Incitement ( incitement ) is roughly the same as abetting a crime, requiring clear instructions for criminal behavior or plans. For example, if A tells B: “Go kill C,” and provides a murder plan, then A may be found guilty of incitement.
However, if A only frequently tells B: “C shouldn’t be in this world,” “It would be better for everyone if C died,” “Our hatred for C cannot be resolved,” etc. After 10 years or even longer of being immersed in hate speech, B finally kills C one day. Then, an unbelievable thing happens: A does not meet the standards for conviction of incitement.
The reason why the scope of incitement is so small is that if Alice says she dislikes Bob, and then Bob is attacked, it would be outrageous for Alice to be convicted of incitement. But completely ignoring it is also impossible. Currently, rules such as anti-hate speech and child protection can be used to alleviate the problem.
Some regions prohibit hate speech against countries, races, ethnicities, religions, classes, and genders, but the United States is quite special because it needs to meet the rules of “clear and present danger” and “actual malice” etc. before being convicted solely based on speech. (But the current United States may promote rules that restrict the First Amendment)
Then there is the matter of child protection. If children are instilled with hate speech, they may be deprived of custody due to psychological abuse. It’s just that people who are already adults and living in the United States may feel very powerless when facing this extremely polarized world because simply avoiding being affected by the second-hand hatred of others is already exhausting.
The Manson Family is a well-known cult organization in the United States. Its leader, Manson, used various means to control his followers in an era of unease and confusion. One of the means was to claim that a race war was coming. This was both a doomsday judgment. Manson controlled members by fabricating enemies and disasters and claiming to be the savior, ultimately leading the Manson Family to kill more than 9 people.
Fortunately, the Manson Family was small in scale. If large-scale content disseminators such as media, social media, and KOLs release inducing speech and hate speech, the impact may be significant. However, out of freedom of speech, deleting it at will may not be the best solution, while transparent discussion and annotations may alleviate the problem. For details, please refer to the previous blog post <The Balance of Free Expression>.