Spanje (Project Number: 452-14-002).

Ethical standards

The randomized experiment was approved by the IRB of the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences of the University of Amsterdam.

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Op-Ed: The case for restricting hate speech

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As a sociologist and legal scholar, I struggle to explain the boundaries of free speech to undergraduates. Despite the 1st Amendment—I tell my students—local, state, and federal laws limit all kinds of speech. We regulate advertising, obscenity, slander, libel, and inciting lawless action to name just a few. My students nod along until we get to racist and sexist speech. Some can’t grasp why, if we restrict so many forms of speech, we don’t also restrict hate speech. Why, for example, did the Supreme Court on Monday rule that the trademark office cannot reject “disparaging” applications—like a request from an Oregon band to trademark “the Slants” as in Asian “slant eyes.”

The typical answer is that judges must balance benefits and harms. If judges are asked to compare the harm of restricting speech – a cherished core constitutional value – to the harm of hurt feelings, judges will rightly choose to protect free expression. But perhaps it’s nonsense to characterize the nature of the harm as nothing more than an emotional scratch; that’s a reflection of the deep inequalities in our society, and one that demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of how hate speech affects its targets.

Legally, we tell members of traditionally disadvantaged groups that they must live with hate speech except under very limited circumstances. The KKK can parade down Main Street. People can’t falsely yell fire in a theater but can yell the N-word at a person of color. College women are told that a crowd of frat boys chanting “no means yes and yes means anal” is something they must tolerate in the name of (someone else’s) freedom.

Because we are ‘free’ to be hateful, members of traditionally marginalized groups suffer.

At the same time, our regime of free speech protects the powerful and popular. Many city governments, for instance, have banned panhandling at the behest of their business communities. The legal justification is that the targets of begging (commuters, tourists, and consumers) have important and legitimate purposes for being in public: to get to work or to go shopping. The law therefore protects them from aggressive requests for money.

Consider also the protections afforded to soldiers’ families in the case of Westboro Baptist anti-gay demonstrations. When the Supreme Court in 2011 upheld that church’s right to stage offensive protetsts at veterans’ funerals, Congress passed the Honoring America’s Veterans’ Act, which prohibits any protests 300 to 500 feet around such funerals. (The statute made no mention of protecting LGBTQ funeral attendees from hate speech, just soldiers’ families).

So soldiers’ families, shoppers and workers are protected from troubling speech. People of color, women walking down public streets or just living in their dorm on a college campus are not. The only way to justify this disparity is to argue that commuters asked for money on the way to work experience a tangible harm, while women catcalled and worse on the way to work do not — as if being the target of a request for change is worse than being racially disparaged by a stranger.

In fact, empirical data suggest that frequent verbal harassment can lead to various negative consequences. Racist hate speech has been linked to cigarette smoking, high blood pressure, anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and requires complex coping strategies. Exposure to racial slurs also diminishes academic performance. Women subjected to sexualized speech may develop a phenomenon of “self-objectification,” which is associated with eating disorders.

These negative physical and mental health outcomes — which embody the historical roots of race and gender oppression — mean that hate speech is not “just speech.” Hate speech is doing something. It results in tangible harms that are serious in and of themselves and that collectively amount to the harm of subordination. The harm of perpetuating discrimination. The harm of creating inequality.

Instead of characterizing racist and sexist hate speech as “just speech,” courts and legislatures need to account for this research and, perhaps, allow the restriction of hate speech as do all of the other economically advanced democracies in the world.

Many readers will find this line of thinking repellent. They will insist that protecting hate speech is consistent with and even central to our founding principles. They will argue that regulating hate speech would amount to a serious break from our tradition. They will trivialize the harms that social science research undeniably associates with being the target of hate speech, and call people seeking recognition of these affronts “snowflakes.”

But these free-speech absolutists must at least acknowledge two facts. First, the right to speak already is far from absolute. Second, they are asking disadvantaged members of our society to shoulder a heavy burden with serious consequences. Because we are “free” to be hateful, members of traditionally marginalized groups suffer.

Laura Beth Nielsen is director of the legal studies program and professor of sociology at Northwestern University and research professor at the American Bar Foundation. She is the author of “ License to Harass: Law, Hierarchy, and Offensive Public Speech .”

