Spiked: Hate-speech laws are no friend of minorities

Scotland’s Hate Crime Bill is well-intentioned. But history shows us that censorship is no way to fight hate. ‘Nothing is more apt to surprise a foreigner than the extreme liberty which we enjoy in this country of communicating whatever we please to the public…’ Thus wrote Scottish philosopher David Hume in 1742, extolling free speech as ‘the […]

Foreign Policy: Germany’s Online Crackdowns Inspire the World’s Dictators

Politicians and opinion-makers around the world  often assume that there is a trade-off between civil rights and national safety, although the association is theoretically ambiguous. Different theoretical arguments support both a positive and negative association between freedom of expression and terrorism: Some hold that restricting the freedom of expression will hinder the coordination of terrorist […]