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Comment by donatj | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, those are awful horrible people who sent him the gifs, on the other hand I feel like sending someone a gif is protected free speech? I'm very torn.

Also I don't know what app he is using but they don't autoplay for me… So it seems… avoidable.

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Just like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater (where there is no fire), sending someone a gif in the hopes that it causes a seizure is not protected speech. It's assult.

Slippery slope. If I tell someone on the internet to kill themselves and it turns out they're actually suicidally depressed, should I be charged with a crime?

What if I post something that's just really offensive? I feel like we've entered a time where people would gladly see the First Amendment trodden over if it means seeing "justice" doled out to nasty people.

This isn't even close to a gray area! The analogy would be finding out that your target is in a given theater, where you then yell "fire!". This was targeted and pre-meditated; the result and the intent were one and the same.

Your argument rests on something very different.

Eichenwald didn't "turn out" to have epilepsy – he had written about it before. This was someone intentionally attempting to harm someone by triggering a seizure.

And your hypothetical situation isn't hypothetical – people who cyberbully others into committing suicide are certainly charged for their crimes.

Yes, in fact, there is precedent for this: http://abcnews.go.com/US/massachusetts-teen-accused-urging-b...

I agree that the first amendment doesn't apply in this case, but the "fire in a crowded theater" analogy is only used by people who aren't aware of its origin. The phrase was coined by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in WWI, in a SCOTUS decision to imprison socialists for leafleting against the draft.[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

The origin may be questionable, but is yelling "fire" in a crowded theater protected speech?

It's not illegal for me to serve people food with peanuts. It is illegal for me to serve peanuts to someone that is allergic with the intent to cause them harm. There is no "slippery slope" that serving peanuts to anyone will become illegal.

Well... no. If you could say a magic word that induced a seizure, you would be prohibited from saying that too.

I think there are a number of words that "trigger" certain people, and it's well within my legal rights to say them.

"triggering" someone is not the same thing as triggering a seizure.

I think you probably understood what I actually meant, and wrote, so I won't be entertaining ^That.

I understood completely well, I simply legitimately don't think they're that different of things. I think you're underplaying triggering.

They are both mental triggers. You literally "trigger" a seizure. I know a person who any mention of rape brings her to attempt self harm. It's genuinely not that different.

Except for the part where it's completely different, and you decided to play the, "doesn't understand what you mean" game first.

I like to think that if you had a good point, you'd be making it, and that it wouldn't involve a really desperate attempt to equivocate between "trigger words" and photosensitive epilepsy.

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