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Comment by mbrumlow | Hacker News Reader

Somewhere we went wrong when coming up with this idea of online harassment.

People are going to say mean things to other people. This is never going to change.

The solution is simple. If somebody is saying something you don't like then don't visit their site. If it is in a platform then block them and or set your profile to only interact with a white list. If they say something as fact about you that is not true, sue them, we already have the laws for this stuff. But most importantly stop worrying about what somebody else says to you online.

People have a duty to police their own online content. Nobody should be telling me what I can and can't look at on the internet (please don't take that out of context of laws)

Universities are not our parents.

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I don't know if this is the answer, but "just block them" isn't a solution.

I've had someone call my work and try to get me fired, I've had someone make dozens of accounts on various social media platforms to harass me, and even when I blocked them they would post my personal information and make up lies about things I've done, and because I blocked them I had no idea, and then more people would believe the harasser because I didn't respond to it, and would pile on.

Filing a police report for some of the more threatening messages didn't do anything, as the police basically told me there wasn't going to be anything they could do.

Locking or whitelisting accounts like GitHub wasn't really an option as I work with it and I maintained a semi-popular project that I wasn't willing to just delete, but it came close.

In the end the harasser gave up eventually, and I was lucky that my job didn't believe them, but it was a pretty shitty time in my life that had me really worried that these lies would stick around my name forever and I wouldn't be able to escape them in the future.

This kind of harassment is completely incomprehensible to me. Especially as the work of a single individual. How one can be so full of spite and hate and so empty of empathy, I cannot understand. I get how mobs can do this by stirring themselves up into a frenzy, but for an individual to persistently lie and flame someone in an attempt to ruin their life, without stepping back and reconsidering what is the point. I must be naive to not be able to comprehend this kind of behavior.

Some people aren't rational (well that's an understatement, we are all at times, but some people are almost entirely incapable of rational thought at all times.) Some people have severe problems and should be receiving professional medical help, but aren't. If you try to understand what's going on inside their head, you will probably fail because their thought processes are alien to your own. But more important than understanding how they think is understanding that they exist.

Absolutely not how real world works. As an online harassment victim, you may never know even know that it is happening online. But all your classmates would know.

The sites might have lies about you or they might even have your real data. Someone might post your real photos; discussing your body, your fashion sense, or whatever that makes you loser.

You are a broke college kid. Good luck finding a lawyer who would help you find anonymous posters and then sue them.

In mean time, your social life is being destroyed. Online harassment seeps into the real world. Your classmates make fun of you in your earshot. You can complain about it once or twice but school get tired of it and stop taking you seriously.

You will get depressed and sducidal unless you have a strong support system. Even then you will have poor grades, you might quit school. Your life is being ruined because people believe in black n white definition of freedom of speech.

Perhaps we should recognize that there are shades of grey. We cannot harass someone in physical world without getting kicked out of establishment or getting arrested.

Maybe we should go after platforms that let online harassment happen on their platform. After all they are profiting off your data, why shouldn't they be held responsible to police their platform better.

That is like saying schools should not punish bullies, let the victim sue the bullies.

It's called free speech. Yes, it sucks to be made fun of online, but most universities are getting better support systems to deal with this kind of stuff. Theres lots of free counseling services on campus that do provide the support in many ways, even with housing and food problems. Police does take threats seriously and will investigate to make sure it is not credible, and people do get kicked out of the university for making threats. But nowhere does blocking a site or service fit into the picture. I'm a student at a UC right now, and this is the message that was given to us.

Harassment is not protected speech. What are you on about?

This really depends on what you consider harassment.

And that is the crux of this topic, and why some people find the notion of making blanket rules based off words that are so subjective.

That's called kids being assholes, it happened long before the internet was invented, and it will continue once we eventually decide to shut down the internet once and for all. The school should have legitimate solutions for it involving punishments against the involved students, and if you can't sue them when they don't, then your fucked under this ruling too, aren't you?

That just sounds like high school to me, even though no one was using the internet to communicate. A girl had to leave my high school because other girls were spreading mean rumors behind her back. Some other girls had serious issues with the same problem. The school had no idea what to do.

> People are going to say mean things to other people. This is never going to change.

This case is not about saying mean thigns to other people -- US first ammendment allows people to say mean things to others.

This case is about credible threats of violence being sent via a social network. One of the features of that social network was that you could only see messages from people who were geographically nearby.

--begin quote--

We first address the University’s expressed apprehension about punishing students for their speech. Put simply, we are satisfied that its First Amendment concerns about penalizing speech lack a proper basis. The University could have vigorously responded to the threatening Yaks without implicating the First Amendment because “true threats” 27 are not protected speech. See Virginia v. Black, 538 U.S. 343, 359 (2003) (recognizing that “true threats” are not constitutionally protected and describing them as “statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals”). 7 The Supreme Court and our Court have consistently recognized the principle that threatening speech is not protected by the Constitution. See, e.g., Watts v. United States, 394 U.S. 705, 707 (1969) (upholding constitutionality of statute making it illegal to threaten president with physical violence); United States v. Maxton, 940 F.2d 103, 105-06 (4th Cir. 1991) (“Threats to kidnap or injure persons are legislatively proscribable, falling within that group of expressions, such as fighting words, which are not constitutionally protected pure speech.” (internal quotation marks omitted)). Moreover, both federal law and Virginia law criminalize the communication of threats to kill or injure others. See 18 U.S.C. § 875(c) (prohibiting transmission through interstate commerce of threat to injure another); Va. Code Ann. § 18.2-60(A)(1) (criminalizing electronic communication of threat to kill or injure another if threat recipient is placed “in reasonable apprehension of death or bodily injury”).