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The government is drafting anti-hate speech laws. Here are 4 things they should include

Lecturer, Graduate School of Business and Law, RMIT University

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In May, the federal government confirmed it’s working on new laws to prohibit hate speech, sometimes called vilification, based on sex, gender, sexuality, race or religion.

Many have welcomed the plan to introduce stronger laws as needed to tackle hate speech against Jewish, Palestinian and Muslim communities in the wake of growing antisemitism and Islamophobia in Australia.

Many people agree freedom of speech has its limits and the law has some role to play in prohibiting harmful speech. But what should these laws look like? Here are four things that should be addressed in the legislation.

1. Protection for specific attributes

Generally, hate speech can be seen as harmful speech or behaviour that attacks a person or a community simply because of who they are. People are targeted because of unchangeable characteristics such as their gender or sex, their sexuality, their race or religious background, or whether they have a disability or HIV. Research by the eSafety Commissioner has found hate speech based on these characteristics is growing, particularly online.

Hate speech doesn’t occur in isolation. It’s connected to societal and political treatment of marginalised communities. As hate speech increases, so does discrimination and violence against vulnerable groups.

For example, my research established women are often targeted by hate speech. One participant spoke about receiving messages describing sexually assaulting her in graphic detail. Gendered hate speech, like this example, is used to harass women and silence their voices in public spaces. Hate speech against women is also known to contribute to violence against women .

This is why new laws need to prohibit hate speech against many different attributes and not just focus on one community.

2. Protection for multiple risk factors

When someone uses hate speech to abuse a person or a group of people, often they are not only attacking them because of one characteristic, but because they cross over multiple characteristics. This is known as “ intersectionality ”, a concept first created by Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw. It argues people who have multiple attributes often experience discrimination and violence more often and more severely.

These experiences extend to hate speech. The eSafety Commissioner has found LGBTIQ+ or First Nations people experienced online hate speech at double the national average. LGBTIQ+ women are significantly more likely than heterosexual cisgender women to experience online gender and sexuality-based harassment. Women of colour are also more likely to be targeted by anonymous users online.

In my research, a participant spoke about her experiences of hate speech as a Muslim woman:

I happen to be brown and Muslim. So, a minority within a minority within a minority […] Sometimes it’s really difficult to extract the gendered side of it from the other dimensions of it, the racist, xenophobic side […] they are intertwined. Like when I get told, “Get back in the kitchen and make me a ham sandwich”.

This is why the law needs to prohibit hate speech that occurs because of “one or more” protected attributes.

3. Criminal and civil penalties

The federal government’s announcement indicates new laws prohibiting hate speech will include criminal – not civil – penalties. These new laws would only target deliberate acts that seek to incite violence or cause harm. New criminal laws will send a strong message to the community that hate speech is unacceptable.

However, the track record for prosecution of criminal hate speech laws is not strong. In Victoria it took almost two decades before anyone was prosecuted for serious vilification under the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act.

Changes to current sedition laws in the Commonwealth criminal code, which is a possibility suggested by some commentators , are also unlikely to lead to better results for communities targeted by hate speech. Rather, such changes are more likely to confuse the issue as these laws were originally introduced to target terrorism.

To make sure hate speech laws are effective, civil penalties are also needed. Civil laws exist at a federal level prohibiting race-based hate speech and these laws allow for victims to make complaints and engage in mediation. These laws are “harm-based”, meaning they capture conduct that causes harm to the victim, rather than criminal laws which are focused on incitement of violence. These laws also take into account the perspective of the target when considering whether material or behaviour amounts to hate speech.

New laws to prohibit hate speech need to include such harm-based civil laws, which will cover more conduct and put the power in the hands of the victims to make complaints.

4. Protection against backlash

As with any attempt to limit speech, even when it causes harm, there is a chance of community and political backlash against these laws and complaints made by victims. Such backlash can result in hate speech laws being enforced in troubling or harmful ways.

