The (limited) effects of target characteristics on public opinion of hate speech laws

Policymakers and social media platforms face increasing pressure to regulate hate speech. Regulating hate speech is controversial, in part because partisans supposedly disagree about who hate speech laws should protect. Utilizing two large conjoint experiments in Denmark and the United States, this article demonstrates that ordinary citizens support restricting extreme speech, regardless of who it targets. Support for hate speech regulation is shaped by the severity of the hate, while target characteristics have small but asymmetrical effects across parties. Moreover, the data show no evidence that partisans are less restrictive of hate targeting out-partisans. This suggests that existing research overestimates partisan differences and the effects of target characteristics on support for hate speech regulation because of abstract questions that conflate the severity of speech with whom it targets. These findings suggest that content moderation policies on social media platforms could emphasize severity as the key criterion to foster bipartisan support.