When “Hate Speech” Becomes a Shield for the Powerful
In a free society the public is supposed to be able to mock, criticize, and even insult the people who hold power over them. That right is not a courtesy extended by the state. It is a structural necessity: those who make the laws, spend the taxes, and deploy the police must remain exposed to the full force of public judgment. When governments invent new categories of forbidden speech and then aim them squarely at criticism of politicians, the relationship is inverted. The rulers become the protected class, and the citizens become the ones who must watch their words.
Georgia offers the latest illustration. Last month the Ministry of Internal Affairs created a Division for Combating Hate Speech. Its mandate is sweeping: identify "any type of public communication that contains hate speech, incitement of enmity, violation of dignity, and other similar acts," draft reports, and send them for prosecution, even when no private citizen has filed a complaint. The division did not have to invent its targets from scratch. The ruling Georgian Dream party had already revised the criminal code to punish insults directed at public officials with fines and short prison terms. Within a single month the new unit forwarded 150 cases to the courts.
One of those cases involved journalist Vakho Sanaia. In June he posted a sarcastic Facebook comment encouraging others not to call Parliamentary Speaker Shalva Papuashvili and MP Lado Bozhadze "d*cks." The Tbilisi City Court fined him the equivalent of roughly $2,300. Sanaia responded with two more posts that essentially doubled down on the joke. The Division for Combating Hate Speech opened a fresh investigation. Last week a court sentenced him to fourteen days in prison on top of the original fine. Officials described the new posts as evidence of "disregard for the court's decision" and a willingness to continue "unlawful conduct."
The sequence is instructive. A law framed as protection against "hate speech" and "violation of dignity" was applied to coarse political mockery. No violence was threatened. No private individual was targeted. The only dignity on the line belonged to elected officials who found the language distasteful. The machinery created to police hatred was simply redirected toward shielding the powerful from ridicule.
Georgia is not an outlier. Across Europe, similar patterns appear with depressing regularity. Germany maintains heightened criminal protections for politicians against insults; police have raided homes over online jokes that called a minister a "penis." In France a woman was prosecuted for referring to President Macron as "filth" on Facebook. In Italy a journalist was fined for tweets mocking Prime Minister Meloni's height. In each instance the rationale is the same: certain speech is said to damage dignity, social cohesion, or democratic discourse. In practice the protected party is almost always the officeholder.
The deeper problem is structural. Once the state is granted authority to define and punish "hate" or "insult" in the political realm, the definition expands to cover whatever threatens the comfort of those in power. The language of harm and dignity supplies the moral cover; the enforcement apparatus supplies the muscle. What begins as a campaign against genuine incitement ends as a tool for managing criticism. The more expansive the category, the easier it becomes for authorities to treat ordinary political hostility as a public-order problem rather than a democratic feature.
Free societies have historically understood the opposite principle. The right to insult the powerful is not a bug in the system; it is one of the pressure valves that keep the system from exploding. When that valve is closed by criminal law, the pressure does not disappear. It simply seeks other outlets, often less transparent and more corrosive. Meanwhile the officials who benefit from the protection grow less accountable and more thin-skinned. The public, watching journalists and ordinary citizens punished for crude jokes, learns the safer course is silence or carefully euphemistic praise.
Georgia's new hate-speech division and the imprisonment of a journalist for calling politicians crude names are not isolated excesses. They are the logical endpoint of treating political speech as a regulated commodity rather than a fundamental right. When the state claims the power to decide which criticisms of its own officials are too hateful to be allowed, the real target is not hatred. It is accountability.
