Historically, in the brick-and-mortar world, we've had courts to settle disputes. Online, there are terms of service agreements and invisible judges determining, usually at the behest of the loudest and largest mob, who is guilty of crossing the line between conscious protest and hate speech.
Facebook Islam Row Highlights Free Speech Issues
And at times, that line can be as thin as the line between art and pornography. Yet, here we are creating user-generated societies within corporately-provided bubbles without any clear delineation of what is tolerable. What is tolerable is determined by mobs and, less often, lawyers who will pull this out into the real world if necessary.
I'm certainly not one to judge the content of the Facebook group mentioned in this
Those sound more like strong opinions than hate speech. But I'm not a judge. And I don't necessarily want to be. I'm just not sure, in this case, if you substituted "Christianity," "Mormonism," or "Wicca," you could label it anything other than religious commentary. But because it involves Islam – or it involved Judaism – it would be slapped around into the hate speech zone, at least for a little while.
The point is one I've
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