Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door
It seems like Germany&#x27;s approach here or something like it, maybe more streamlined and less heavy handed, is the only way forward in the long run. It&#x27;s too easy to spread inflammatory lies right now and it&#x27;s already spurring people into violence. How long before angry mobs are burning down Children&#x27;s hospitals and killing doctors under the false idea that four year olds are being given sex change operations for instance? It&#x27;s too much strain on society to live with this constant low level threat of violence from made up information.<p>There&#x27;s literally an infinite space of inflammatory but believable lies for bad actors to pick from and only a very small space of equally viral true information. The asymmetry is too much in favor of the bad so something has to tip the scales back toward sanity. It may seem trivial to police what someone&#x27;s racist uncle says on Facebook but it&#x27;s not one racist uncle, it&#x27;s 10 million racist uncles who own firearms (in the US at least). Eventually some of them will decide they have nothing to lose and go on the hunt.