'Anti-meme law' could see Mexicans jailed for posting insulting images
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
I want to say trolling is somewhat like obscenity—in that you know it when you see it—but that is a deeply unsatisfying response when so much discourse online is so polarized.
Because it’s Ok for me to disagree with, even hate and detest, what someone is saying. It’s Ok for me to shocked and angered and deeply offended by a thing you say. It’s not Ok for me to go around clubbing people when they do this.
I think the current laws on libel, defamation, and slander are appropriate and fairly functional. Public figures in particular have a higher burden as well they should.
The new generation of anti-speech laws here and in the UK I find are deeply flawed and dangerous, and appear to me to be tools of oppression rather than the opposite.
Yes, some individual might be bullied, and if they want to constrain it to "those not serving in public office, management in a government position, or celebrity status" I might be willing to consider it. But that would be way more tight in wording than any legislature is likely to introduce. In the end it's another law to control mindshare.
With liberty and freedom comes things you may not like, but liberty is far more important than protecting people who don't know how to handle getting their feelings hurt.
But there is an issue when someone is directly inciting to hatred and violence against targeted groups or individuals. That sort of betavior needs to be acted against. The problem then is that the hatemongers actively try to skirt as close as they possibly can to the line without crossing it, with dogwhistle terms and other tricks.
I don't have a perfect solution, and I don't think we'll find one. When you've literally got people calling for named individuals to be thrown from planes, that is clearly out of bounds, though.
> The problem then is that the hatemongers
The problem is also that one man's hatemonger is another man's preacher of truth, and what constitutes "hate" is not always objective. Policing speech would be a perfect way for political actors to abuse the law and jail their opponents for wrongthink
Exactly, you cannot do that without bias.
It's something entirely to call for persecution and violence.
I would contend that one takeaway from companies like Facebook is that this phrase doesn't actually hold up all that well on a global Internet.
Facebook originally classified breast-feeding as explicit. At the time there was actual controversy about whether or not it fit into that category (public perception now is mostly that it didn't). Facebook's shift from "no pornography" to "here's a giant document about exactly what is and isn't pornography down to the number of nipples you show" feels to me like the white flag of a company that has decided it no longer knows it when it sees it.
I think "you know it when you see it" works very well for small, tight-nit communities, and maybe not quite so well as soon as as you start operating on the scale of a country. On that scale, I kind of prefer the narrower definitions we have on stuff like libel and slander.
It's logically indefensible, in that there isn't enough to it to make a logical case to defend it, which means the people proposing ideas like these must believe that either their ideas are so widely shared that nobody would ever try to attack it, or that they'll be able to destroy anyone who does attack it through means other than calm, logical argumentation. That second possibility frightens me.
There is a sub-group among them that are further aroused by sharing pictures of child feet on facebook. Something about doing that in public makes it more exciting for them.
Just asking if in the interest of other readers who come along because at first I couldn't grok the connection between how one feels about certain imagery and retaining ownership of one's uploads.
> a quality in a substance or material, especially one that means that it can be used in a particular way
It's also sense 1a given here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/property
> a quality or trait belonging and especially peculiar to an individual or thing
The comment says that many people are assuming that a photograph has "the property of being pornographic", and this is a mistake in their thought. Ownership and propriety are not related to the comment in any way.
If the law is in regard to protecting how people feel (which implicitly controls how they think), it will be used to enforce what can be said. That's the only tool you need for oppression. If it's to limit exposure to ideas, like pornography or explosive manufacture, it's ironically less oppressive because it's more objective than "how random human might feel on a given day".
Depends. What an American considers obscenity and what an Italian or French or Japanese person can be very different.
Good to see that the Mexican government is focusing on what's important.
AMLO has got nothing to do with this, he isn't even in office yet (though it kinda seems like he already is).
this is really just a proposed law from a state legislature.