Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanBC | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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