STATEMENTS CAPABLE OF INCITING HATRED OR ENMITY TOWARDS SOCIAL GROUPS: THE LINE BETWEEN EXTREMISM AND INCORRECTLY EXPRESSED OPINION

The author tries to define the boundaries between the natural human right to express one's opinion, to disseminate information, on the one hand, and an offense related to public incitement of hatred or enmity. In modern Russian realities, a person can become an offender without even suspecting it, because in his value system, expressing a negative opinion is not criminal, but from the point of view of the legal system it is. The aim of the study is to identify signs of so-called “verbal extremism”, as well as to compare on this basis the usual rules of dispute management or posting content on the Internet with prohibited torts. The study revealed that modern Russian legislation has included in the subjects of legal regulation those areas that have traditionally been evaluated from the point of view of morality, in particular, the expression of one's position on an issue, public approval of other people's actions or ideas. Unaccustomed to such prohibitions, citizens often become subjects of extremist offenses if they voluntarily or involuntarily expressed (disseminated) information that is only hypothetically capable of inciting hatred or hostility towards certain social groups. Moreover, the legislator did not define the criteria themselves for classifying people to any social groups allegedly affected by such statements; nor is their initiative required for legal prosecution. Public approval of the activities of revolutionaries of the past years, whose actions are seen as signs of extremism in the light of modern legislation, also seems uncertain from the point of view of the onset of legal responsibility. The article is intended for specialists in the field of jurisprudence, philology, ethics, and political science, whose interests include the study of modern language structures and the establishment of state prohibitions in this area.