These laws may be weaponised against the very communities they are designed to protect. There have been cases where complaints of hate speech have been made specifically to undermine legal protections. In 2016, former Senator David Leyonhjelm made a complaint of racial vilification to the Human Rights Commission as part of his ongoing attack on part of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Protecting against backlash is difficult and requires the government to think carefully about how laws are designed . The purpose of new hate speech laws – to protect marginalised communities – must be clearly set out and understood by those tasked with enforcement.

It is also important the public is educated about why some limitation of speech is necessary when it causes harm to marginalised communities. Robust protection for legitimate speech, such as conduct that is reasonable and done for genuine academic, artistic, religious or scientific purpose or is a fair and accurate report of something in the public interest, must also be included in any new laws.

Creating effective and robust laws to prohibit hate speech at the federal level may be challenging but given what’s at stake, it’s worth getting it right.

• Freedom of speech
• Violence against women
• Antisemitism
• Islamophobia
• Hate speech
• Racial Discrimination Act
• Intersectionality
• Gender-based violence
• Hate speech laws

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Speech Thesis Statement

Speech thesis statement generator.

In the realm of effective communication, crafting a well-structured and compelling speech thesis statement is paramount. A speech thesis serves as the bedrock upon which impactful oratory is built, encapsulating the core message, purpose, and direction of the discourse. This exploration delves into diverse speech thesis statement examples, offering insights into the art of formulating them. Moreover, it provides valuable tips to guide you in crafting speeches that resonate powerfully with your audience and leave a lasting impact.

What is a Speech Thesis Statement? – Definition

A speech thesis statement is a succinct and focused declaration that encapsulates the central argument, purpose, or message of a speech. It outlines the primary idea the speaker intends to convey to the audience, serving as a guide for the content and structure of the speech.

What is an Example of Speech Thesis Statement?

“In this speech, I will argue that implementing stricter gun control measures is essential for reducing gun-related violence and ensuring public safety. By examining statistical data, addressing common misconceptions, and advocating for comprehensive background checks, we can take meaningful steps toward a safer society.”

In this example, the speech’s main argument, key points (statistics, misconceptions, background checks), and the intended impact (safer society) are all succinctly conveyed in the thesis statement.

