A handful of well publicized jail terms would go a long way towards protecting the next potential victim.
> People were trying to hack into his Facebook account, which was quickly disabled. The pages of his children were targeted. His wife began receiving phone calls with death threats, at all hours of the night. A petition that stated, “Chris Filardi is a disgrace and frankly does not deserve to breathe another breath,” was signed by 3,798 people.
But I bristle at the use of the term 'SJW', especially here. It's a dog-whistle of a term which has lost meaning unless you subscribe to a simplistic "us" vs "them" mentality about people on the Internet.
Resist that.
You can read more starting with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elonis_v._United_States
How do people distinguish between (subjective) humor and an actual threat where it’s illegal? Do they outlaw all jokes about killing?
Is it equally not right to ban saying "black people should die alone of cancer" to a black man?
and the degree to which you hold that view (that its dangerous precedent, and difficult to stop once the ball gets rolling), is the degree to which you accept hate speech banning. But imo yes, in general, if theres no backing threat, then the government should not have any opinion on such a saying. Individuals and corporations can, should, and do, but the government has no business regulating such a thing.
I think I misunderstood your position; I'm in agreement with that statement: there is no difference, and neither should be punished or regulated, unless theres evidence of there being a real chance to transform into (or cause) actions.
>Or why you should allow people or corporations to enforce a ban but not government.
The federal government offers a space for the entire population; corporations offer a space for a (very) limited subset, and individuals offer a space for those in their household.
Due to the sweeping nature of its power (and its slow speed to update), its by far preferable to play conservatively. If you don't have a good reason to regulate, the government should not regulate. The same applies less to corporations, due to limited power, the general availability for its subjects to move to other corporations (which exists for country movement, but much more difficult than corporate).
>There are already things you cannot say. Why not add wishing someone harm to them? What useful purpose does it serve?
Well, you want to limit the amount of speech regulation in general, because again its difficult to regulate, difficult to decide what to regulate, and almost trivially easy to abuse. The problem isn't that keeping that particular statement is beneficial, but that banning such a statement, and statements like it, is prone to buggy behavior.
And of course you want to avoid as much as possible reaching the point where you can no longer criticize the federal government, and the more you regulate speech, the more stable that path becomes. And the federal government is naturally incentivized to take that path if it can: it makes its life far, far easier.
But if we as a society wanted to we could have a lawyer comb through all the comments sent to people that are victims of online mobs and pick out the ones that constitute real prosecutable things.
Might be a sentiment I agree with, but is not one I would express openly without a certain rhetorical distancing for fear of the retaliation that would be attached.
Opinion based violence is a thing. Check your privilege levels; what opinions would people feel unsafe expressing in your vicinity?
This is a new and perverse way of thinking about "privilege" that I've never seen before. I am someone that certain people would consider "privileged" and I've never had anyone ask me that question. (Guess my background.) There's plenty of opinions that I would fear expressing based on my circumstances, things I only talk about with very close friends. And legitimate fears - being fired or evicted. To me, it seems like people who talk about "privelege", especially "white privilege", sometimes over-estimate how far that takes one (he's literally immune to self-censorship!!1!). Maybe some are, but I really doubt it.
Becoming aware of the privilege you hold gives you all sorts of insight into how the world around you really functions.
That insight does not unfortunately; have a moral valence. There are plenty of people who use their insight into the exercise of social power purely for self-interested gain. They can do enormous damage to the organizations that allow such people to accrue power if their self-interest differs from the organizations intended goals.
You'd probably have an uphill battle convincing a court that an online death threat is a "true threat." What percentage of them are acted on? How many decimal places do you have to go to before it doesn't round to 0?
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, please don't threaten people with death, even if you don't mean it, it's gross.
If 100 people perpetrate a crime together -- even if loosely coupled mob, it's not less of a crime than if 1 person perpetrates it alone.
Making a person face criminal liability for making a negative comment because a third party, that your defendant has never met, committed an actual crime is farcically orwellian.
https://legaltalknetwork.com/podcasts/make-no-law/2018/01/fi...
That's a podcast with transcript from a free speech lawyer discussing the fighting words doctrine.
Again, you're super unclear about the exact scenario you're imagining. But the only way that you could be punished for saying "I am going to murder you" under the fighting words doctrine (instead of the true threat doctrine) is if you said it face-to-face with someone and that person was likely to punch you for it.
It is certainly not the case that if you made some statement like "I think you should die in a fire," online and then someone else that you had never interacted with attacked the person that you spoke to, that the fighting words doctrine would have anything whatsoever to do with any case against you.
There are almost no internet comment threads that can plausibly be described as inciting imminent lawless action.