After reading through Turkey's thread, I realized just how fractured the definition of "hate speech" really is between the Libertarian and Commutarian perspectives. So I went digging and found this article on the ABA website. I've chopped it down slightly for easier reading:

Debating Hate Speech

Hate speech is speech that offends, threatens, or insults groups, based on race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, or other traits. Should hate speech be discouraged? The answer is easy—of course! However, developing such policies runs the risk of limiting an individual’s ability to exercise free speech. When a conflict arises about which is more important—protecting community interests or safeguarding the rights of the individual—a balance must be found that protects the civil rights of all without limiting the civil liberties of the speaker.

In this country there is no right to speak fighting words—those words without social value, directed to a specific individual, that would provoke a reasonable member of the group about whom the words are spoken. For example, a person cannot utter a racial or ethnic epithet to another if those words are likely to cause the listener to react violently. However, under the First Amendment, individuals do have a right to speech that the listener disagrees with and to speech that is offensive and hateful.

Acts Speak Louder than Words
One way to deal effectively with hate speech is to create laws and policies that discourage bad behavior but do not punish bad beliefs. Another way of saying this is to create laws and policies that do not attempt to define hate speech as hate crimes, or “acts.” In two recent hate crime cases, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that acts, but not speech, may be regulated by law.

R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, 505 U.S. 377 (1992), involved the juvenile court proceeding of a white 14-year-old who burned a cross on the front lawn of the only black family in a St. Paul, Minn., neighborhood. Burning a cross is a very hateful thing to do: it is one of the symbols of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that has spread hatred and harm throughout this country. The burning cross clearly demonstrated to this family that at least this youth did not welcome them in the neighborhood. The family brought charges, and the boy was prosecuted under a Minnesota criminal law that made it illegal to place, on public or private property, a burning cross, swastika, or other symbol likely to arouse “anger, alarm, or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion, or gender.” The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Minnesota law was unconstitutional because it violated the youth’s First Amendment free speech rights.

Note that the Court did not rule that the act itself—burning a cross on the family’s front lawn—was legal. In fact, the youth could have been held criminally responsible for damaging property or for threatening or intimidating the family. Instead, the law was defective because it improperly focused on the motivation for—the thinking that results in—criminal behavior rather than on criminal behavior itself. It attempted to punish the youth for the content of his message, not for his actions.

In the second case, Wisconsin v. Mitchell, 508 U.S. 476 (1993), Mitchell and several black youth were outside a movie theater after viewing Mississippi Burning, in which several blacks are beaten. A white youth happened to walk by, and Mitchell yelled, “There goes a white boy; go get him!” Mitchell and the others attacked and beat the boy.

In criminal law, penalties are usually based on factors such as the seriousness of the act, whether it was accidental or intentional, and the harm it caused to the victim. It is also not unusual to have crimes treated more harshly depending upon who the victim is. For example, in most states battery (beating someone) is punished more harshly if the victim is a senior citizen, a young child, a police officer, or a teacher.

Under Wisconsin law, the penalty for battery is increased if the offender intentionally selects the victim “because of the race, religion, color, disability, sexual orientation and national origin or ancestry of that person.” The Supreme Court ruled in Wisconsin v. Mitchell that this increased penalty did not violate the free speech rights of the accused. The Court reasoned that the penalty was increased because the act itself was directed at a particular victim, not because of Mitchell’s thoughts.

Success on Campus
Here’s how one community recently approached an incidence of hate speech by calling attention to it rather than attempting to suppress it—by encouraging speech that pointed out how out of place the hate speech was in a community that values the dignity of all.

Matt Hale, a notorious racist, was recently asked to speak at the University of Illinois at Springfield. Hale is the leader of the World of the Creator, a white supremacist group. His presence on campus was controversial. Several students, faculty, and community members thought that the university should cancel his appearance. Instead, he was allowed to speak. Hale’s audience was not impressed. He came across as having a confusing set of beliefs that were out of place in a democratic, multicultural society. Several faculty and students spoke out against his message of hatred.

By allowing Hale to speak, the university recognized free speech rights but also provided a means for community members to respond. Communitarian and libertarian goals were both met.

How do the members of this community define hate speech? Under what circumstances is it right to limit speech?

Under no circumstances is it right to limit speech. It should be the most sacred liberty and natural right of any society and whether that speech hurt the feelings or offend anyone is irrelevant.

FIRE!

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I always assumed "hate speech" consisted of either threats, or treating fellow human beings as subhuman.

Then again, I consider people who say shit like "Who cares, they're just stupid animals" to be hateful bigots, too.

Maybe it's an archaic concept, incompatible with post-modern ideals.

Pretty simple really. Hate speech is speech backed with intention to inflict hatred, condemnation and vilification of arbitrary traits such as race, gender, sexual orientation etc etc.

Should hate speech be ridiculed, discouraged and mocked in open discourse? Absolutely, and I will take that sentiment to the grave with me.

It should not however, be restricted, censored or banned because it may end up harming the delicate sensibilities of a select few. When you clamp down on speech regardless of how insensitive it may be, you end up on a dangerous slippery slope pattern of what can and cannot be said in the dialogue of society.

Hate speech can be pretty fucking subjective not to mention. What 'hate speech' is to Muslims for example, is pretty much just criticism of an ideology to us. Hurt feelings should never be a justification to curtail speech.

Yeah, whatever hate speech is, I don't think it should be censored. Just censured.

"What isn't hate speech?" might be an even better question.

I hate black culture.
I hate Japanese culture.

That's not hate speech--I don't hate black people, and I don't hate Japanese people--I just hate how a lot of them choose to live their lives. I hate their customs, I hate their traditions, I hate their rituals, and I hate their culture. There are some aspects of culture that are demonstrably bad, or detrimental to society--and others that are "better," if not outright "good".

However, if you try saying either of those two things I just said, you WILL be branded racist.

Hate speech policy can be altered by those with power and it's really fucking easy to go from defining hate speech as "Kill all immigrants", to "I don't like immigrants", to "immigration is bad", to "I think we should question immigration".

Would you agree that intent plays a large role in determining hate speech? To use your example, "kill all immigrants" is clearly provoking hate towards a group of people, while "immigration is bad" has no subject to really discriminate against; it's a broad statement that could be expanded upon in a number of ways, most of which do not invoke hate speech.

Anthing that constitutes as a threat on someones life or property.