--end quote--

I don't care what the case is about. We already have laws on threats, its not the Universities job to hide or block those threats. Even if they did somehow block the sites these "credible threats" were posted on it still does not stop the fact that the threats were made.

In fact I argue that if the university prevented a threat from reaching me that they could be held liable for any damage done to me should that threat come to fruition -- by blocking my ability to be aware I was in danger.

Moreover, even if the Universities did so on their own networks that does not thing for the rest of the internet that lives in each and every students pocket.

If somebody makes a credible threat you report it and take action. Banning sites that some people use to make threats is not the solution -- if it were, you might as well ban the entire internet.

Again, I believe you are misunderstanding the situation and creating an argument based on a misleading headline from the Think Tank that was sourced for the article.

The complaint is not that YikYak wasn't blocked -- it's that no action was taken by the University to investigate the threats properly and readily. Blocking YikYak was simply __an option__ which the University could have taken, but that wasn't the thrust of the plaintiffs' argument at all. The point of Blocking YikYak was more of a point that "well, you absolutely could have done something", rather than a prescribed course of action. *

I'm sorry, but you're arguing a point that was not made by the plaintiffs and also is not related to the actual court Opinion either. The crux of the complaint is that in light of real, credible threats, the University took no action whatsoever. The Opinion is more about how the defenses of anonymity made it "impossible" for the University to act and that 1st Amendment protections prohibited [the university] from doing so were considered invalid in light of other case law.

*Nevermind that YikYak itself had built in a blackout system like this which would rapidly allow Universities to simple blackout the GPS coordinates of the University if there was a request from the Administration. YikYak had a built-in censorship/disabling tool for a long time. No effort would be needed to specifically block YikYak aside from a simple letter on some department letterhead.

I don't think it is the job of the university to investigate or take action. We already have laws -- use those.

Universities are not equipped to investigate and have guidelines to do so with due process. Making them responsible completely bypasses entire sections of law.

Somebody threatens you at the gym. It's not the gyms responsibility to investigate and take action. You call the cops. That is what you do.

Making other organizations reposnable for legal matters is just a way to bypass the law and do whatever the hell you want.

Simply put universities can't be the judge jury and executioner of the law.

You do realize that almost every university on the US has its own police force? They are absolutely equipped to investigate crimes, or they’re at least as qualified as the town police would be.

Pro Tip: the university police has a conflict of interest, they will prefer to sweep violent crime under the rug rather than deal with it because bad statistics will make the place look bad. The GP poster is correct to be concerned that investigative and judicial powers are vested in the same entity; we usually keep them separate, and for good reason.

Agreed. The other side of the argument seems too trapped inside a vacuum where things are done the way they should be on paper. That's not reality at a university looking to turn a profit. The people doing the grunt work (Campus Police) might have the tools and means to solve this problem but the people signing their paychecks don't want them to do anything that could reduce profits or put their job at Campus Police in jeopardy.

As someone from the US, universities having their own police forces is between authoritarian and barking mad. It seems downright at odds with both its proposed functionality and goals. The design seems like it would cynically be used to suppress student movements yet it is mostly used to softball enforcement for sake of reputations and not alienating students.

Having police for demographics seems inherently suspicious from a standpoint of liberty as it is either for undue crackdowns or undue lenience separate from official legal status. To give an absurd yet rationally based hypothetical - if it was official that it was in the interest of the state and people for college students to get more lenient drug and alcohol sentences because they want to encourage a limited degree of exploration to better innovation they wouldn't need a seperate police force because it was already codified in law.

This is distinct from when there are actual practical differences for given groups to be policed - a specialized white collar crime police force makes perfect sense as the needs are different. Similarly military police in a provost [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provost_(military_police)] role are justifiable.

I'm not saying campuses should go unpoliced. I'm saying that the approach is suspect for the situation even if it is just a stupid historical artifact. Keeping an office of a police station on a sufficiently large campus but part of the normal state or city policing is fine - just because they are part of a university doesn't mean they are outside their jurisdiction. Deciding to have a security force that specifically don't have policing powers but enforce rules 'privately' is also fine.

That’s a fair point. Judicial processes on campus can definitely be pooorly conceived and unintuitive. My “favorite” are the various “honor courts” that various schoold use as a catch-all “we don’t like what you did, so you’re expelled” process.

I was about to write that this was not true, because I could not believe it, but boy was I wrong: “in the 2004-05 school year, 74% of college campuses had sworn officers with the power to arrest, and 90% of these departments were armed”. [0]. That seems absurd to me! I went to tiny liberal arts schools for undergrad/grad school, and we just had nice dudes with pepper spray that walked around occasionally.

