More Perfect: The Hate Debate

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Science, Natural Sciences, History, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.6 • 43.5K Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2025

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Back in 2017 our colleagues at More Perfect gathered a room full of people together to debate a straight forward question: Can free speech go too far? Today, eight years have passed and plenty has changed, but this question feels alive as ever. And so we’re re-airing More Perfect’s The Hate Debate. Taped live at WNYC's Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, Elie Mystal, Ken White and Corynne McSherry duke it out over whether the first amendment needs an update in our digital world. Special thanks to Elaine Chen, Jennifer Keeney Sendrow, and the entire Greene Space team. Additional engineering for this episode by Chase Culpon, Louis Mitchell, and Alex Overington. EPISODE CITATIONS: Videos - If watching is more your speed, you can see the event, in its entirety, here: https://www.youtube.com/live/azcIcVDyVTM?si=ZqpQHQfvTKr2jS0z There’s other Radiolabs for that - Further recommended listening What Up Holmes and Post No Evil. Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, this is Latif. You might have seen last month we did a whole week of shark stories to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the movie Jaws. If you haven't checked it out, please do. We're really proud of it. It's called Swimming with Shadows, a Radio Lab week of sharks. It also kind of ate up our whole team for weeks. So this month, we are running a couple extra rewinds so that we have time
0:25.3	to finish a bunch of new episodes that are going to start coming out in August about topics
0:31.6	like menopause, artificial intelligence, bioluminescence, evolution of the human voice.
0:38.2	There's so many things we are really excited about.
0:41.4	All that will be coming at you starting in August.
0:45.2	In the meantime, today we have for you a debate over how free free speech should really be.
0:53.7	It comes from our sister's show More Perfect, who recorded it live back in 2017.
0:58.8	They called the episode The Hate Debate.
1:01.5	And we wanted to rerun it because these issues of what should and should not be sayable
1:08.3	continue to be as alive and electric as ever, whether we're talking about
1:14.2	college student protesters or non-citizens or social media platforms or government employees
1:20.7	or now there's even the question of whether AI chatbots have free speech rights.
1:25.2	This question of free speech and how much of it is too much,
1:29.5	it's not going away. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to my predecessor as host, Jad Abamrod,
1:38.5	and the debaters. We recorded this at WNYC's Green Space in New York in front of a live audience. The evening
1:45.8	begins with Jad
1:47.7	polling the audience whether or
1:50.0	not they think the government should do
1:52.1	more to limit free speech.
1:54.8	Here you go.
1:55.9	Wait, you're listening.
1:57.4	Okay.
	...

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