Hate Speech Online: an (Intractable) Contemporary Challenge?

Internet users generate billions of pieces of online content weekly across a number of social media platforms, and that content includes hate speech. How to respond to hate speech online is a question that is troubling democracies all over the world and there is no easy solution in sight. The question of hate speech has long given rise to dispute in international human rights law, a dispute that arises because the protection of freedom of speech on the one hand and the prohibition of hate speech on the other are rooted in different normative principles that need to be accommodated. This enduring dispute makes it particularly difficult to design solutions to the problem of hate speech online. The article describes and assesses the current rules regulating hate speech online in four jurisdictions, the USA, the UK, Europe and Germany and suggests that it is not clear that any of the systems satisfactorily address the issue of hate speech online.