Chattanooga officials are clamping down on hate speech through a program called Hatebase, but they will not specify what is and is not hate speech.
The Chattanooga Times Free Press defines Hatebase as “an early warning system that helps identify situations of concern” to stop mass violence before it begins.
But how do city officials define hate speech?
The Tennessee Star posed that question to the office of Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke in an email Friday.
City spokesman Kerry Hayes responded with this:
“City staff do not define hate speech, as that is not the purpose of the Mayor’s Council Against Hate or the Hatebase tool,” Hayes said.
Hayes also said no city funds or taxpayer dollars pay for the city’s use of Hatebase.
But what happens to people government officials deem are guilty of hate speech?
“We believe that anyone who commits a hate crime should be appropriately charged and adjudicated,” Hayes said without specifying what, precisely, happens to people who commit hate speech — not hate crimes.
As The Times Free Press reported, the city has a Council Against Hate website where “residents can submit sightings or incidents of hate speech they experience or witness. The city pulls this data nightly from Hatebase and adds it to a dataset used to monitor hate speech in the community.”
“The City of Chattanooga is one of the first local governments that Hatebase has partnered with in the U.S.,” the paper reported.
“Hatebase originated from the Sentinel Project, an international nonprofit based out of Toronto that works to prevent genocide and mass atrocities through engagement and cooperation with victimized populations across the globe.”
According to DigitalJournal.com, “Hatebase has gathered a growing list of over 3,600 terms considered to be hate speech.”
Tennessee has at least one other similar program.
As The Star reported last month, Williamson County School System officials can, if they choose, monitor students’ online activity 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and punish students if they say something unsuitable.
School administrators are the ones who decide what is and isn’t unsuitable. As of this year, school system officials do this through a program called Gaggle.
School system officials set up the program to help with student safety issues. WCS spokesman Cory Mason said Gaggle monitors student accounts “for inappropriate or concerning words and images that have been placed on the WCS server.”
“Some of the things it looks for include references to drug and alcohol use, self-harm, threats, etc.; the same student behaviors school administrators have addressed for years,” Mason said in an email.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Chattanooga Municipal Building” by Andrew Jameson. CC BY-SA 3.0.
Hate speech is anything pro-white, pro-Christian, pro-life.
And isn’t Mayor Burke Jewish?
Let’s see, we are going to partner with a foreign “international” company to tell we the people what we can and can’t say. Makes a lot of sense for communists. And schools regulating what students can say 24/7 is insane.
This is repugnant.
a) The FBI (which we all know is incompetent and corrupt) monitors for actual signs of any sort of extremism, why is a local city doing this?
b) ‘hate’ speech is protected speech under the First Amendment
c) A few appointed officials dictating what is offensive? Scary times. This is not Nazi Germany
d) ANY attempt at suppressing people’s thoughts only makes things boil worse
Chattanooga…lol…high crime rate, low income. Let me guess you have democrats running the city? Year over year, crime rates increasing.
Also, a crime against a person is a crime; these ‘hate crime laws’ create classes of people who are no better than any other human being and are enforced in a discriminatory manner. I pray for lawsuits on end.
The Chattanooga TN crime rate for 2017 was 1065.72 per 100,000 population, a 4.17% increase from 2016. The Chattanooga TN crime rate for 2016 was 1023.05 per 100,000 population, a 3.41% increase from 2015. The Chattanooga TN crime rate for 2015 was 989.32 per 100,000 population, a 1.58% increase from 2014.
You need to vote these terrorists out of office as soon as possible. They are literally compiling a list for future government antagonism against political opponents. Nothing more, nothing less. This is something that simply can NOT be allowed to spread further in our Republic.