100 Speech Thesis Statement Examples

• “Today, I will convince you that renewable energy sources are the key to a sustainable and cleaner future.”
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• “Today, I’ll discuss the power of effective time management in enhancing productivity and share practical techniques to prioritize tasks.”
• “My aim is to convince you that raising the minimum wage is vital to reducing income inequality and improving the overall quality of life.”
• “In this speech, I’ll explore the societal implications of automation and artificial intelligence and propose strategies for a smooth transition into the future.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll emphasize the significance of volunteering in community development and suggest ways to get involved in meaningful initiatives.”
• “I will argue that stricter regulations on fast food advertising are necessary to address the growing obesity epidemic among children and adolescents.”
• “Today, I’ll discuss the importance of financial literacy in personal empowerment and provide practical advice for making informed financial decisions.”
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• “In this speech, I’ll present the case for investing in renewable energy technologies to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change on future generations.”
• “I will argue that embracing failure as a stepping stone to success is crucial for personal growth and achieving one’s fullest potential.”
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• “My aim is to persuade you that stricter gun control measures are essential to reduce gun-related violence and ensure public safety.”
• “In this speech, I’ll discuss the significance of cultural preservation and the role of heritage sites in maintaining the identity and history of communities.”
• “I will argue that promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace leads to enhanced creativity, collaboration, and overall organizational success.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll explore the impact of social media on political engagement and discuss ways to critically evaluate online information sources.”
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• “In this speech, I’ll discuss the importance of supporting local businesses for economic growth, community vibrancy, and sustainable development.”
• “I will argue that fostering emotional intelligence in children equips them with crucial skills for interpersonal relationships, empathy, and conflict resolution.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll emphasize the need for comprehensive sex education that addresses consent, healthy relationships, and informed decision-making.”
• “Today, I’ll explore the benefits of embracing a minimalist lifestyle for mental clarity, reduced stress, and a more mindful and sustainable way of living.”
• “My aim is to persuade you that sustainable farming practices are essential for preserving ecosystems, ensuring food security, and mitigating climate change.”
• “In this speech, I’ll discuss the importance of civic engagement in democracy and provide strategies for individuals to get involved in their communities.”
• “I will argue that investing in early childhood education not only benefits individual children but also contributes to a stronger and more prosperous society.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll examine the impact of social media on body image dissatisfaction and offer strategies to promote body positivity and self-acceptance.”
• “Today, I’ll present the case for stricter regulations on e-cigarette marketing and sales to curb youth vaping and protect public health.”
• “My aim is to persuade you that exploring nature and spending time outdoors is essential for mental and physical well-being in our technology-driven world.”
• “In this speech, I’ll discuss the implications of automation on employment and suggest strategies for reskilling and preparing for the future of work.”
• “I will argue that embracing failure as a valuable learning experience fosters resilience, innovation, and personal growth, leading to ultimate success.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll emphasize the significance of media literacy in discerning credible information from fake news and ensuring informed decision-making.”
• “Today, I’ll explore the benefits of implementing universal healthcare, focusing on improved access to medical services and enhanced public health outcomes.”
• “My aim is to persuade you that embracing sustainable travel practices can minimize the environmental impact of tourism and promote cultural exchange.”
• “In this speech, I’ll present the case for criminal justice reform, highlighting the importance of alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent offenders.”
• “I will argue that instilling a growth mindset in students enhances their motivation, learning abilities, and willingness to face challenges.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll discuss the implications of artificial intelligence on the job market and propose strategies for adapting to automation-driven changes.”
• “Today, I’ll emphasize the importance of digital privacy awareness and provide practical tips to safeguard personal information online.”
• “My aim is to persuade you that investing in renewable energy sources is crucial not only for environmental sustainability but also for economic growth.”
• “In this speech, I’ll discuss the significance of cultural preservation and the role of heritage sites in maintaining a sense of identity and history.”
• “I will argue that promoting diversity and inclusion in the workplace leads to improved creativity, collaboration, and overall organizational performance.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll explore the impact of social media on political engagement and offer strategies to critically assess online information.”
• “Today, I’ll present the case for investing in public transportation to alleviate traffic congestion, reduce emissions, and enhance urban mobility.”
• “My aim is to persuade you that implementing mindfulness practices in schools can enhance students’ focus, emotional well-being, and academic achievement.”
• “In this speech, I’ll discuss the importance of supporting local businesses for economic growth, community vitality, and sustainable development.”
• “I will argue that fostering emotional intelligence in children equips them with essential skills for healthy relationships, empathy, and conflict resolution.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll emphasize the need for comprehensive sex education that includes consent, healthy relationships, and informed decision-making.”
• “My aim is to persuade you that sustainable farming practices are vital for preserving ecosystems, ensuring food security, and combating climate change.”
• “In this speech, I’ll discuss the importance of civic engagement in democracy and provide strategies for individuals to actively participate in their communities.”
• “I will argue that investing in early childhood education benefits not only individual children but also contributes to a stronger and more prosperous society.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll examine the impact of social media on body image dissatisfaction and suggest strategies to promote body positivity and self-acceptance.”
• “Today, I’ll present the case for stricter regulations on e-cigarette marketing and sales to combat youth vaping and protect public health.”
• “My aim is to persuade you that connecting with nature and spending time outdoors is essential for mental and physical well-being in our technology-driven world.”
• “In this speech, I’ll discuss the implications of automation on employment and suggest strategies for reskilling and adapting to the changing job landscape.”
• “I will argue that embracing failure as a valuable learning experience fosters resilience, innovation, and personal growth, ultimately leading to success.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll emphasize the significance of media literacy in discerning credible information from fake news and making informed decisions.”
• “Today, I’ll explore the benefits of implementing universal healthcare, focusing on improved access to medical services and better public health outcomes.”
• “My aim is to persuade you that adopting sustainable travel practices can minimize the environmental impact of tourism and promote cultural exchange.”
• “I will argue that instilling a growth mindset in students enhances their motivation, learning abilities, and readiness to tackle challenges.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll discuss the implications of artificial intelligence on the job market and propose strategies for adapting to the changing landscape.”
• “Today, I’ll emphasize the importance of digital privacy awareness and provide practical tips to safeguard personal information in the online world.”
• “My aim is to persuade you that investing in renewable energy sources is essential for both environmental sustainability and economic growth.”
• “In this speech, I’ll discuss the transformative power of art therapy in promoting mental well-being and share real-life success stories.”
• “I will argue that promoting gender equality not only empowers women but also contributes to economic growth and social progress.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll explore the impact of technology on interpersonal relationships and offer strategies to maintain meaningful connections.”
• “Today, I’ll present the case for sustainable fashion choices, emphasizing their positive effects on the environment and ethical manufacturing practices.”
• “My aim is to persuade you that investing in early childhood education is an investment in the future, leading to a more educated and equitable society.”
• “In this speech, I’ll discuss the significance of community service in building strong communities and share personal stories of volunteering experiences.”
• “I will argue that fostering emotional intelligence in children lays the foundation for a harmonious and empathetic society.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll emphasize the importance of teaching critical thinking skills in education and how they empower individuals to navigate a complex world.”
• “Today, I’ll explore the benefits of embracing a growth mindset in personal and professional development, leading to continuous learning and improvement.”
• “My aim is to persuade you that conscious consumerism can drive positive change in industries by supporting ethical practices and environmentally friendly products.”
• “In this speech, I’ll present the case for renewable energy as a solution to energy security, reduced carbon emissions, and a cleaner environment.”
• “I will argue that investing in mental health support systems is essential for the well-being of individuals and society as a whole.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll discuss the role of music therapy in enhancing mental health and promoting emotional expression and healing.”
• “Today, I’ll emphasize the importance of embracing cultural diversity to foster global understanding, harmony, and peaceful coexistence.”
• “My aim is to persuade you that incorporating mindfulness practices into daily routines can lead to reduced stress and increased overall well-being.”
• “In this speech, I’ll discuss the implications of genetic engineering and gene editing technologies on ethical considerations and future generations.”
• “I will argue that investing in renewable energy infrastructure not only mitigates climate change but also generates job opportunities and economic growth.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll explore the impact of social media on political polarization and offer strategies for promoting constructive online discourse.”
• “Today, I’ll present the case for embracing experiential learning in education, focusing on hands-on experiences that enhance comprehension and retention.”
• “My aim is to persuade you that practicing gratitude can lead to improved mental health, increased happiness, and a more positive outlook on life.”
• “In this speech, I’ll discuss the importance of teaching financial literacy in schools to equip students with essential money management skills.”
• “I will argue that promoting sustainable agriculture practices is essential to ensure food security, protect ecosystems, and combat climate change.”
• “Through this speech, I’ll emphasize the need for greater awareness of mental health issues in society and the importance of reducing stigma.”
• “Today, I’ll explore the benefits of incorporating arts and creativity into STEM education to foster innovation, critical thinking, and problem-solving.”
• “My aim is to persuade you that practicing mindfulness and meditation can lead to improved focus, reduced anxiety, and enhanced overall well-being.”

