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Anna Krylov's avatar

Very nice to see the data supporting what many of us observed empirically -- that the definitions off "harm" and "hate speech" have stretched to include just about anything.

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Rona Dinur's avatar

Thanks for the excellent post!

I'll add that the broadening of the concept of harm is not entirely an organic/spontaneous development. It's a result of a concentrated, prolonged effort by various activists-academics, who for decades have indirectly and sometimes underhandedly advocated for its expansion in various academic writings (there are very visible trends in the literature I’m familiar with, in law and philosophy).

This broadening appears to have been directly motivated by the U.S. first amendment doctrine, which maintains that speech is protected unless it causes imminent harm (the incitement exception). So instead of arguing directly for a change in constitutional protections or the law more broadly, these scholars-activists have tried to expand the notion of harm. This has gone along with similar attempts to expand the notion of trauma and other mental health-related concepts, as legal doctrines in many countries have traditionally acknowledged only physical harm and not any form of emotional distress as “harm” for legal purposes, unless it amounts to a medically recognized mental condition; and with attempts to claim that various things are actions and not speech (e.g., that insulting minorities/women is not speech but an act of humiliation/subordination)—because actions are not protected by the first amendment.

All of these attempts have for decades used various technically sophisticated theories and argumentative moves to support those conceptual expansions/conflations, making them appear like good-faith academic inquiry, when in reality much of this is driven by the underlying lawfare. All the while, the application of the concept of harm, for instance, has been very biased and selective – e.g., it’s been used to support only certain efforts that conflict with freedom of expression, while completely ignoring other causes that may be equally supported by the same arguments but are not favored by the relevant scholars/activists, and generally, while ignoring the harms stemming from suppression of free speech.

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