"Dangerous" speech

I just became aware of a research project called the Dangerous Speech Project, headed by Susan Benesch, Director of the Dangerous Speech Project.

"Dangerous speech" is related to the more familiar term "hate speech." Benesch describes the distinction as she understands it in What is Dangerous Speech? 12/18/2017 from the Project's YouTube channel:

Their website's FAQ describes the distinction this way:

Generally, ‘hate speech’ refers to a message that vilifies a person or group of people, because they belong to a group or share an identity of some kind. Legal definitions of hate speech refer to various kinds of groups, defined by religion, race, or ethnicity; others add or omit disability, sexual orientation, gender, or even philosophy of life (Norwegian Penal Code, section 135a). Under all of those definitions, then, “I hate you” is not hate speech. In practice, the boundaries of hate speech are drawn by prevailing social norms and individual and collective interpretation, so that each person has an idea about what hate speech is, but one person’s notion of hate speech rarely matches another’s. Focusing instead on the narrower category of Dangerous Speech makes it easier to achieve consensus, and to respond effectively.

Benesch wrote about an all-too-familiar purveyor in Crossing the Line into Dangerous Speech Medium 08/12/2016:

With his incoherent suggestion that ‘Second Amendment people’ stop Hillary Clinton, Trump may have intended to call for violence, or not. No one other than him knows, and it doesn’t matter — not nearly as much as whether some of his supporters understood him to be endorsing violence. That’s likely, since audience members at Trump rallies, listening to his ambiguous but provocative language, have shouted out explicit calls for violence such as ‘hang the bitch,’ ‘kill her,’ and ‘build a wall — kill them all.’ Generally if people rage violently in public, they are taken to be mentally ill. The fact that some Trump supporters have been doing this — meeting no rebukes from others in the crowd nor from the candidate — suggests that their norms of speech and belief are changing. They believe it’s acceptable to bellow, openly and in public, ‘kill!.’ ...

And one day after his Second Amendment remark, on Wednesday, Trump compounded it with his bizarre assertion that Hillary Clinton and President Obama are co-founders of the Islamic State or ISIS (also referring to the latter as ‘Barack Hussein Obama’.) After insisting, even in response to incredulous questions, that he really meant that Clinton and Obama co-founded ISIS, a few hours later Trump reversed himself and said the remark was ‘sarcastic.’ Sarcastic or not, whether he intends to incite violence or not, Trump was able to foresee the danger. Many Americans perceive ISIS as an existential threat, and to describe other Americans as ISIS founders is to identify them as enemies and as traitors, who can be seen as worse than enemies. [emphasis in original]

An interview with her appears in the current (47:2018; 17.11.2018) issue of Der Spiegel, "»Wenn man erst wartet, bis ein Land mit Benzin getrankt ist, ist es zu spat«", In it, she argues that a lot of hate speech is not dangerous speech in her definition. She gives the example that if she said a bunch of hateful things about the interviewer, it would be hate speech but would not likely lead to violence.

But, of course, hateful personal comments can and do lead to fights. So that doesn't necessarily provide a sharp distinction.

She also makes an important point about Internet speech, as in Facebook. It does provide a way for hate speech to spread. But it also means that people also get negative reactions sooner than they might have in earlier decades. She uses the example of vulgar locker-room talk about women that pre-Facebook might not have encountered any overt disapproval, is now more likely to encounter such objections in online forums. People who deliberately use such comments as online trolling like to get such responses. But people who aren't deliberately trolling can actually learn something constructive by encountering such criticisms that wouldn't have made it into the locker rooms of 25 years ago. And that helps to spread more constructive norms.