The Post That Quora Deleted for Being… Hate Speech

Not for the life of me can I see anything in here that is deemed hate speech. Please give me your opinion.

Yes.

I immigrated to America and left a decade later to return to the EU.

• The degree of ignorance and misinformation puzzled me. People couldn’t tell me the most basic things — like what a zebra crossing was.
• The web technology was way behind the UK
• The food was expensive. My daughter recently joined me in Portugal from Houston. She couldn’t believe that she was paying 1/3 of what she paid in the States.
• The sense of entitlement.
• The complete lack of regard for the well-being of others — very little welfare, no help for the sick, no care about climate change. It was all me, me, me -the individual.
• The love affair with guns. How sick do you have to be to think that a gun is an important part of life?
• Americans are semiliterate. They all want to be writers, but they can’t write a grammatical sentence even when they try.
• Voting for Bush a second time totally floored me.
• Finding out about the Electoral college. My first comment was ‘But that’s not a democracy.”
• Finding out about the American Dream. My job dropped. Every country I’ve lived in, it’s been quite normal to have a job, a house, medical, savings, etc. Why was something so normal considered special in America?
• The obsession with ‘freedom.’ Again, every country I’ve lived in has taken it for granted. The day after tomorrow I move to Ireland from Portugal. It’s the 5th most democratic country in the world. America is a very long way behind that.
• I was stunned to find out that ‘abortion’ was a thing a few months after I arrived. This is something that we take for granted — even in Africa. Why are Americans still quibbling about something that is a personal choice? What has the government got to do with it?
• There used to be a gift shop on every corner when I arrived. The 2008 financial crash did away with that. My daughter and I walked around asking “What do they do with all this stuff?
• My 18 year old daughter was not allowed in a pub. I could go into a pub at 16 in South Africa and the UK. I never had any problems in Germany and France (provided it was wine or beer) . At 18, one could order hard liquor.
• People in America believed in gods, laws of attraction, and all sorts of superstitious rubbish. I had thought it was advanced — after all they put a man on the moon. I was flabbergasted.
• People kept asking me where I was from. Elsewhere in the world, my accent is instantly recognisable. I am South African / German. Americans travel so little that they cannot tell the difference between British, New Zealand, Australian, and South African accents.
• Americans kept claiming to be Irish or German or French or Dutch, etc. When queried, it would turn out that their forefathers were. They seemed to have this weird idea that if their forefathers came from a country, that conveyed that countries’ nationality onto them.
• The first time I heard (and saw) Americans (Republicans) bowing before a flag and reciting the plege of allegiance, I felt as if I had taken a time machine back to the days of idolatory in biblical times. It was bizarre.
• People said the most bizarre things to me. After about 6 months of being there, this guy told me I was pretending to have an accent. And men thought that if I wore cleavage, I was sexually available, and some of them asked me if I was a first date/third date girl. I had to ask what that meant. I was told I was being asked if I had sex on the first date or the third date. Holy shit. Oh, yes, and America won WWII on behalf of the British Empire.
• The way the police treated you. It reminded me of the Gestapo in Germany (well, films of them — my late father was a Jewish journalist in Nazi Germany). They came across as bullies — not as the friendly police I am accustomed to in other countries.

I guess that’s enough. I still have lots of friends in the States, and I miss San Diego Comic Con, swing dancing and Zydeco, Trader Joes, and some friends, but that’s about all.

36.9K views. View 2,612 upvotes. View 10 shares

Generally, however, hate speech is any form of expression through which speakers intend to vilify, humiliate, or incite hatred against a group or a class of persons on the basis of race, religion, skin color sexual identity, gender identity, ethnicity, disability, or national origin. Source

A distinctive feature of hate speech is that it is applied to a person or group because of who they are. For example, in public transport, if one person rudely responded to another because they were pushed, it is an insult. But if in the same situation a person uses discriminatory expressions that refer to that person’s identity or the group to which he or she belongs, or incites others to discriminate against this person or their group, it is hate speech. Source

The first, which is most often associated with hate speech, involves dehumanizing and demonizing the out-group and its members. Dehumanization involves belittling groups and equating them to culturally despised subhuman entities, such as pigs, rats, monkeys, or even germs or dirt/filth. Demonization, on the other hand, involves portraying a group as superhuman, like a monster, robot, or even fatal diseases like cancer that are a mortal threat to the in-group. When presented this way, the destruction of the adversary is not only acceptable, but even desirable and beneficial for the in-group’s survival. Source

Is this really hatred?

To me, hatred is something very different to what I expressed in the above Quora response. I have received hate mail, and it is nothing like this. Hate mail and hate speech spews derogatory names, threatens violence against others, and it is usually against minorities who cannot defend themselves.

For the record, there were hundreds of comments, some from Americans and some from immigrants and others outside America. About 90% agreed that I was spot on.

A vendetta against certain writers

I’m pretty sure that I don’t write anything that can be construed as hatred or prejudice, etc. I do, however, offend some people because they don’t like to read what I write. The above piece, for instance, will not be liked by those who want to believe that America is perfect.

There is, of course, no perfect country. There are just countries that are more liveable than others. One of the hallmarks of having a balanced view is being able to see the good and the bad in one’s own country without taking offence when others mention it.

I am of the opinion that there are conservative groups out there that target writers like me. They look for an excuse to report you, and then they report you en masse. The ‘moderators’ are often not that bright, or maybe they have just as much of an agenda as the people who are targeting writers like me. I don’t know. Or, maybe, I’m just so unaware that the above really is hate speech.

Since I have been given the warning by Medium in December, my figures are not what they used to be. I no longer see my work distributed on the platform, although my work is, apparently, sent to my followers in the Digest. So when people do this to writers, we pay a penalty — a financial one, because we are no longer promoted by the publication.

I’m going to delete my Quora account in a day or so. I just want to see whether Quora is going to acknowledge that the above post isn’t hate speech (in my opinion). I really don’t want to waste my time writing pieces that are deleted because some people cannot cope with something that doesn’t flatter them.

Your thoughts? I guess I want to know if you think the piece I wrote is hate speech, and if you do, why. I have provided definitions given by various organisations.

Over to you.

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