Speech Thesis Statement for Introduction

Introductions set the tone for impactful speeches. These thesis statements encapsulate the essence of opening remarks, laying the foundation for engaging discourse.

• “Welcome to an exploration of the power of storytelling and its ability to bridge cultures and foster understanding across diverse backgrounds.”
• “In this introductory speech, we delve into the realm of artificial intelligence, examining its potential to reshape industries and redefine human capabilities.”
• “Join us as we navigate the fascinating world of space exploration and the role of technological advancements in uncovering the mysteries of the universe.”
• “Through this speech, we embark on a journey through history, highlighting pivotal moments that have shaped civilizations and continue to inspire change.”
• “Today, we embark on a discussion about the significance of empathy in our interactions, exploring how it can enrich our connections and drive positive change.”
• “In this opening address, we dive into the realm of sustainable living, exploring practical steps to reduce our environmental footprint and promote eco-consciousness.”
• “Join us as we explore the evolution of communication, from ancient symbols to modern technology, and its impact on how we connect and convey ideas.”
• “Welcome to an exploration of the intricate relationship between art and emotion, uncovering how artistic expression transcends language barriers and unites humanity.”
• “In this opening statement, we examine the changing landscape of work and career, discussing strategies to navigate career transitions and embrace lifelong learning.”
• “Today, we delve into the concept of resilience and its role in facing adversity, offering insights into how resilience can empower us to overcome challenges.”

