Eric Heinze (Queen Mary University of London, School of Law) has posted The Multifaceted Regulation of Online Hate Speech (Forthcoming in Eric Heinze, Natalie Alkiviadou, Tom Herrenberg, Sejal Parmar and Ioanna Tourkochoriti (eds), The Oxford Handbook on Hate Speech (Oxford University Press, 2026) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Arguments for and against hate speech bans have raged for many years. In the early days of cyberspace, it might at first have seemed that protagonists on both sides could adopt what is described here as parallel models of regulation, applying the same regulatory policies that they had already adopted for traditional, offline speech contexts. Accordingly, those who had long endorsed bans for offline speech would advocate bans for online speech, and those who had long opposed bans offline would oppose them online. Yet the internet has forced both sides to rethink their assumptions. Opponents of bans can no longer cast doubt on causal links between abstract ideas and real-world harms; and advocates of bans can no longer claim that bans represent only occasional and peripheral incursions into free speech. For the foreseeable future, given that these two realisations push in opposite directions, our regulatory schemes will simultaneously over-and under-regulate online speech. The best that can be achieved will be to reduce the greatest risks at both ends through what is described here as a multifaceted regulatory model. Most importantly, democratic controls can legitimately be imposed on electronic communications without penalties having to be imposed on individual speakers.