Jacob Mchangama

Bio: Jacob Mchangama is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Harm principle & Liberal democracy. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 2 publications receiving 8 citations.

The Sordid Origin of Hate-Speech Laws

Abstract: All western European countries have hate-speech laws. In 2008, the EU adopted a framework decision on "Combating Racism and Xenophobia" that obliged all member states to criminalize certain forms of hate speech. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Supreme Court of the United States has gradually increased and consolidated the protection of hate speech under the First Amendment. The European concept of freedom of expression thus prohibits certain content and viewpoints, whereas, with certain exceptions, the American concept is generally concerned solely with direct incitement likely to result in overt acts of lawlessness. Yet the origin of hate-speech laws has been largely forgotten. The divergence between the United States and European countries is of comparatively recent origin. In fact, the United States and the vast majority of European (and Western) states were originally opposed to the internationalization of hate-speech laws. European states and the U.S. shared the view that human rights should protect rather than limit freedom of expression. Rather, the introduction of hate-speech prohibitions into international law was championed in its heyday by the Soviet Union and allies. Their motive was readily apparent. The communist countries sought to exploit such laws to limit free speech. As Americans, Europeans and others contemplate the dividing line emerging on the extent to which free speech should be limited to criminalize the "defamation of religions" and "Islamophobia," launched by the member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (oic) since 1999, they should bear this forgotten history in mind. However well-intended--and its initial proponents were anything but well-intended--the Western acceptance of hate-speech laws severely limits the ability of liberal democracies to counter attempts to broaden the scope of hate-speech laws under international human rights law, with potentially devastating consequences for the preservation of free speech. Freedom of expression and hate speech The (nonbinding) universal Declaration of Human Rights m (UDHR) adopted in 1948 does not include an explicit duty to prohibit hate speech. Article 19 simply secures "freedom of opinion and expression." However, the drafting history shows that the issues of hate-speech regulation and restrictions on free speech were frequently discussed. During the negotiation of Article 19, the drafters faced the challenge of whether, and if so to what extent, freedom of expression should tolerate even intolerance. (1) The majority of states favored a robust protection of free speech such as that set out in a U.S. proposal (UN Doc. E/CN.4/21), which read "there shall be freedom of speech, of the press and of expression by any means whatsoever." However, the Soviet Union continuously proposed various amendments aimed at prohibiting expressions of intolerance. The first UK proposal on the wording of an article aimed at securing freedom of expression recognized, like the Soviet proposal, the possibility for states to limit this right, in the interests of national security, against incitement to violence and disorder and obscene publications, whereas the UK proposal expressed doubts about the possibility of including publications aimed at suppressing human rights. But the UK did recognize a danger that these words would afford a wider power for the limitation of freedom of publication than is necessary or desirable" they found "that it would be inconsistent for a Bill of Rights whose whole object is to establish human rights and fundamental freedoms to prevent any Government, if it wished to do so, from taking steps against publications whose whole object was to destroy the rights and freedoms which it is the purpose of the Bill to establish. At first glance this proposal may seem wholly reconcilable with the efforts of the Soviet Union. …