Speech Thesis Statement for Graduation

Graduation speeches mark significant milestones. These thesis statements encapsulate the achievements, aspirations, and challenges faced by graduates as they move forward.

• “As we stand on the threshold of a new chapter, let’s reflect on our journey, celebrate our achievements, and embrace the uncertainties that lie ahead.”
• “In this graduation address, we celebrate not only our academic accomplishments but also the personal growth, resilience, and friendships that have enriched our years here.”
• “As we step into the world beyond academia, let’s remember that learning is a lifelong journey, and the skills we’ve honed will propel us toward success.”
• “Today, we bid farewell to the familiar and embrace the unknown, armed with the knowledge that every challenge we face is an opportunity for growth.”
• “In this commencement speech, we acknowledge the collective accomplishments of our class and embrace the responsibility to contribute positively to the world.”
• “As we graduate, let’s carry with us the values instilled by our education, applying them not only in our careers but also in shaping a more just and compassionate society.”
• “Join me in celebrating the diversity of talents and perspectives that define our graduating class, and let’s channel our unique strengths to make a meaningful impact.”
• “Today, we honor the culmination of our academic pursuits and embrace the journey of continuous learning that will shape our personal and professional paths.”
• “In this graduation address, we acknowledge the support of our families, educators, and peers, recognizing that our successes are a testament to shared effort.”
• “As we don our caps and gowns, let’s remember that our education equips us not only with knowledge but also with the power to effect positive change in the world.”

Speech Thesis Statement For Acceptance

Acceptance speeches express gratitude and acknowledge achievements. These thesis statements capture the essence of acknowledgment, appreciation, and commitment.

• “I am humbled and honored by this recognition, and I pledge to use this platform to amplify the voices of the marginalized and work toward equity.”
• “As I accept this award, I express my gratitude to those who believed in my potential, and I commit to using my skills to contribute meaningfully to our community.”
• “Receiving this honor is a testament to the collaborative efforts that make achievements possible. I am dedicated to sharing this success with those who supported me.”
• “Accepting this award, I am reminded of the responsibility that accompanies it. I vow to continue striving for excellence and inspiring those around me.”
• “As I receive this recognition, I extend my deepest appreciation to my mentors, colleagues, and family, and I promise to pay it forward by mentoring the next generation.”
• “Accepting this accolade, I recognize that success is a team effort. I commit to fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation in all my endeavors.”
• “Receiving this honor, I am reminded of the privilege I have to effect change. I dedicate myself to leveraging this platform for the betterment of society.”
• “Accepting this award, I am grateful for the opportunities that have shaped my journey. I am committed to using my influence to uplift others and drive positive change.”
• “As I stand here, I am deeply moved by this recognition. I pledge to use this honor as a catalyst for making a meaningful impact on the lives of those I encounter.”
• “Accepting this distinction, I embrace the responsibility it brings. I promise to uphold the values that guided me to this moment and channel my efforts toward progress.”

Speech Thesis Statement in Extemporaneous

Extemporaneous speeches require quick thinking and concise communication. These thesis statements capture the essence of on-the-spot analysis and delivery.

• “On the topic of technological disruption, we explore its effects on job markets, emphasizing the importance of upskilling for the workforce’s evolving demands.”
• “In this impromptu speech, we dissect the complexities of global climate agreements, assessing their impact on environmental sustainability and international cooperation.”
• “Addressing the issue of cyberbullying, we examine its psychological consequences, potential legal remedies, and strategies to create safer online spaces.”
• “Discussing the merits of universal basic income, we weigh its potential to alleviate poverty, stimulate economic growth, and reshape the social safety net.”
• “As we delve into the debate on genetically modified organisms, we consider the benefits of increased crop yields, while also evaluating environmental and health concerns.”
• “On the topic of urbanization, we analyze its benefits in fostering economic growth and cultural exchange, while addressing challenges of infrastructure and inequality.”
• “Delving into the controversy surrounding artificial intelligence, we explore its transformative potential in various sectors, touching on ethical considerations and fears of job displacement.”
• “In this impromptu speech, we examine the impact of social media on political discourse, highlighting the role of echo chambers and the need for critical thinking.”
• “Addressing the issue of mental health stigma, we discuss the societal barriers that prevent seeking help, while advocating for open conversations and destigmatization.”
• “Discussing the concept of ethical consumerism, we weigh the impact of consumer choices on industries, environment, and labor rights, emphasizing the power of informed purchasing.”

