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Nishant Jain's avatar

This past couple of weeks, the question circling my mind is this - Did a tree really fall in the forest if you cannot convince every single white person about it?

Proving harm, explaining consequences, sometimes feels that way with people deliberately bent upon misunderstanding. Thank you for this post. 🙌

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Antonia Malchik's avatar

The Center for Humane Technology has examined at length the links between online hate speech and physical violence. Sometimes that violence happens to people who don’t even have internet access. “Just block them” is an absurd answer that shows how little they understand of human relations.

I live in Whitefish, Montana, where neo-Nazis terrorized people through online violence and phoned death threats in 2016/2017. The threatened physical invasion never happened, but the damage it caused was very real. It’s an outdated understanding of “harm” to claim that hate speech does not equate to physical damage. It does. Living in fear is a physiological state; it’s not abstract or separate from our physical selves.

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