Banning Hate Speech: Are Our Debates about Liberal Values or about Democratic Values?

Hateful communications erode liberal-democratic values, yet is it the liberal values or the democratic values that they attack? Neither purely liberal nor purely democratic models of speech supply an adequate basis for regulation, therefore we must pinpoint salient features of each component to synthesise a specifically liberal-democratic model. Elements from both strands are essential, but only norms necessarily underpinning democratic citizenship can legitimately determine the penalties that may be imposed upon individual speakers solely on the grounds of some world view expressed or implied by any given communicative act. For the foreseeable future, the practical results of that thesis will run as follows: in the first instance, liberal democracies must retain a legitimate presumption of democratic controls over large electronic platforms, but these controls must not extend so far as to impose solely viewpoint-selective penalties upon individual speakers.