HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship

Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, makes the civil libertarian case against hate speech regulation with unusual rigour and specificity. The book is not a defence of hateful speech but an argument that legal suppression is both ineffective at reducing the harms it targets and dangerous as a precedent — that the discretion it grants to enforcement authorities has historically been exercised against the communities it was meant to protect.

The argument is directly relevant to counter-disinformation policy: many of the regulatory instruments being developed to address coordinated information manipulation depend on definitional categories (harmful content, foreign interference, coordinated inauthentic behaviour) that carry similar risks of scope creep and enforcement bias. Strossen's analysis of how hate speech law has functioned in practice provides an evidence base for thinking carefully about analogous risks in the information integrity space.