Online hate speech regulation in the United States and Europe: Accommodating conflicting legal paradigms

This dissertation deals with online hate speech regulation in an international context. It tries to assess how the legal paradigms regarding hate speech in the United States and Europe have been affected by the rise of the Internet. Secondly, it also deals with the more general issue of how countries can regulate content on the Internet that is illegal within their borders, but legal in the country of origin. European countries have very strict hate speech laws, while the United States' First Amendment protects most forms of hate speech. As a result of this situation, European countries and institutions have attempted to regulate hate speech originating from the United States. This work analyses and evaluates these attempts based on a normative framework and formulates suggestions for approaching this issue.; The first chapter of this work provides an in depth discussion of hate speech law in the United States. The second chapter discusses how this legal framework has been translated to the online environment. Chapters three and four follow the same outline when discussing European hate speech law. European hate speech law and its underpinnings are discussed in chapter three. The focus is on explaining the ideals and beliefs underpinning European hate speech law, specifically in contrast with the American approach, rather than on giving an in depth account of European codes and jurisprudence. Chapter four discusses the various attempts of European courts and governments to apply their strict hate speech laws to Internet content.; In chapter five, a normative framework to evaluate such attempts is proposed. This normative framework is based on three basic principles: regulation should be effective, should respect the layered mature of the Internet and should be grounded in a representative concept of sovereignty. Chapter six applies this normative framework to evaluate some possible methods available to Europe to fight hate speech online. This section contains some suggestions, based on the normative framework from chapter five, for how European nations could best enforce their hate speech laws online.