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As legislators and platforms tackle the challenge of suppressing hate speech online, questions about its definition remain unresolved. In this review we discuss three issues: What are the main challenges encountered when defining hate speech? What alternatives are there for the definition of hate speech? What is the relationship between the nature and scope of the definition and its operationability? By tracing both efforts to regulate and to define hate speech in legal, paralegal, and tech platform contexts, we arrive at four possible modes of definition: teleological, pure consequentialist, formal, and consensus or relativist definitions. We suggest the need for a definition where hate speech encompasses those speech acts that tend towards certain ethically proscribed ends, which are destructive in terms of their consequences, and express certain ideas that are transgressions of specific ethical norms. SAGE-Journals-Accessible-Video-Player 10.1177/01968599221124309.M1 sj-vid-1-jci-10.1177_01968599221124309 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing misuse of social media calls for an urgent move towards greater legal regulation to control the menace of fake news, hate speech and disinformation among democracies. Online interactions have undergone an evolution that threatens not only free speech, privacy, data protection, national security but democracy as a whole. The subject matter assumes significance, in a democracy like India, which has recently notified a new regulatory regime - Information Technology Rules, 2021, that has fundamentally changed the regulation of online content in India. This development warrants revisiting the prior regulatory regimes to analyse the new rules and guidelines and their impact on public sphere. The fact-finding review paper aims at mapping the evolution of laws governing online content in India. The study is based on reviewing existing laws, regulations, policies, research papers, media reports and articles. It also seeks to explore the linkages between the legislative regulatory gaps and regulatory framework covering rules and principles on instances of internet governance to find solutions for future developments. After critically examining new guidelines, the study found a case of overreaching provisions that dilute free speech and privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]