Speech Thesis Statement in Argumentative Essay

Argumentative speeches present clear stances on contentious topics. These thesis statements assert positions while indicating the direction of the ensuing debate.

• “In this argumentative speech, we assert that mandatory voting fosters civic participation and strengthens democracy by ensuring diverse voices are heard.”
• “Advocating for stricter gun control, we contend that regulations on firearm access are vital for public safety, reducing gun violence, and preventing tragedies.”
• “Arguing for the benefits of school uniforms, we posit that uniforms promote a focused learning environment, reduce socioeconomic disparities, and enhance school spirit.”
• “In this persuasive speech, we assert that capital punishment should be abolished due to its potential for wrongful executions, lack of deterrence, and ethical concerns.”
• “Taking a stand against standardized testing, we argue that these assessments stifle creativity, promote rote learning, and fail to measure true intellectual potential.”
• “Defending the benefits of renewable energy, we assert that transitioning to sustainable sources will mitigate climate change, create jobs, and reduce dependence on fossil fuels.”
• “Addressing the merits of open borders, we contend that welcoming immigrants bolsters cultural diversity, contributes to economic growth, and upholds humanitarian values.”
• “In this persuasive speech, we argue against the use of animal testing, asserting that modern alternatives exist to ensure scientific progress without unnecessary suffering.”
• “Advocating for comprehensive sex education, we assert that teaching about contraception, consent, and healthy relationships equips students to make informed choices.”
• “Arguing for universal healthcare, we posit that accessible medical services are a basic human right, contributing to improved public health, reduced disparities, and economic stability.”

These examples offer a range of thesis statements for various types of speeches, catering to different contexts and styles of presentation. Tailor them to fit your specific needs and adjust the content as necessary to create impactful speeches.

Is There a Thesis Statement in a Speech?

Yes, a thesis statement is an essential component of a speech. Just like in written essays, a thesis statement in a speech serves as the central point or main idea that the speaker wants to convey to the audience. It provides focus, direction, and a preview of the content that will follow in the speech. A well-crafted thesis statement helps the audience understand the purpose of the speech and what they can expect to learn or gain from listening.

What is the Thesis Structure of a Speech?

The structure of a thesis statement in a speech is similar to that of a thesis statement in an essay, but it’s adapted for the spoken format. A speech thesis generally consists of:

• Topic: Clearly state the topic or subject of your speech. This provides the context for your thesis and gives the audience an idea of the subject matter.
• Main Idea or Argument: Present the main point you want to make or the central argument you’ll be discussing in your speech. This should be a concise and focused statement that encapsulates the essence of your message.
• Supporting Points: Optionally, you can include a brief overview of the main supporting points or arguments that you’ll elaborate on in the body of your speech. This gives the audience an outline of what to expect.

How Do You Write a Speech Thesis Statement? – Step by Step Guide

• Choose Your Topic: Select a topic that is relevant to your audience and aligns with the purpose of your speech.
• Identify Your Main Message: Determine the central message or argument you want to convey. What is the key takeaway you want your audience to remember?
• Craft a Concise Statement: Write a clear and concise sentence that captures the essence of your main message. Make sure it’s specific and avoids vague language.
• Consider Your Audience: Tailor your thesis statement to your audience’s level of understanding and interests. Use language that resonates with them.
• Review and Refine: Read your thesis statement aloud to ensure it sounds natural and engaging. Refine it as needed to make it compelling.