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campus_police

1. A university education is a massive advantage in various measures of success

2. Universities have often been actively hostile towards various groups

These two facts caused a lot of government regulation to be applied to universities, which includes the university taking steps to prevent a "hostile environment." This means that policing harassment is often a legal requirement on universities, and was put in place so that the universities could not rely on the existing student body to do the discrimination on behalf of the university.

That is to say prior to the laws that are being applied in this case, we had laws against harassment and they didn't work. At least partly this is because harassment is usually not a federal crime, so the federal government could not force the states to enforce those laws.

I don't know man?

What they are talking about is more than saying mean things.

In the dorm I lived in at U Wisconsin, everyone was perfectly free to call anyone else a fat, ugly b word. But if you said, "I'm gonna go get my gun and kill all you fat, ugly b's." It should come as no surprise that you would be kicked out of the dorms. (Out of the university too, but I digress.)

Point is, some things you say, the university, or high school, or whatever, they just have to take action on it. They can't just let it go. To expect them to do so is just being unrealistic. Sorry, but that's just not how anyone else in the world wants it to work. And those other people are able to sue the university or high school or what have you to press their point when situations like this arise.

The university does not, there might be a case for a high school or any place responsible for taking care of minors to take action, and that action simply should be the same action that individuals in public should take -- call the authorities -- that is the people we pay to enforce laws.

A dorm is no different than living in a apartment. When somebody threatens you living in a apartment or a house you call the cops. You don't call the landlord -- or even the owner of the property. These people are not equipped with the resources to properly handle these situations.

When you give these ill equipped organizations the power and authority you remove due process -- which is an assault on everybody rights and freedoms. When these organizations are responsible for "taking action" you will end up with a real quagmire, much like the one we have today where students are kicked out of school without any investigation into any allegations later to find out accusations were made out of spite. In the cases that are real, the universities should not be involved at all, the police and courts should be -- this ensures that offenders are removed from society and not just the campus.

A university is a lot like a gym, or grocery store, or a library, or even a public park -- more so with ones that take in government money. It is none of these peoples jobs -- or should it be -- to vet who they are, and or monitor or interpret peoples online behavior. If one individual has an issue with another it is their duty to take action, not some 3rd party.

University is the real life, you are a adult, and people need to start acting like an adult and expecting people to act like adults. Out in the world you don't run to your teacher when you are offended, threatened, or assaulted, you take real legal action -- involve local law enforcement.

People, please stop acting like University is some special place where all the rules and laws are not valid and we need a entirely new set of them to be enforced by people who not equipped to do so.

At an institution falling under Title IX a dorm is not entirely analogous to an apartment. There are in fact "special rules" that apply. Likewise as a organ of state government, state universities also fall under unique rules. Status as a government organ was the sole basis for it's First Amendment argument. An apartment management company cannot violate a tenant's First Amendment rights.

>At an institution falling under Title IX a dorm is not entirely analogous to an apartment. There are in fact "special rules" that apply

I believe the point is to question whether they should fall under the jurisdiction of Title IX.

IMO, if college is about entering adulthood, then we should teach and expect these people to use the same systems that adults outside of college use for dealing with legal interpersonal matters.

You are on point.

I just want to point out though, I don't think college is about entering adulthood, it just so happens to be one of the first things adults tend to do with their new found freedom.

Some chose to enter the work force, others join the army, some might decide to go back home and live in their parents basement. But at the end of the day they are still adults and have to behave like one -- this goes for the for both predators and victims of said harassment.

College is for adults, and it is high time we start treating people who go to college like adults and expect of them to act like so.

Should students be required to turn 18 before enrolling at college then?

That is a side topic that really has nothing to do with this. But minros are also expected to follow the laws as well.

I think if you find your self in college young enough to be of question you probably are also capable of following the laws.

Kroger is not reposnable for a minor misbehaving, no should any other entity beyond the minors guardian.

I hold primary school speical because it is mandated on both ends -- to send your child -- and for them to receive your child -- so some requirement of provideing extra safety can be had.

College on the other hand is optional, and if one does not feel safe they simply can not go.

That sounds harsh but "feeling safe" is not a right and is problematic because it is so subjective.

> Somewhere we went wrong

Yes. The moment we brought up the chant of "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me". The brain can break the same way your legs or arms can and the "just tough it out" answer is not an answer at all.

No one would suggest you should just not visit a neighborhood if people there attacked you. The proof that the web should be a special case because "muh, free speech above all" is very flimsy.

Actually, people do avoid bad neighborhoods and suggest to their children and others to avoid those.

There's a reason, many actually, for freedom of speech. And all those reasons are more important than your feelings.

>No one would suggest you should just not visit a neighborhood if people there attacked you.

To be fair that's exactly what happens. People warn not to go into the crime/high gang activity areas of my city all the time.

Hate speech covers this, and it is illegal.

Recently, there's a cultural idiom that offense is completely in the eye of the beholder. What people often feel uncomfortable with is not banning hate speech, but reclassifying milder and milder forms of offense as intolerable. To extend your analogy, bumping into someone intentionally on the street makes you a jerk, but not criminally so. It's assault in only the loosest interpretation. People that have done this probably don't need to go to trial for it.

Hate speech is not illegal in the US.

Right. Canadian. Sorry.

> Hate speech covers this, and it is illegal.

