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From a deontological perspective, a culture where punishment for wrongthink is dished out by social media is better than one where wrongthink is outright illegal. That's why I like living in America, where there are no hate speech laws.
But a thought occurred to me: from a consequentialist perspective, it'd be better to let "cancelling" be done by the state, because then people can defend themselves and a court can decide if they're truly guilty of the offense.
I'm ignorant of international affairs, so I have a question for those of you who are better-educated and/or not American: in a culture where there are hate speech laws, like Britain, are Twitter which hunts less common?
I would say that Twitter witch hunts are less common in Finland than what seems to be the case in the US, which of course might simply reflect that in a smaller nation it's harder to create the sort of a critical mass that you really need for a proper pile-on with an effect.
People also frequently get away with saying stuff in Finnish that they wouldn't in English, even before the Musk takeover; for instance, just yesterday a somewhat notorious far-right author went on one of his semi-frequent drunken twitter rampages where he typically, among other things, posts crude sex stuff to left-wing Twitter women (one example from the current one was "I would like to make you straight by wearing sandpaper around my dick while fucking you in the ass" - no, it doesn't make much sense in Finnish either) and repeatedly posting the Finnish n-word to notable black politicians, seomthing he has done, as said, several times without reprecussions. Safe to say that if an American author of any sort did that in English their posting career would be cut short. (He also called me a "repulsive walking colon" during this bout, quite a mild example.)
The most recent free speech case here was, of course, the case of conservative politician MP Päivi Räsänen, once again acquitted after an onerous legal process.
What were the comments? This reporting is ludicrous. You might say the media gladly provides the censorship the state ultimately refrained from.
You mean Räsänen, right? The comments have been pored over multiple times by Finnish media in Finnish, such as in this article by Yle (ie. Finnish state media). The comments are also often quite extensive, need context, and one of the main issues was that the prosecutor had its own interpretations of them that were quite in variance with the literal statements.
There's an English-language liveblog of the latest trial here, they go over the statements to some degree here.
This is a perfect example of why having free speech as a core tenet is superior to all other approaches. Having some apparatchik come up with dishonest interpretations of statements to prosecute someone for wrongthink is just such an obvious failure mode of hate speech laws that I have trouble believing that this result is anything other than the intended outcome.
...the intended outcome is to prosecute and then acquit?
The intended outcome is to harass people over their views. I can't imagine looking at such a blatantly awful prosecution and thinking, "well, justice done in the end". I am, once again, glad to live in a country that's at least closer to free.
I'm not saying I'm agreeing with the prosecution or how this case has been handled, or that the agitation laws currently work fine considering they've allowed this procedure to go this far (though this might also serve as a precedent for further cases to not be processed this way, even in our common-law system), I was just saying that presumably the intended outcome for the prosecution wouldn't be just to harass but to actually convict. Räsänen case wasn't even my main point anyway, and I'm not necessary saying there's any particular connection between formal hate crime laws and social media culture.
Right, but I think his point was that even if they'd prefer to convict (maximum punishment), they'll cheerfully settle for causing years of pain (guaranteed minimum punishment). Even if you (the defendant) win, you lose, and people will think twice about that kind of wrongthink in the future. The intended outcome is to suppress this kind of speech.
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