Susan Benesch

Susan Benesch (born 1964) is an American journalist and scholar of speech who is known for founding the Dangerous Speech Project. Benesch is a free speech advocate, recommending the use of counterspeech rather than censorship to delegitimize harmful speech.

Early life and education Benesch was born in 1964 in New York. She is of Czech ancestry on her father's side, and her family was described as "upper-middle class". Benesch described herself as descending from "immigrants, refugees and people who were killed because other people had been taught to hate them".

After graduating from Columbia University, she worked in journalism, including as staff writer for the Miami Herald in Haiti and St. Petersburg Times correspondent in Latin America. She is fluent in Spanish. Benesch earned a JD at Yale in 2001 and an LL.M. from Georgetown University Law Center in 2008. She is also an adjunct professor at American University.

She founded the Dangerous Speech Project in 2010 with a grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

Views In regulating "dangerous speech", Benesch seeks to minimize the harm to freedom of speech, and advocates the use of counterspeech over censorship. Counterspeech means responding to hate speech with empathy and challenging the hate narratives, rather than responding with more hate speech directed in the opposite direction. According to Benesch, counterspeech is more likely to result in deradicalization and peaceful resolution of conflict. Counterspeech, which seeks to delegitimize rather than stifle harmful speech, can often incorporate humor. Benesch is a critic of United States president Donald Trump, saying that he operates in a gray area of "dangerous speech" such as when he suggested that supporters should use the Second Amendment on Hillary Clinton. She describes Trump as "undermining the extent to which his supporters trust the essential institutions and practices of U.S. democracy", which she finds "deeply irresponsible".

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