Welcome to the Tech Policy Podcast. I'm Evan Swardstraber. On today's show, filtering hate speech on the internet. A lot of folks have called for this kind of thing in the wake of terrorist attacks in Portland and London and Manchester, arguing that the internet, and perhaps not even the internet, just everyday

life allows people to say things they shouldn't be saying, and that bad speech leads to bad

behavior. But when you disagree with the person in power, whether it's President Trump or

Prime Minister May, is it really safe to be allowing the government to decide what is hate speech and what is not hate speech and what should be allowed to be said in on the internet or in public?

So joining me to discuss this is Kathy Gellis, a Bay Area lawyer who focuses on copyright, free speech, and a bunch of other stuff.

And she was on the show previously in an episode called suing a website where we talked about intermediary liability,

the responsibilities that websites have when they're sued.

And we'll certainly be touching on that today as well.

So, Kathy, thanks for joining the show again.

Thanks for having me.

So you've come up with this thing called the Trump Test, which is kind of interesting.

So recently in Portland, Oregon, we had a white supremacist who was harassing a Muslim woman on public transit.

And Good Samaritans intervened and tragically they were killed.

And this has led to a lot of people saying, look, the environment we're in, the political environment is toxic.

And we've got a president who has legitimized this kind of

thing, treating Muslims poorly, and therefore we need to regulate that speech. But ironically,

the person who would have the power to regulate that speech is the person they're blaming

for the bad behavior happening. So how does that work? Well, to be, to be fair,

people were starting to object to hate speech prior to the ascendancy of President Trump. Of course.

They, the arguments were that basically it is a direct, there's a direct causal effect that if people

say bad things that Stokes racial animus and at some point people will act on it, there's a direct causal effect that if people say bad things that stokes racial animus and at some point

people will act on it there's reasons to question that but the the big point of why it we need to question

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