No systematic evidence links hate speech to actual violence yet

Evidence

The tragic shooting rampage in April 1999, which resulted in the deaths of 12 students and the wounding of 23 others at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, is often cited to illustrate the link between hate speech and violence: The shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, referred to one of the victims, Isaiah Shoels, with ethnophaulisms as they killed him (Associated Press, 1999). Even though the titles of these papers and these anecdotes seem to be persuasive, the fact remains that they clearly fall short of establishing a compelling empirical link between antilocutions and violence. It should be noted that, in more general terms, the relationship between the way people think and talk about outgroups and the way they behave towards those outgroups is far from straightforward (see Mackie & Smith, 1998). To date, there has been no systematic study of the association between antilocutions and violence. — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice, 1272

The tragic shooting rampage in April 1999, which resulted in the deaths of 12 students and the wounding of 23 others at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, is often cited to illustrate the link between hate speech and violence: The shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, referred to one of the victims, Isaiah Shoels, with ethnophaulisms as they killed him (Associated Press, 1999). Even though the titles of these papers and these anecdotes seem to be persuasive, the fact remains that they clearly fall short of establishing a compelling empirical link between antilocutions and violence. It should be noted that, in more general terms, the relationship between the way people think and talk about outgroups and the way they behave towards those outgroups is far from straightforward (see Mackie & Smith, 1998). To date, there has been no systematic study of the association between antilocutions and violence. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1272

Categorization

• XREF: Contradicts the widely assumed speech-leads-to-violence narrative in online content-moderation debates and the ‘speech that kills’ framing.
• SHARE: Send to anyone debating hate speech regulation policy — the empirical gap between plausible conviction and demonstrated causal links is directly relevant.
• corroborated: 4 independent passages support this claim — John F. Dovidio, Peter Glick, Laurie A. Rudman, On the Nature of Prejudice: Fifty Years…, 1272; , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 1272