Inside State-Run ‘Bias-Response Hotlines,’ Where Fellow Citizens Can Report Your ‘Offensive Joke’

In January 2020, the top law enforcement agency in the state of Oregon launched a “Bias Response Hotline” for residents to report “offensive ‘jokes.’”

Staffed by “trauma-informed operators” and overseen by the Oregon Department of Justice, the hotline, which receives thousands of calls a year, doesn’t just solicit reports of hate crimes and hiring discrimination. It also asks for reports of “bias incidents”—cases of “non-criminal” expression that are motivated, “in part,” by prejudice or hate.

Oregonians are encouraged to report their fellow citizens for things like “creating racist images,” “mocking someone with a disability,” and “sharing offensive ‘jokes’ about someone’s identity.” One webpage affiliated with the hotline, which is available in 240 languages, even lists “imitating someone’s cultural norm” as something “we want to hear” about.

It is not entirely clear what the state does with these reports. While the hotline cannot “sanction a bias perpetrator,” according to its website, it does share “de-identified data” with the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, a body that develops “public safety” plans for the state, and connects “survivors” with “resources” like counseling and rent relief.

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A hotline that lets people report their neighbors for “offensive” flags—based solely on the feelings of those offended—sounds more at home on a college campus than in a state government bound by the First Amendment. But Oregon isn’t an outlier. It is one of a dozen Democratic jurisdictions, including eight states, that have created bias reporting systems for residents to report protected speech.

Connecticut’s system lets users flag “hate speech” they “heard about but did not see.” Vermont tells residents to report “biased but protected speech” directly to the police. Philadelphia has an online form that asks for the “exact address” of the “hate incident,” as well as the “name” and gender identity of the offender—information the city uses to contact those accused of bias and request that they attend sensitivity training.

“If it is not a crime, we sometimes contact the offending party and try to do training so that it doesn’t happen again,” Saterria Kersey, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, told the Washington Free Beacon. The offender is free to decline, she said.

The systems, which include hotlines and online portals, resemble the bias response teams commonplace on college campuses, which allow students to report each other, anonymously and without verification, for ideological faux pas. What sets the state-run systems apart are their ties to law enforcement.

Some of the hotlines share data with policymakers and the police on the grounds that “biased” speech, while not actionable in itself, can lead to hate crimes.

“People who engage in bias incidents may eventually escalate into criminal behavior,” reads a report from the Maryland attorney general’s office, which maintains its own bias reporting system. By collecting data on those incidents, states say they can predict where hate crimes will occur and develop strategies for combating them.

Such number-crunching need not violate anyone’s privacy, officials in Maryland and Connecticut told the Free Beacon. The systems, they said, are not used to spy on individuals but to track statewide trends.

But where bureaucrats see a form of data collection, others see a regime of social control. Civil liberties advocates argue that the mere possibility of ending up in a government database will encourage citizens to self-censor and that bias reporting systems push the bounds of what is permitted by the First Amendment. They also worry that even if the systems stay within those bounds, they are fomenting a culture antithetical to self-government—one in which snitching is normalized as a state-sanctioned practice.

“We associate snitching with some of the most oppressive regimes throughout history,” said Nadine Strossen, a past president of the American Civil Liberties Union. “The Stasi comes to mind.”

At a time when “wokeness” is ostensibly on the back foot—major companies have axed their DEI programs, top universities have stopped requiring diversity statements, and Donald Trump has been reelected president—the systems suggest that reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. They illustrate how technologies pioneered on campus can be repurposed by state governments. And they raise the possibility that those technologies will outlive the cultural moment that produced them, blanketing the United States, or at least the blue areas of it, in a permanent layer of surveillance.

“Exporting campus bias reporting systems to wider society is a disastrous idea,” said Aaron Terr, the director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). “When a state policy explicitly calls out ‘offensive jokes,’ it’s past time to worry.”

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The First Amendement protects slurs, swastikas, and even calls for genocide. It does not, however, bar governments from providing “support” to people “harmed by protected speech,” in the words of a 2022 report from the Vermont attorney general’s office. And amid the cultural aftershocks of George Floyd’s death, many states seized on that loophole to justify a new form of surveillance.

California, Illinois, and New York all set up systems to report not just hate crimes but “bias incidents,” defined as any expression of bias against a protected class that does not rise to the level of a crime. Washington state will launch its own system this year. Local-level systems exist in Westchester County, N.Y., Montgomery County, Md., Eden Prairie, Minn., and Missoula, Mont.

By the end of 2025, nearly 100 million Americans will live in a state where they can be reported for protected speech.

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The Maryland attorney general’s office said that police record incidents of hate speech so they can be included in the state’s annual hate crime reports. The Vermont attorney general’s office, which receives reports of hate speech from the state’s police, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

For Terr, FIRE’s director of public advocacy, the involvement of law enforcement raises serious questions about the systems’ constitutionality and their potential chilling effects.

“Some courts have ruled that campus bias response teams chill protected speech through implicit threats of investigation and punishment,” Terr told the Free Beacon. “The state-level reporting systems raise similar First Amendment issues, especially when law enforcement is involved.”

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Strossen, the former ACLU president, said that the chilling effect would be especially pronounced if, as in Philadelphia, state or city officials contact people about their allegedly offensive speech.

“There’s a very strong argument that would be considered a violation of the First Amendment,” she said. {snip}

A few states imply that the potential to chill speech is a feature, not a bug, of their reporting systems. Illinois’s hotline says that “reporting hate” is valuable because it “sends a message” to “offenders” that “hate will not be tolerated.” And Connecticut’s Hate Crimes Advisory Council, which oversees the state’s reporting system, has said that it aims to prevent bias incidents—not just hate crimes—”before they occur,” likening its efforts to an anti-terrorism campaign.

“One of our goals is to make Connecticut a state where people who express and spread hateful ideas do not have a receptive audience or climate,” the council wrote in a 2022 report. “One of our principal recommendations is a vigorous public interest campaign—similar to the anti-terrorist ‘If You See Something, Say Something’ model—making it clear that Connecticut is ‘No Place For Hate.’”

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