The Study On Hate Speech And Its Regulation

Hate speech refers to a kind of speech guided by hatred intent, based on identity including ethnicity, race, nationality, gender and religious that tents to initiate intergroup discrimination and hatred. Hate speech is not only apt to cause psychological and physical harm, but negative impacts on the whole society, essence of which is contrary to the core values of freedom of speech.Dilemmas coming from theory and practice represents the difficulties of imposing legal restrictions on hate speech. On one hand, free speech is a fundamental right of citizens, core values of which is prone to be hurt by hate speech. On the other hand, what hate speech expresses and disseminates is a kind of hatred rather than positive energy from which the public benefit. The negative information marks a profanation towards individual dignity and a infringement upon reputation of citizens, and to some extent, a harm on public order and the overall interests, causing confusion and conflict between different groups.This paper proceeds from the elements that constitute hate speech, namely, expression of speech, directing object, intent expressed, impairment and the like so as to conduct a comprehensive analysis. Besides, by means of the investigation aimed at the reality of China and relevant reference on research conclusion of hate speech overseas, the author tries to establish type theory on hate speech conforming to national conditions and divides the hate speech into four types: racial hate speech, regional hate speech, religious hate speech, and gender hate speech. Through making a differentiation among the types and in virtue of relevant case as well as law theory of Europe and America, the thesis tries to make a contribution to build theoretical basis for the restriction of hate speech.The presence of restrictions on hate speech emerge in the United States and Germany, as two representative countries in the world. America advocates a tolerant attitude, who would rather endure the injury caused by hate speech than encroach on the value of it. Correspondingly, Germany stands on strict restrictions on hate speech to guarantee dignity of human personality at the expense of some aspects in free speech. Whereas China is a multiethnic country with an imbalance in regional development and the constitution focus on protecting dignity of human personality, German model affords us more valuable lessons with respect to restrictions on hate speech. Considering that most domestic scholars approve of essential restrictions on free speech and that different departments of law stipulate provisions of sanction for negative comments like defamation, incitement to ethnic hatred, bad network speech since the effect exerted by hate speech is far more abominable than the speech itself, we bear a conservative attitude towards restrictions on hate speech in terms of logicality and coherence of the law. Therefore, the author proposes three measures: first, the principle of legality; second, adopting more speech; third, for the government’s part, least restrictive principle, the organic combination of which makes for a good restrictions on hate speech.