Hate speech is most certainly not illegal in the US. In Europe (and elsewhere) some forms of hate speech are illegal.

Hate speech that encourages violence is illegal in the US. General hate speech that doesn't include threats or incitement of illegal activity, on the other hand, seems to be celebrated these days.

>Hate speech that encourages violence is illegal in the US.

That’s not quite right either. “We should violently overthrow the government/eliminate xyz people” is protected by the First Amendment. “Everyone get your guns and storm the federal building/kill these people right now” is not. (The exact line is obviously hard to discern.)

It is actually a criminal offense to call for the violent overthrow of the US government. This was added to the law by the Smith Act, although it has since been found unconstitutional in part. A small number of Nazis were convicted thereunder, and a rather larger (~10x) number of communists and anarchists.

On the other hand, I'm not aware of any laws in the US criminalizing threats of genocide and so on, which is kind of a problem because we have numerous historical examples of such rhetoric being normalized and then actualized when some (as yet undetermined) threshold conditions are met, and once that train leaves the station it's a one-way trip. Defenders of such rhetoric should think twice about whether they really wish to snatch up this monkey's paw.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2385

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act

There is no possible reading of the First Amendment case law that leaves those parts of the Smith Act intact.

Almost any political ideology calls for unsanctioned violence at some point—where society deviates sufficiently from the moral principles of the ideology. For example, it is within the current Western consensus that one can or even should resist at least some kinds of dictatorship through violence. And more fundamentally, political ideology is about violence—how and to what ends society should use violence (e.g. what counts as a crime?—what are the valid bases for civil judgments?—both questions ultimately ask when it is okay to use violence to secure compliance).

Any restriction on political speech because it “encourages violence” is therefore actually a thinly-veiled restriction on particular ideologies for being objectionable. Such a restriction is not viewpoint neutral and almost impossible to legally sustain.

There is no question that free speech can threaten the political status quo, for better or for worse. All political power requires some measure of consent from the governed, and changing ideas can threaten that consent. The principle of free speech is that the ideas upon which such consent is given are not themselves matters for coercion, but for free discussion and debate. That is a radical notion, even a dangerous notion, but one at the heart of the American project.

Spare me the lecture, I pointed out the finding of unconstitutionality before you did.

> Hate speech that encourages violence is illegal in the US.

In the US, the “direct incitement to violence” exception to freedom of speech has nothing to do with hate speech, except perhaps incidentally. Any direct incitement to violence is not protected speech, whether hateful or not.

>No one would suggest you should just not visit a neighborhood if people there attacked you.

I would absolutely suggest that. I'd advise you right now not to e.g. take a trip to the south side of Chicago. What are you suggesting? That the government has an obligation to proactively prevent crime? How is that to be done? Martial law?

You can't have the freedoms you enjoy and complete safety. It's the price we pay, and it's worth it.

>I would absolutely suggest that.

For the sake of the person's safety that should be suggested, but where does one draw the line at such suggestions? College aged women are safer if they don't drink alcohol, so should that be the official statement of a university? What about saying that if they stay with a male guardian, they will be safer than if they don't? If that statement is true, should it be an official policy statement made to increase safety?

>College aged women are safer if they don't drink alcohol, so should that be the official statement of a university?

If they're under 21 probably, yeah. At 21 and above, like always, you have to be careful of what situations you put yourself in. That's not victim blaming, it's reality. Malicious people will always exist and women will always be at a physical disadvantage.

>What about saying that if they stay with a male guardian, they will be safer than if they don't? If that statement is true, should it be an official policy statement made to increase safety?

No, it should not be a rule because the government should not limit a woman's right to travel as they see fit. Don't you see the problem with this line of thinking? Safety at the cost of freedom is a mistake.

>No, it should not be a rule

Sorry for the confusion, I didn't mean for it to exist as an actual rule, just as an recommendation by the institution in question. Such as a campus police department giving out safety tips.

In that case I suppose I don't really care. I care about the limitation of freedom, not suggestions. If this were simply a suggestion then sure, why not? Who cares, people may do as they like. It may be something that catches our attention for a news cycle or two, but it's not a big deal.

What if the price of my freedom is your safety?

If dealing with one to one going with any absolutism's logical extreme is batshit insanity that suggests murdering absolutely everyone else to ensure that your safety/freedom is never potentially compromised is the only option.

The actual details are nuanced and the general line is 'freedom to swing your arms ends at my face' from general reciprocity and sustainability - freedom to cause harm unilaterally (distinct from self-defense) damages overall freedom as well in the same sense that a power vacuum can lead to less freedom as the strong dominate.

Here's an example from today's news of what a cop (and I) considered to be a true threat of violence but which the defendant maintains (so far) that he was trying to prove a point about workplace safety.

http://nixle.us/AMTQ6?fbclid=IwAR1pRErR6-CuOjvULJWJDSSKLISJ_...

So far this person hasn't committed any violent acts and I'm willing to stipulate that his stated grievance is founded in fact, though it may or may not have been his actual motivation. Have his free speech rights been infringed?

> I would absolutely suggest that. I'd advise you right now not to e.g. take a trip to the south side of Chicago. What are you suggesting? That the government has an obligation to proactively prevent crime? Short of legal penalties, how is that done? Martial law?

