Banning Hate Speech doesn’t work and makes racism worse

On Saturday, a synagogue in California was attacked by an apparently self-professed homicidal racist. The attacker has supposedly explicitly said that he was partly inspired by the xenophobic mass-murderers responsible for the mosque attacks in New Zealand last month. Since that attack, New Zealand has been debating strengthening their hate speech laws. Now, the debate over whether America should create hate-speech laws at all has been reinvigorated.

If the intent of censoring public speech is to prevent violence then hate-speech laws are at best an ineffective tool. At worst, they enable the conspiracy-minded and activate their violent tendencies, making bigotry worse. For many reasons, America should not criminalize hate speech, but chiefly because censorship does not accomplish what it’s supposed to: make fewer racists. Hate speech laws don’t work. At all.

There are many unintended negative consequences of hate speech laws that demonstrate what a bad idea they are. It should be no surprise that hate speech laws would be used to punish people that say mean things to police. Human Rights Watch has been warning for years that bans on hate speech in social media would lead to political censorship and repression; that well-intended hate-speech laws would be used in places like Russia to intimidate and imprison political…