Censorship Bubbles Vs Hate Bubbles

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I argue that considerations of epistemic bubbles can give us reason to defend censorship of hate speech. Although censoring hate speech leads to epistemic bubbles (‘censorship bubbles’), they tend to be less epistemically problematic than epistemic bubbles generated by the circulation of hate speech (‘hate bubbles’). Because hate speech silences its target groups and creates the illusion that the dominant group identities are threatened, hate bubbles are likely more restrictive in structure than censorship bubbles and have a stronger tendency to turn into echo chambers where opposing views are actively discredited. Therefore, I argue that censorship bubbles might be a minor price we ought to pay to avoid hate bubbles. Additionally, my analysis shows that we cannot focus exclusively on the content or the structure of epistemic bubbles, since their content can partly determine their structure, as is in the case of hate bubbles.

KEYWORDS:

• Hate speech
• censorship
• epistemic bubbles

Acknowledgments

I thank Emanuel Viebahn, Caroline West and James Evans for reading and commenting on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Here Alcoff draws from Lorraine Code 1993.

2. Here Alcoff draws from Sandra Harding 1991.

3. Here Alcoff draws from Charles Mills 1997.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Wendy Xin

Wendy Xin is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include environmental ethics, emotions, feminist philosophy and social epistemology.