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> The proposed law change will shift the focus on to the “harmful effect” of a message rather than if it contains “indecent” or “grossly offensive” content, which is the present basis for assessing its criminality.

I'm feeling very harmed after reading your comment. I realize the content's of your message are objectively harmless, but I "feel" harmed. So...off to jail you go.

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But on a more serious note. Like you said I it's insane that we have come to the point where what you actually say, you intentions, are completely irrelevant, it's all about how your message is perceived. What are the guardrails here?

Harmful effect can be anything. I could plagiarize the top ShowHN post from yesterday, post it here and get called out. Then try to get all the commenters prosecuted because my feelings were hurt? Is this seriously how this law works?

Hell an even more extreme example could be "hey it's really nice and sunny outside today", and someone will comment "I identify as darkness, this is hurtful to my people". Am I headed to the slammer for saying that the weather was nice?

> we have come to the point where what you actually say, you intentions, are completely irrelevant, it's all about how your message is perceived

The way this is typically framed is "impact matters more than intent". Like if you weren't watching where you were walking and accidentally stepped on someone's foot. You didn't _intend_ to harm them, but the overall _impact_ was that you did harm them.

As you rightly point out though, the elephant in the room is that impact in this context is not falsifiable. Unlike stepping on someone's foot where you could use instruments to measure how many capillaries were broken or if the bone is cracked, with words and feelings you can't actually empirically prove harm was done which is why I think enacting laws and policies that directly correlate with impact is a recipe for disaster...

IMO the best way to deal with impact has to be at the cultural level. "Hey, I find swear words offensive, can you stop?" "Oh sure, sorry about that, I won't swear around you". Bam, problem solved.

A society that transitions to: "Hey, I find swear words offensive, I'm going to report you to the psychological harm police" is one on the fast track to dystopia.

Hey, I find your comments offensive. Can you stop?

Hello I am Internet Officer Badge #762783.

Do you feel that user "clairity" harmed you? If so I will begin the paperwork for detainment and evaluation for reeducation by the Internet Feelings Agency (IFA).

Sounds like you have qualified immunity, and I am required to report, your status of legal superiority offends my sensibilities.

as happens so often, basketball provides a microcosm. fouls are called (and varying penalties assessed) for illegal moves that lead to an unfair advantage. implicit in that is that intent matters. many times, a foul isn’t assessed for an illegal maneuver because the intent to gain advantage wasn’t there (contact was happenstance) or no advantage was gained. however, some fouls are so dangerous (e.g., undercutting a shooter), that intent does not matter, and a foul is called even when done completely unintentionally.

as always, we have to consider the nuance and avoid overly broad statements/policies.

Uhm... Intent had nothing to do with a foul. The idea is the move is illegal because it can give you an advantage. It doesn't matter if you intend to or not. A lot of the fouls in basketball are not intentional. A common foul is attempting to block a shot and hitting the shooter's arm. No harm was intended, but a foul was called. About the only time intent matters in basketball is got a three point attempt.

that's completely missing the discretion refs have in calling fouls. if they didn't employ discretion, you'd have a foul every 5 seconds, rendering the game unwatchable/unplayable (e.g., the rule changes that the nba made this season). intent and (unfair) advantage are crucial to that discretion. again, nuance.

>IMO the best way to deal with impact has to be at the cultural level.

IMO the only reasonable way to deal with impact is to limit the law to purely physical impact. It should never be the business of any government to attempt to regulate, mandate, restrict or punish behavior based on the thought processes or feelings of anyone.

Not sure exactly how to quantify "physical impact", but in many US states, the crime of misdemeanor battery is defined as any "unwanted" contact, such that cases without any apparent physical harm become crimes based on thought processes and feelings of the aggrieved party.

> you are held responsible for other people's feelings, and for their feelings as a result of your words and actions, and

It also makes it impossible to distinguish between those whose feelings are truly hurt and those who pretend their feelings got hurt. On social media there is an appealing incentive for this later group to be more vocal and to inflict more harm as there is more audience. It's also a form of trolling: "Wonder if I can pretend to be offended and ban/cancel/pile on so and so. I'd get soooo many likes/retweets/upvotes etc!". We'd like to believe only a tiny fraction of people would engage in the later, but with online visibility and with no way to distinguish the two, the later group I think will start to get larger and larger over time.

This is also a benchmark of totalitarian nightmare. Can I denounce my neighbor and tell the ruling party they made anti-governmental remarks and have their family deported to a labor camp, if I don't like the choice of flowers in their garden? If the answer is "yes" then I may be living a totalitarian nightmare.

> The most fundamental piece of applicable psychology is the idea that you are responsible for your own thoughts, feelings, and actions, period. You are responsible for making yourself happy, for asserting yourself, for setting any boundaries you choose. People on Twitter can just block, or mute, or turn off their DMs for people they don't follow. What's wrong with that? Now there's a human right to use Twitter unhindered? They just spent the last decade telling us there wasn't!

