Hate Speech and Academics

I wonder if there's any possibility that this approach to 'hate speech' won't end up painting right-wing speech as more or less essentially hateful, while left-wing speech has to go as far as actually calling for people's murder to qualify? In theory the academics tapped to do this could come up with principles that apply evenly across the board. In practice, social psychology is well-known (thanks especially to the work of Jonathan Haidt) for having a bias against Republicans and conservatives that is by far the most prominent on social issues.

In the first survey, they repeated a more detailed version of Haidt’s query: How did the participants self-identify politically? The question, however, was asked separately regarding social, economic, and foreign-policy issues. Haidt, they found, was both wrong and right. Yes, the vast majority of respondents reported themselves to be liberal in all three areas. But the percentages varied. Regarding economic affairs, approximately nineteen per cent called themselves moderates, and eighteen per cent, conservative. On foreign policy, just over twenty-one per cent were moderate, and ten per cent, conservative. It was only on the social-issues scale that the numbers reflected Haidt’s fears: more than ninety per cent reported themselves to be liberal, and just under four per cent, conservative....

Over all, close to nineteen per cent reported that they would have a bias against a conservative-leaning paper; twenty-four per cent, against a conservative-leaning grant application; fourteen per cent, against inviting a conservative to a symposium; and thirty-seven and a half per cent, against choosing a conservative as a future colleague. They persisted in saying that no discrimination existed, yet their theoretical behaviors belied that idealized reality.

I suppose Twitter could recruit heavily from the less-than-four-percent of conservative social psychologists. Could, rather than is likely to do so. The skeptic in me suspects this is largely an attempt to give an academic whitewash to what is really a wholehearted attempt to suppress conservative speech and ideas in political discourse.