The Harm in Hate Speech Laws

Abstract: The Harm in Hate Speech Laws JEREMY WALDRON The Harm in Hate Speech HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 304 PAGES $2695 IN THE HARM IN Hate Speech, New York University Professor Jeremy Waldron sets out to defend hate speech laws (or "group defamation laws," as he prefers to label them) against critiques based on "knee-jerk" American First Amendment exceptionalism Yet Waldron's defense of hate speech laws is based on a purely abstract and ultimately flawed harm principle that is at odds with modern realities The harm principle proposed by Waldron thus leads to a utilitarian calculus which reduces the freedoms of conscience and expression to dubious empirical disputations based on evidence that is vast and contradictory Waldron's abstract thesis leads him to dismiss some very weighty arguments against hate speech laws without investigating real examples of how they impact individuals and political debates and lead to arbitrary outcomes difficult to reconcile with the rule of law The book's central premise is that hate speech undermines the equal dignity of individual members of vulnerable minorities For Waldron, "The ultimate concern is what happens to individuals when defamatory imputations are associated with shared characteristics such as race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality and national origin" As examples, Waldron invokes the history of systematic racism and segregation in the US and the lethal legacy of Nazism in Europe Manifestations of hate speech "intimate a return to the all-too-familiar circumstances of murderous injustice that people or their parents or grandparents experienced," which a "well ordered society" should not tolerate Accordingly, hate speech can be restricted as a means of "assurance" to the targeted groups Waldron explicitly rejects the idea that hate speech should constitute a "clear and present danger" before being prohibited by comparing hate speech with environmental harms such as automobile exhaust Since we know that exhaust can result in lead poisoning, it is justified to require each automobile owner to fit an emission control on the exhaust pipe, even if we cannot show a direct link between the individual car owner and those afflicted by pollution To 'Waldron the harm in hate speech outweighs the many objections to hate speech laws, such as the restrictions on autonomy and freedom of conscience, the interference with the political decision-making process, the often vague and imprecise language of hate speech codes, and the risk of political abuse The objective of seeking to reassure all members of society that they will not suffer persecution based on their race, religion, ethnicity, etc is one on which virtually all can agree No one can deny the very real and horrific consequences of Jim Crow and lynchings in America, or of Kristallnacht and the Holocaust in Europe Even the most principled defender of the First Amendment would surely allow for further restrictions on free speech if indeed it could be shown that hate speech creates a significant risk of a return to violent racial persecution But nothing suggests that America's increasingly isolated position on the protection of free speech has led to increasing racial tensions While there is likely no scientific method of accurately gauging the relationship between free speech and extremism, numerous surveys on race relations suggest that the putative dangers of tolerating extreme speech have little factual basis There is arguably no better way to gauge an ethnically diverse society's level of tolerance and commitment to equality than to look at interracial marriages--prohibited in sixteen states until the Supreme Court struck down Virginia's miscegenation law in 1967 The statistics on American attitudes toward interracial marriages reveal a startling development According to a 2011 Gallup survey, only four percent of Americans approved of interracial marriages in 1958 …

A Web of Hate: Tackling Hateful Speech in Online Social Spaces

Abstract: Online social platforms are beset with hateful speech - content that expresses hatred for a person or group of people. Such content can frighten, intimidate, or silence platform users, and some of it can inspire other users to commit violence. Despite widespread recognition of the problems posed by such content, reliable solutions even for detecting hateful speech are lacking. In the present work, we establish why keyword-based methods are insufficient for detection. We then propose an approach to detecting hateful speech that uses content produced by self-identifying hateful communities as training data. Our approach bypasses the expensive annotation process often required to train keyword systems and performs well across several established platforms, making substantial improvements over current state-of-the-art approaches.

Characterizing usage of explicit hate expressions in social media

Abstract: Social media platforms provide an inexpensive communication medium that allows anyone to publish content and anyone interested in the content can obtain it. However, this same potential of social media provide space for discourses that are harmful to certain groups of people. Examples of these discourses include bullying, offensive content, and hate speech. Out of these discourses hate speech is rapidly recognized as a serious problem by authorities of many countries. In this paper, we provide the first of a kind systematic large-scale measurement and analysis study of explicit expressions of hate speech in online social media. We aim to understand the abundance of hate speech in online social media, the most common hate expressions, the effect of anonymity on hate speech, the sensitivity of hate speech and the most hated groups across regions. In order to achieve our objectives, we gather traces from two social media systems: Whisper and Twitter. We then develop and validate a methodology to iden...

A Farewell to Fragmentation: Fragmentation within international human rights law

Abstract: With the emergence of more specialized regimes for the protection of human rights and the proliferation of treaty bodies, mandated to supervise compliance with these instruments, fragmentation has not only become an issue between human rights law and other fields of international law, but also within the body of human rights law. In this chapter I argue that conflicts of jurisprudence are more likely to occur than conflicts of jurisdiction. And while the general debate is mainly focused on the substantive dimension of fragmentation and on legal techniques for dealing with tensions or conflicts between legal rules or principles, fragmentation in international human rights law is mainly problematic from an institutional perspective: Problems are not caused by incompatible substantive provisions of human rights treaties but rather by colliding institutional preferences and structural biases of the different human rights treaty bodies.

The state, hate speech regulation and sustainable democracy in Africa: a study of Nigeria and Kenya

Abstract: The debates on hate speech regulation have divided scholars and practitioners. While the liberals largely argue that hate speech ban is anti-democratic and counter-productive for preservation of fu...

The problem with hate speech laws

Abstract: On August 19, 2014, the city court of Malmo, Sweden, convicted Swedish “shock-artist” Dan Park of “agitation against a national or ethnic group” under Sweden's anti-hate speech laws and sentenced h...