I'm trying to figure out if you're suggesting that police be withdrawn from places likely to have crime. It certainly aligns with the idea that the police should ignore direct verbal or written threats to people's safety.

>I'm trying to figure out if you're suggesting that police be withdrawn from places likely to have crime. It certainly aligns with the idea that the police should ignore direct verbal or written threats to people's safety.

I have no idea how you arrived at that. The point is that we already have laws against violence and harassment. What is being successful is to limit freedom in an attempt to _proactively_ prevent such crime. That's where you get into trouble.

More harm than good comes from protecting people from the big bad world. History has shown time and time again that no one can be trusted with the power to control our thoughts and movements.

My wife are at home on the south side of Chicago right now. I've got 9 people coming for a party tonight. What do you advise we do?

Why should something be banned because someone somewhere might be offended or their "brain might break"?

Just because someone might get hurt playing sports, should sports be banned from universities? Everyone should be punished because someone might get hurt?

Why limit it to universities? People's feelings get hurt in everyday life. If someone asks a woman out and she refuses, it might hurt the guy's feelings. Should women be forced to date every guy who asks them out since there is a chance some guys' "brains might break" due the rejection?

Coddling and infantilizing people is the worst thing you can do. Especially for a university where you are supposed to have "your brain broken" by being exposed to new and offensive ideas.

I grew up protestant and went to university and took philosophy classes that "broke my brain" and were initially offensive to me as a christian. Should I sue my university?

If we followed your logic, everything would be banned because anything can "break a brain". Flat earthers could shut down physics departments because the spherical model of earth "breaks their brains".

>Why should something be banned because someone somewhere might be offended or their "brain might break"

Certain activities are banned in sports. People playing American football wear helmets; you can't stamp on your opponent's head during wrestling; you can't do high tackles in rugby.

And certain activities are banned in speech, even in the US. In this case credible threats of violence were made and the University (wrongly) said that they couldn't block those because of 1st ammendment.

Sure. But those rules are enforced within the sport, not television networks. Just because tyson bit holyfield's ear doesn't mean the network got banned. Even more, just because there is a possibility that someone might bite someone's ear doesn't mean that entire networks have to be banned.

If there is a credible threat, that's a matter for the police, not the university. If instead of a website, someone mailed the threats, should the university ban the mailman, the postal system and all mail?

Also, when it comes to something as important as free speech and open access, I'd rather err on the side of more free speech rather than less.

One thing that is interesting is how so many foreigners are so supportive of limiting speech in the US. Can I ask why you are so heavily invested in supporting censorship in the US, especially since you aren't american?

Credible threats of violence were made. Complaints about those were made to the univeristy who did nothing at all to investigate the threats. The university claimed they couldn't do anything because 1st ammendment. That argument was rebutted - one thing the university could have done was to block yikyak. No-one was asking for that to happen, no-one suggested it should happen, but it was one option available to the university.

> One thing that is interesting is how so many foreigners are so supportive of limiting speech in the US. Can I ask why you are so heavily invested in supporting censorship in the US, especially since you aren't american?

A more interesting thing is how few Americans bother to read the original court documents to understand what's really going on and who then leap to yelling CENSORSHIP even if that isn't what's happening.

If there were credible threats, can you show me the arrest records? If credible threats are made, what does blocking the websites do? Is it better to ignore those threats rather than address them? Credible threats are a criminal matter after all. And I did read the article. Didn't find any credible threats that were listed.

And we care because we are americans and we don't like censorship and we don't want to live in an oppressive and censored environment. I was just curious as to why you care as a foreigner. I wasn't trying to offend you. Just curious.

"Is it better to ignore those threats rather than address them?"

You'd have to ask UMW.

You're moving the goalposts, which is not forbidden but is causing you to get downvoted as people discount your sincerity.

Why do you say "wrongly"? It's one thing to punish bad speech; it's quite another to block furture speech which may be good or bad. Generally the first amendment requires punishing speech after the fact outside of some narrow circumstances.

It's not clear to me how the university would block only threats in the future without restraining potentially legitimate speech.

They claimed they were forbidden from blocking the wbesite because 1st ammendment. The court told them that was wrong, and that 1st ammendment didn't prevent them from blocking the website.

They have other reasons for not wanting to block websites, and they should have used those.

"Gonna tie these feminists to the radiator and [g]rape them in the mouth”

“Dandy’s about to kill a bitch . . . or two”

“Can we euthanize whoever caused this bullshit?”

Those must have been some philosophy classes.

People are going to say mean things to other people. This is never going to change.

I reject this premise. The social costs for abusing people like this need to be quite a lot higher. Right now it's virtually free and the internet is awash in trolls and malicious behavior. This is a novel situation caused by the confluence of effectively unlimited communication possibilities and we're in no way required to normalize its negative aspects.

One novel approach to rebalancing such costs would be to give the recipient of a credible-seeming threat license to attack the threatening party in proportion to the perceived severity of the threat. So people who credibly threaten others with murder, for example, would be making themselves a legally valid target for homicide.

