Abstract

Once confined to the barriers of the physical world, hate speech has now spread across the Internet and has become increasingly visible on mainstream social media platforms. Fearing that this harmful rhetoric will incite violence and drive extremism, governments worldwide are passing laws and regulations and pressuring social media companies to implement policies to stop the spread of online hate speech. However, despite its widespread, hate speech does not have a single legal definition. In this article, I discuss the various definitions of hate speech, and its detection and juxtaposition with the freedom of expression citing cases for better understanding.

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