You should try telling this to those who get abused online. I think people who regularly get rape threats and racial abuse, many of whom are calling for such legislation ( recently there have been numerous cases with black footballers and also some with female journalists), have a slightly higher priority than people who just want to insult freely without fear of consequences. Considering people have committed suicide over online harassment, it's not as simple as "just block the baddies".

We already have a crime of assault (as distinct from battery or rape). A credible threat is already a crime of assault and that’s as it should be.

“<Foobar> is a poopyhead”, even if it provokes an outsized negative reaction on Foobar’s part, is nowhere near the same thing.

Someone hurling racial slurs on Twitter or sending rape threats, from the comfort of their home without any credibility, isn't a "credible threat", but isn't insignificant.

It is also already now punishable by existing, sane laws in many countries.

Someone hurling racial slurs is not the same as someone sending rape threats

We currently (in the US, anyway) have laws against harassment and threats. They may not be well-enforced, but we do have those laws. Adding additional, vague laws will not help with enforcement, but it would open the door for authorities to prosecute lower and lower levels of 'harmful' behavior which go well beyond what you would want.

The solution is to crack down hard on the real harm, based on the many laws we already have on the books.

I can't speak for more than myself, but here's an alternative viewpoint: as a female that fits into other undisclosed minorities, and as an erotic artist who regularly gets threats (comes with the package) - I am far more afraid of the consequences of this dystopian line of thinking than I am of the occasional hate mobs. There are tools out there to deal with mobs/threats, even if it's unpleasant, but giving puritans a legal leverage to take down my art (and anyone who's creative work is remotely controversial) is going to wreck an unholy amount of damage. The typical line of attack is claiming that our art is "harmful" because of BDSM content, and the proposed legistlation would just reinforce that.

I feel like you mean the best in your heart, but would encourage anyone to think deeply before white knighting for minorities. A lot of times well meaning laws can have disastrous consequences in smothering less-powerful voices (laws against "immoral" content referring to anything sexual online regularly making things worse for actual sex workers, for instance). The ACLU has a long list of historical incidences where "legal" censorship ended up hurting civil rights activists, queer activists and creatives, and too many other groups to name.

> I feel like you mean the best in your heart, but would encourage anyone to think deeply before white knighting for minorities. A lot of times well meaning laws can have disastrous consequences in smothering less-powerful voices (laws against "immoral" content referring to anything sexual online regularly making things worse for actual sex workers, for instance). The ACLU has a long list of historical incidences where "legal" censorship ended up hurting civil rights activists, queer activists and creatives, and too many other groups to name.

Absolutely, especially in clown shitfests like the UK. That doesn't mean people who enjoy racially abusing teenagers on Twitter should just be left to do so. There's a middle ground between banning anything anyone might deem "offensive" (like erotica or BDSM) and the wild west.

>I think people who regularly get rape threats and racial abuse, many of whom are calling for such legislation ( recently there have been numerous cases with black footballers and also some with female journalists), have a slightly higher priority than people who just want to insult freely without fear of consequences.

They don't have higher priority than the rest of society, which enjoy an important lack of authoritarianism in this regard. It's not about wanting to insult freely, but about the right to offend.

> A person's freedom ends where another man's freedom begins

I don't know why you think your freedom to offend/insult is higher than another person's freedom to not be offended/insulted.

I think inherent in the right to speak is the possibility to say things which risk some other person experiencing (or claiming) offense.

Perhaps I claim to be genuinely offended/insulted by speech in the form of a haiku. You can’t prove that my claimed offense/insult is not genuine, yet it would be ridiculous to ban such speech or prosecute it.

I think there is therefore a necessary middle ground of speech which is legal but for which someone claims it offends them. If it offends some people, see xkcd 1357.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

I was deeply hurt and insulted by your comment, please delete it immediately and stop posting on the internets!

No one has a freedom to not be offended. It they did, then it would be impossible to have free speech. As there is no way to know if your speech won't offend everyone.

This proposed law is discriminatory against autistic people (of which I am one) and, possibly, other people who, due to difficulty in reading a room or difficulty in self-censoring or difficulty in separating fact from imagination, might say or post offensive things without intending to cause hurt. (Or, maybe, without intending to hurt anyone who actually exists, as opposed to their imagined enemies.) I could also add that it's discriminatory against people who were raised in certain environments, but I've noticed that "They were raised that way" isn't seen as a valid defense, as it's apparently viewed as axiomatic that everyone has a chance to revise all of their implicit biases before posting to Twitter.

Is it morally appropriate to get together a group of your friends and pressure someone to commit suicide on social media? By your logic, it seems that it is; their suicidal reaction to malicious and intentional verbal abuse is not anyone else's problem but their own.