> One novel approach to rebalancing such costs would be to give the recipient of a credible-seeming threat license to attack the threatening party in proportion to the perceived severity of the threat. So people who credibly threaten others with murder, for example, would be making themselves a legally valid target for homicide.

not sure whether you're serious, but this actually seems like a decent idea. it would require some very well-written legislation to define "perceived severity", though. if someone threatens to kill you, specifically, and you can show that they know where you live, you shouldn't have to wait until they're in your house to do something about it.

It's halfway between a Swiftian 'modest proposal' and a callback to duelling laws. Simply implementing this as described would of course lead to all sorts of undesirable outcomes, but really it's just a combination of the fighting words doctrine and an expanded concept of imminence that incorporates the erosion of spatial obstacles to information.

Currently you shouldn't use deadly force absent a reasonable fear that it is about to be inflicted on you. But since it is entirely possible to send a threat like I know you live at [address] and I'm coming to [do crimes] and place the recipient in a state of continuous uncertainty, the very open-endedness of the threat manifests the fear of imminence in the target. Rather than making the victim devote resources to continually monitoring and assessing the behavior of the threatening party, we can simply expand the target's right of self-defense in proportion to the scope of the issued threat.

All well and good until I pose as someone else and make false threats to get them legally murdered

you're right, this is a pretty bad failure mode. however, a similar (though much less severe) risk is incurred when we make universities responsible for handling threats. if someone poses as you on social media and makes death threats against another student, a court of law might find insufficient evidence to prove that you actually made those threats, but good luck showing the account wasn't yours under a preponderance of evidence ruleset.

Could you try addressing the argument instead of constructing a magic trapdoor by imagining additional facts? Assume you can verify the authenticity of a threat, in case that was not clear from my earlier description.

as much as I like the idea, I think it is a fair point to make. the original context for this discussion was threats made over the internet. it is actually kind of hard for a normal person to authenticate the identity of someone over the internet to a degree of confidence that justifies a killing in self defense.

The bulk of personal threats and violence takes place between people who know each other and is not so difficult to authenticate; likewise there are many ways and people willing to help identify the authors of internet threats.

The point again is not so much that 'this will solve the problem' as 'threatening people should have a significant cost' and this is one way of significantly increasing that cost without needing to appeal to state actors whose alacrity and integrity may be open to question.

This approach maximizes free speech while providing the targets of objectionable or harassing speech more options for responding to it.

That assumption was not at all obvious, if you want to talk about imagining facts.

To address the argument, it's not fair to assume that recipients of such threats would be either willing or physically able to respond. People with kids will not go around dueling people in the modern era. In my opinion, it's nothing more than a fantasy world. We have a justice system and law enforcement officers. Maybe they don't do a great job, but it should in no way fall to the individual, no matter how zealous they may be.

I'm not suggesting that it should fall to the individual, but that the individual have some latitude to defend themselves against a credible threat rather than being expected to just put up with it and hope for the best.

I'm sorry, harassment is legal now? And society has solved the problem by telling people not to go where they get harassed? Called a #?$? $%%$ and told to go off and %$%$ die at the movie theatre? Don't go there. Harassed at work by your boss? Just stop going to work!

Simple harassment has always been legal. It's only illegal when some other factors make it so, for example, sexual harassment by an employer or another person in a position of power. It's also legal to fire someone or kick them out for being an asshole.

The problem with the 21st century is that people have lost the concept of anything between "illegal" and "forced to put up with". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_which_is_not_forbid...

I'm going by the legal definition of harassment. Specifically the definition of harassment that is not legal.

By the legal definition of harassment that is not legal, harassment is not legal. Seems a bit tautological to be worth sharing.

I'm not sure how to state it in a less convoluted way.

https://definitions.uslegal.com/h/harassment/

Harrassed online, just dont go online!

I hope you see the problem there.

Well the legal definition of harassment requires systemic or persistence to qualify outside of separate circumstances. If If someone were to heckle or catcall you outside of a bar or in a movie theater once that isn't harassment. Following you down the street persistently and heckling or cat calling after you told them get lost or organizing a different person to heckle you every day would qualify as harassment.

A coworker, boss, or anyone in a privileged position like a doctor or police officer sexually harassing you once is unacceptable legally.

I'm sorry, but this really is not reflective of the specific threats and comments made by the persons, and it's not a matter of simply "don't look at the posts", there were pretty clear written and verbal threats made which in any other context would be grounds for a real investigation [1]. Looking though the actual document and not the think tank summary, the threats are pretty explicit:

• “Gonna tie these feminists to the radiator and [g]rape them in the mouth”;3

• “Dandy’s about to kill a bitch . . . or two”; and

• “Can we euthanize whoever caused this bullshit?”

The University certainly took the threats seriously enough to assign university security to events that the members of the plaintiff's group were attending, and the University did absolutely nothing in response to the threats by simply claiming they were powerless. Keep in mind that the context of these threats was around the time that a member of the plaintiff group had been murdered (while eventually the murder was disassociated from the events/threats, the investigation took some time). Such context lends a lot of credibility to the threats from my point of view.