Tips for Writing a Speech Thesis Statement

• Be Specific: A strong thesis statement is specific and focused. Avoid vague or general statements.
• Avoid Jargon: Use language that your audience can easily understand, avoiding complex jargon or technical terms unless you explain them.
• One Main Idea: Stick to one main idea or argument. Multiple ideas can confuse your audience.
• Preview Supporting Points: If applicable, briefly preview the main supporting points you’ll cover in your speech.
• Reflect the Purpose: Your thesis should reflect the purpose of your speech—whether it’s to inform, persuade, entertain, or inspire.
• Keep It Concise: A thesis statement is not a paragraph. Keep it to a single sentence that encapsulates your message.
• Practice Pronunciation: If your thesis statement includes challenging words or terms, practice pronouncing them clearly.
• Test for Clarity: Ask someone to listen to your thesis statement and summarize what they understood from it. This can help you gauge its clarity.
• Revise as Necessary: Don’t be afraid to revise your thesis statement as you refine your speech. It’s important that it accurately represents your content.
• Capture Interest: Craft your thesis statement in a way that captures the audience’s interest and curiosity, encouraging them to listen attentively.

Remember, the thesis statement sets the tone for your entire speech. It should be well-crafted, engaging, and reflective of the main message you want to communicate to your audience.

Text prompt

• Instructive
• Professional

Create a Speech Thesis Statement on the importance of voting

Write a Speech Thesis Statement for a talk on renewable energy benefits

Genocide prevention adviser warns of global threat posed by hate speech

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The UN’s top genocide prevention official warned on Friday that hate speech remains a significant threat to global peace and security, often targeting society’s most vulnerable.

Alice Nderitu, Special Adviser of the Secretary on the Prevention of Genocide, emphasized that in addition to violence, hate speech also reinforces discrimination, stigma, dehumanization, and marginalization.

“Violence does not start when physical attacks are launched. Violence often starts with words. Words of hatred spread intolerance, divide societies, promote and endorse discrimination and incite violence ,” she told ambassadors at the Security Council .

Her briefing was presented in the context of resolution 2686 , adopted unanimously in June 2023, on tolerance and international peace and security.

In the resolution, the 15-member Council urged UN Member States to condemn and prevent hate speech, extremism, and violence, and encouraged the promotion of tolerance, intercultural dialogue, women's participation, social cohesion, quality education, and peace initiatives.

It also requested feedback on the spread of hate speech and timely reporting.

► Watch Ms. Nderitu’s briefing to the Security Council

Hate speech and disinformation

In ongoing crises or conflict situations, hate speech intensifies existing tensions and vulnerabilities.

Ms. Nderitu warned that combined with disinformation, hate speech entrenches divisions and poses direct threats to civilians , potentially leading to severe crimes such as genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

Combined with disinformation, hate speech entrenches divisions and poses direct threats to civilians

In addition, the proliferation of social media use has exacerbated the reach and impact of hate speech, she added.

Such divisive, misleading and hateful narratives enable hate speech to spread rapidly and reach distant audiences, thus increasing the potential for offline harm.

“The widespread use of social media … is allowing hate speech to be employed by anyone, reaching quicker distant audiences, and hence increasing the potential for offline harm. Minorities are particularly targeted. And so are women, especially those in public space,” Ms. Nderitu warned.

Delicate balance

At the same time, tackling hate speech should never be used to stifle freedom of expression, she stressed.

“ Blanket restrictions, bans and internet shutdowns are not the solution and may violate human rights, including freedom of expression . They may also silence the actors working to stand up against hate speech including civil society, human rights defenders, and journalists.”

UN Plan of Action

The Special Adviser stressed the UN’s commitment to raising awareness about the dangers of hate speech and addressing its impacts, drivers, and root causes.

The UN Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech provides a comprehensive framework for addressing the scourge in line with international human rights standards, she said, outlining its various tools, including dialogue, education, and promoting social cohesion and peace.

“The Strategy is being employed across the UN system, especially in the field, to support national actors, including Member States, who have the primary responsibility in addressing hate speech,” she added.

Dedicated action

Ms. Nderitu said since the Council resolution passed, several UN peacekeeping operations have monitored and prioritized counter measures, including against gender-based hate speech.

“ Tackling hate speech is complex and requires dedicated attention and support ,” she said, calling for continued political commitment and support from the Security Council as well as urging Member States to develop national action plans rooted in human rights and civilian protection.

• Hate Speech
• security council