First off, if people are being arrested and not charged, that's a violation of their rights, and a huge hassle. If your law is written so that people are being unnecessarily arrested, that's a bad law.

Proving intention used to be the case, but I think a lot of speech laws being made aren't taking this into account, and this is incredibly dangerous. You used the words "gypped" or "scot-free"? Well, those terms are an implied racial (cultural really) slur.

"Hocus pocus" originally comes from Protestant mockery of the Latin words of Consecration from the Catholic Mass. Catholics could, in theory, be offended by that. (I'm Catholic, but I just see it as an interesting piece of historical linguistic trivia, although I know it wasn't always so).

You used the words or "niggardly" or "snigger"? Neither of which have any negative racial or cultural connotations. The first is of Scandanavian etymology, and the second is of Dutch etymology, but they sound a lot like a word that is insulting. If someone takes offense at your racial insult, when you were using a perfectly innocent word, can you use that as a defense? Will it matter when social media has already tried and executed you, and are marching for your punishment?

People are being arrested for using the wrong pronouns. There's no way it can matter whether that was intentional or not. Hate speech laws are defined based not on what someone does, but on how someone else reacts to it, and it's impossible to list all the ways it could be applied. For all we know, people can get into trouble for something that started out as a 4chan prank.

There's no way to prove it one way or another. Proving intention to murder or conspire can be made using physical evidence, but how can you prove you were doing it with or without malice aforethought?

Were you warned and then persisted in your behavior? OK, maybe that would count, but it could still be a slip of the tongue or a typo. This is about as Orwellian as it gets.

That's why hate speech laws, even the best intentioned, scare the crap out of me, not because I support hate-speech, or use it, but because I know that it's way to easy to turn them into a witchhunt, and to prosecute people for completely benign behavior.

Boris Johnson is one of the men who lied about Europe so often the EU made the Euromyths page in an attempt to stem the tide. He's not a reliable source (in any case that's an opinion piece), and nor is the Telegraph.

There's a culture war going on, trans people are the current wedge issue, and people like Boris are absolutely part of it.

Again, we need the underlying facts, which I suspect include a longer history of targeted harassment rather than a driveby twitter insult.

I didn't suggest reliable

I’ve seen higher incidence of insults at working class bus stops, bus lines and workplaces. Sometimes it’s vagrants, sometimes it’s just people about their business who get fed up with something. On Caltrain I see fewer incidents than on the VTA or MUNI. I’ve taken them all. I’ve worked in working class neighborhoods and worked with them too. They tease each other a lot, sometimes they go over the line and then some get worked up, etc. They might throw epithets as a means of retaliation against perceived slights (as minor as asking to get by (passage)).

Now, I do hear indirect insults in white collar circles where they insult other people not present (for example berating working classes for the choices in life they make) but we’re not talking about indirect insults. We’re talking the ones where there is the potential for direct retaliation.

mc32 didn't say that working class people are constantly insulting each other, he described how they would likely react to insults.

> Most people on Twitter don’t insult each other. A low percentage of people do in both cases. Does Twitter facilitate and provide a more lubricated vehicle for insult? Possibly?

Possibly? Absolutely. The foundation of Twitter is the retweet. Without it, there is no sharing, and stuff can't 'go viral'. Most people don't insult each other, but they sure do like and retweet insults, false facts and other negative stuff ruining online communities.

Retweeting is the ultimate cop-out, because you didn't have the guts to say those things, but had no issue having it show up on your feed and those of your followers. You were just "sharing".

I think I get what you're saying. I've seen people call others "fat fucks" (heard that one yesterday) and shit like that in person in public, which is fairly extreme by face-to-face standards but very tame by twitter standards. I've never seen somebody accuse somebody else face-to-face of being a cannibalistic child rapist, but I've seen that on twitter! I think that's the kind of insult that would stand a decent chance of starting a physical altercation.