400285 Public Health : The Impact of Speech on Health

What is the difference between freedom of speech and hate speech?

Answer:

Introduction

United Nation aims at promoting dignity and equity to all human beings globally. Also, it encourages and supports mutual respect for fundamental freedoms and human rights to all without discrepancy as to religion, race, sex or language. Freedom of speech is recognized globally as the human right in international human rights laws (Djuric et al., 2015 pp.29-30). The paper see

The Difference Between Freedom of Speech and Hate Speech

According to Waseem, and Hovy, (2016) freedom of speech is the power or right of a community or an individual to articulate their ideas and opinion without fear of legal penalties, censorship or restraint. Nevertheless, an individual may have to face the consequences of saying some things, however much they have the right to say them. For instance, it is against the law for one to shout the ward fire in a hospital or crowded place because one may get injured. On the other hand, hate speech is communicating in a way that attacks a group or a person by traits such as gender identity, sexual orientation, race, or ethnic origin (Van Spanje, and De Vreese, 2015 pp. 115-130). The concept freedom of speech and hate speech has brought a heated debate across the globe as there is no clear description of what constitute free speech and what truly is hate speech.

Moreover, in countries such as the United States, its press and citizens can communicate freely and criticize the government without fear of convictions but in some countries such as Russia and Chine the people and the press fear for their lives when they speak the truth especially if it is against the government or a prominent leader. It is clear that freedom of speech has not taken it root in many countries. Using, abusive, insulting or threatening wards towards a group is hate speech while giving your idea, opinion or view on which one might not agree is considered freedom of speech. Furthermore, speech plays a critical role in an infirmary as it promotes wellbeing and health of patients (Tsesis, 2015 pp. 1015). For instance, one might speak about poor services in a hospital which will facilitates improvement of quality health. Hate speech is a significant encounter among the journalist in today’s society. The role of the press is to speak without fear when criticizing corrupt politicians (Venkatraman, Garg, and Kumar, 2015 pp. 1422-1425). Also, it is the role of the press to ensure that their content does not incite or promotes violence against a particular group.

Conclusion

Freedom of speech is the power or right of a community or an individual to articulate their ideas and opinion without fear of legal penalties, censorship or restraint. For example, giving your insight, opinion or view to which one might not agree. On the other hand, hate speech is communicating in a way that attacks a group or a person on traits such as gender identity, sexual orientation, race, or ethnic origin.

Bibliography

Djuric, N., Zhou, J., Morris, R., Grbovic, M., Radosavljevic, V. and Bhamidipati, N., 2015, May. Hate speech detection with comment embeddings. In Proceedings of the 24th international conference on world wide web (pp. 29-30). ACM.

Tsesis, A., 2015. Free Speech Constitutionalism. U. Ill. L. Rev., p.1015.

Van Spanje, J. and De Vreese, C., 2015. The good, the bad and the voter: The impact of hate speech prosecution of a politician on electoral support for his party. Party Politics, 21(1), pp.115-130.

Venkatraman, A., Garg, N. and Kumar, N., 2015. Greater freedom of speech on Web 2.0 correlates with dominance of views linking vaccines to autism. Vaccine, 33(12), pp.1422-1425.

Waseem, Z. and Hovy, D., 2016. Hateful symbols or hateful people? predictive features for hate speech detection on twitter. In Proceedings of the NAACL student research workshop (pp. 88-93).