TORONTO — An adjudicator of a human rights hearing into an Internet hate case expressed serious misgivings Monday about whether a provision used to attack hate speech can continue to exist in the Internet age.
The Human Rights Act provision permits anyone who objects to even a borderline case of alleged hate speech to expose the author to a costly, cumbersome human rights adjudication process, said Athansios Hadjis - who is presiding over a Canadian Human Rights Tribunal against Internet webmaster Marc Lemire.
Do you think, maybe that some intelligence is filtering to the top...?
Or maybe he's trying to save his job, who knows.
However, lawyers for the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the federal Department of Justice argued Monday that the ubiquity of Internet communication is the strongest argument for why society must protect minorities by policing cyberspace for expressions of hatred.
Yeah, because goodness knows that 20 people reading a blog is going to have devastating results on the social fabric.
I am far more worried about the chill on free speech than on the works of racists. The US has lots of racists and lots of free speech, and in spite of that, the vast majority of people manage to live side by side without any detrimental result.
H/T: Covenant Zone.