The basis of the appeal and the complaint in the first place was that the University made no action to even address such threats on YikYak (it is rather important to note that this is all about YikYak [2]). This means that one of two things was true:

1. The Yaks were posted by persons within a 1.5 mile radius of the campus

2. Someone was manipulating their GPS to alter their location to make the posts.

Threatening speech has repeatedly not been protected by 1st amendment rights, and the University's refusal to even try to investigate despite having received specific complaints and requests from the plaintiffs.

This isn't about randoms on twitch going KYS after someone trash talks in a game, there were specific acts of violence repeatedly threatened after this whole affair. The University had the ability to look into the events but did not, and their response was more exculpatory than educational/investigative.

Universities in fact do have a legal requirement to investigate these things and maintain a position of neutrality and encouraging an atmosphere and culture on campus that promotes learning. When you have people openly threatening one another, that's not an atmosphere that supports learning. All this is further exacerbated by the fact that one member of the plaintiff group was killed by their roommate who was a former member of the Rugby Team which is noted in the actual opinion as having been a key element in the Yaks coming up.

Even though eventually the murder was disassociated from the rest of the events, that was not for some time -- I don't see it as unreasonable for a group of persons who are receiving death threats and rape threats to take such threats very seriously after one of their members was actually murdered.

Please just read the actual Opinions [1] top to bottom and not the think tank summary. Think Tanks are fine for finding issues, but their summaries are not to be trusted. They are always politically charged and often omit very important facts, such as the exact reasons the Court accepted the appeals (basically, the previous decision failed to meet the standards for protections under the 1st amendment and also the University did not fulfill its legal obligation in many ways)

[1] http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/Opinions/172220.P.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yik_Yak

(Edits are fixing formatting and introducing the context of the murder earlier for clarity of my second paragraph)

Tying someone to the radiator and graping them in the mouth sounds like a reference to this "The Whitest Kids U' Know" comedy bit about an inappropriate grape soda commercial pitch [1], especially about 1:56 in.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmrDypTB_Y0

Sorry unavailable: This video has been banned by The American university safety committee under the 2019 KYS Act (keep youth safe)

In addition,

"About a month later, on June 8, 2015, President Hurley wrote to the president of the Feminist Majority Foundation addressing the OCR complaint. He promptly distributed copies of his responsive letter to the UMW community and several media outlets. According to the Complaint, Hurley’s letter falsely asserted that the OCR complaint drew a connection between Grace Mann’s death and the threatening social media posts. Hurley also inaccurately claimed that neither UMW nor its campus police had received any reports of Yik Yak threats directed at Feminists United members. Additionally, Hurley suggested that the safety concerns of Feminists United members were exaggerated because some of the online threats simply derived from “pop culture.”"

The application in question allows geolocated (as in "nearby") anonymous "Yaks". The Yaks in question threatened violence.

"Don't visit their site" indeed.

Others visit their site. Some sites are very popular. It never stays on the internet, and its not all about what I'm seeing. Imagine a billboard that says "Joe is a deviant criminal". It's ok, I should just not drive that way again?

And Universities have a special obligation, lets not forget that.

> Imagine a billboard that says "Joe is a deviant criminal".

The solution isn’t to ban billboards.

True, but way to miss the point. Its to forbid posting crap like that (on existing sites).

And the ban part is all about the special position of a University vs students. Not about the internet, not about the public in general. Anyway that's how the OP started...

I think it is you who is missing the point. What is different between "forbidding posting crap like that" and "banning billboards"?

So who gets to decide what information is ok for adults to consume? What happens when this newly elected dictator decides that e.g. Jordan Peterson is a hate monger who must be censored? Is that ok? How do we prevent abuse when the subject matter is so often subjective?

This is exactly why we have the first ammendment. This sort of power should not exist as those who would wield it are not infallible and cannot be trusted.

If Joe happens to be a deviant criminal and doesn't like to be reminded of the fact, then he should avert his gaze when driving by. If Joe is not a deviant criminal, then he can sue the person who put up the billboard for damages incurred.

And then there will be a tide of amicus briefs making the same generic arguments about free speech and slippery slopes and parades of horribles, and it's a question of whether Joe wants to spend lots of money and time on litigating the issue, which may cost substantially more than the original libel, thus creating a market for lies which is effectively what we have now.

Universities shouldn't have special obligations any more than any other employer or government agency. Another way to look at it is that regular people shouldn't have less protection against online harassment just because they don't happen to be university students. Rules and protections should apply equally to everyone.

Should public libraries be obligated to block online content that harasses some of their patrons?

Universities have parental responsibilities to legal children.

Very few university students are children. There are a lot more children in public libraries.

>Imagine a billboard that says "Joe is a deviant criminal"

Well now Joe has a libel claim. If Joe is actually a deviant criminal then, well... he pissed off the wrong person. What's the issue?

Well, on that subject, of course the internet is the issue. Once something is 'in the wild' on the internet it is very, very hard to quash it. The old legal mechanisms are slow, certainly not the speed of the internet anyway. A 'viral' video on social media isn't something you stop with a libel suit.

You can't unprint a libelous article in a newspaper either. You can sue them and they can print an apology, but you cannot erase history.

The internet poses new hurdles because information is so easily accessible, but we have to be very careful about imposing rules which restrict an adult's ability to consume information.

I don't' think it is that new given anonymous bill postings before forensics were sufficient to identify a publisher. If everyone already knows that someone posted a bunch of pamphlets that stated that the governor is an embezzling child molester. Enforcement has always been limited by practicality.

Before forensics advanced sufficiently just a dead body in the street with no witnesses was a perfect murder.

What about "I've heard Joe is a a deviant criminal"? The rumor does not have to be true for the statement (that the rumor was heard) to be true.

What about "Joe has, at the time this sign was made, never denied beating his wife on Decemeber 31st." The claim could be very true in that Joe never has denied that specific claim because there was no reason to deny a claim that hadn't been made yet.

What about putting up the sordid details of a teenagers love life on a bulletin board outside her high school? Assume you verified the statements as factual. Is there perhaps an issue even when it is the truth?

Harassment is a crime. Countering it does not require censorship. (Except in the sense of restraining orders, which are actually targeted at the responsible party)

You are now largely placing the effort to fix the problem on the victims.

Sometimes the platform really is the problem. It’s the old mean rime before dick issue, if you let people share content you will see verious kinds of content. Nintendo for example gets around this by limiting what messages you can send to other people.

I am not saying it’s nessisarily appropriate for collages, but it is a real issue schools need to deal with.

>Sometimes the platform really is the problem.

The platform you're talking about is the internet. So do we outlaw billboards? What about TV? I could always run a commercial, right? Are newspapers ok?

We have laws that are reactive because we are not a country feels comfortable providing safety by stripping freedoms. You can come up with blatant examples all day, but real world scenarios will not always be so cut and dry. I lean to the side of less restriction, not more.

Billboards, TV etc have a lot of laws associated with them which cause the owners to act preemptively. So, it's generally not possible to anonymously post an explicit x rated image on a Billboard or TV commercial due to the people doing manual content reviews. Prime time TV added tape delays and a manual bleep to avoid similar issues.

That's not to say message boards need to have some person review every post before it goes public. But, that is a possible theoretical solution to this issue. Granted it's not economically viable, but plenty of other businesses models are also limited by the law.

PS: HN is actually a great example of what's possible while still allowing random postings online while avoiding many of these issues.

>Billboards, TV etc have a lot of laws associated with them which cause the owners to act preemptively. So, it's generally not possible to anonymously post an explicit x rated image on a Billboard or TV commercial due to the people doing manual content reviews. Prime time TV added tape delays and a manual bleep to avoid similar issues.

Sure, we've decided as a society to limit some freedoms for the greater good. You also cannot shout "fire" in a movie theater. We have libel and slander laws. We have laws against harassment.

It's a question of where to draw the line, and I believe censoring legal discourse crosses it.

I don't see a lot of people trying to repeal the "The seven dirty words" you can't say on TV or radio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words

This case is also rather far from the mark of polite discourse and would have been blocked from billboards etc. It's more about how to do this kind of management and some back and forth as we figure out societal norms for new things just seems reasonable to me.

"Figure something out or we block you." -> "How about this?" or "Meh you're not worth dealing with."

>Harassment is a crime.

Which goes back to the other poster's question of where is the problem if it is a factual claim. Assuming they share in the same answer as you, it seems the problem occurs at the point where stating factual statements crosses over into harassment.

While a generic answer that I generally find agreeable, the devil is always in the details, no? Where exactly is that line, and is there still not a problem if someone behaves in manner that is extremely close to but not crossing that line?

> Nobody should be telling me what I can and can't look at on the internet (please don't take that out of context of laws).

But the law is mutable and so we must appeal to deeper principles than those that the law hinges on. Otherwise, we could pass a law that restricts your access to exactly those websites that you wish to visit.

This is the fundamental problem with liberalism. It desires to marry liberty and (an anemic version of) reason, but reason properly exercised also entails knowledge of good and evil. Thus we pass legislation to punish some evils for the sake of the common good and social order, and tolerate other evils the punishment of which would cause more harm than good. But when liberty chafes under the demands of reason, it will often resort to a tendentious skepticism in order to artificially erode certainty for the sake of securing greater permissiveness.

Now it may be possible to argue that, given the way things are, and as broken as liberalism it, it is nonetheless the most prudent way to organize a (Western) society and that the best available way to deal with many social maladies is through softer means than legislation. Whatever the case, the laws themselves are to a large degree informed by culture, ethos, and circumstance and so what ought and ought not be legally restricted online is very much a core issue. It is insufficient to say on the one hand that nobody should be telling you what you can and cannot look at on the internet and on the other preface the former with the caveat that you are assuming conformity with the law because the law can be changed based on a change in understanding of what will best serve the common good here and now.

> Universities are not our parents.

If that were only true! When universities set up grief counseling and support groups for election results. Requiring warnings by professors for “trigger words,” or set up so-called “safe spaces” — it’s clear that universities have lost the plot. Universities have become bastions of coddling and infantilization. It’s a true surprise that universities haven’t begun issuing bubble wrap to student with which they can wrap themselves lest they trip over a challenging idea. Universities have become a farce: institutions originally set up to prepare students for the the messy marketplace of ideas have instead morphed into expensive day-care centers for delicate children. A stand-up comedian can’t even tell jokes anymore without being banished in a chorus of boos and hurt feelings. Chris Rock doesn’t do colleges anymore because of the absurdity.

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