Many people seem to feel otherwise, and there are laws in place in various regions as a result. Are they wrong to choose to restrict your speech in favor of the collective good? If not, then what is the dividing line between "verbal abuse is okay" and "verbal abuse is not okay"? If it merely drives them to self-harm rather than suicide, is that morally acceptable, in some way that causing suicide is not?

Societies have a long-standing tradition of restricting individual behaviors for the collective good. Wishing that societies wouldn't this is hopeless, because it seems like every society that doesn't restrict individual behaviors to some degree ends up becoming a textbook example of how not run a society.

I read your moral position here as "if you are too frail to resist someone's words, you don't deserve protection from their verbal abuse with malicious intent". If I have misunderstood how your moral reasoning applies to the topic under discussion — trolls willfully causing psychological harm on the Internet — please help me understand where I've misapplied your logic.

>Is it morally appropriate to get together a group of your friends and pressure someone to commit suicide on social media? By your logic, it seems that it is; their suicidal reaction to malicious and intentional verbal abuse is not anyone else's problem but their own.

Did you intend to pressure them to do that? If you acted with that INTENT, and external evidence proves it, then NO, by OP's logic, that abuse is the perpetrator's problem.

>Societies have a long-standing tradition of restricting individual behaviors for the collective good.

In the UK? Come off it.

> I read your moral position here as "if you are too frail to resist someone's words, you don't deserve protection from their verbal abuse with malicious intent"

I’m not the original parent, but I read (and share) the position as:

Barring intent by the speaker to inflict direct and immediate physical harm, if you are too frail to maintain your mental health in the face of someone else’s speech (or you pretend to be), then you are not served — and neither is justice, fairness, or truth — by the state applying its monopoly on violence to forcibly silence others at your behest.

Instead, each individual is personally responsible for their own mental well-being, while the state’s responsibility extends no further than offering services and support to help enable your own individual resiliency.

In the case of the UK's laws, they are targeting people with specific intent to cause psychological harm. That's a critical component of "trolling": if no harm was caused to the abused party, then the trolls wouldn't bother, because they're fixated on hurting others for personal pleasure. So, then, "barring intent" is an invalid condition for this discussion, right?

I said direct and immediate physical harm.

“Psychological harm” is something else entirely.

Your position presupposes the guilt and innocence of both parties.

The individual claiming “psychological harm” can just as easily be the perpetrator, and psychological harm will be inflicted on the victim by the state when they’re arrested for upsetting someone with narcissistic personality disorder.

I do not presuppose guilt or innocence, but a claim must be made in order to reach a judgment on either, so all claims are presupposed in that sense.

It seems unlikely that a UK court would reach such a judgment in favor of the perpetrator, as opposed to simply jailing them.

What constitutes intent when it comes to words? Do you have some magical device that enables you to extract intent from people's heads?

I thought tru-crime was just science fiction and yet we have multiple individuals actually supporting a dystopian future where that's a real thing.

It’s not necessarily magical, but we call those devices “judges” and “juries” here in the states, referring to those whose roles in the legal system include judging someone’s intentions. They usually do so without widespread access to telepathy or divination, and so too their UK counterparts.

There are problems with that system aside from that. The UK specifically will always have to content the case when they put a fine on someone making a pup doing an unfavorable gesture as a joke. It wasn't a good joke in itself, but it really lived by the reaction.

They judge "intentions" after a physical crime has been committed using those intentions to come up with appropriate punishment.

They do not place judgement on intention alone. There's a clear difference.

Incorrect. Judges regularly evaluate the intentions of non-criminals where no crime has been committed in family courts and in cases of contract law (disagreement is not unlawful), and juries have the ability of jury equity (UK) or nullification (US) to declare someone's actions as non-criminal even if the actions they are accused of are accepted as fact and are (by definition of law) unlawful. There is also "contempt of court", in which a judge may declare anyone criminal for refusing to comply with the judge's orders.

This all demonstrates that judges and juries are familiar with evaluating intentions and criminality within the frameworks of law provided. A framework of law may declare certain speech as unlawful (such as obscenity or slander) may declare intentions a key factor in criminality, and the systems of law that judge the legality and criminality of that speech are already in place in the UK (and US) to support laws that criminalize speech with malicious intent.

Then explain why a new law needs to be passed.

Things like slander and libel require clear demonstration that you've been damaged monetarily etc.

I don't see how you can clearly show damages from a person deciding to commit suicide or feeling bad because of trolls. Prove it.

Regardless, at the end of the day I don't really care whether there's a legal framework in place. I don't agree that it's helpful to society at all and I'm going to err on the side that almost no speech harmful to anyone and should NEVER result in imprisonment. There's almost no road where criminalizing trolls on the internet leads to a better society or helps mentally ill people.

I've laid out my concerns about the arguments presented by HN commenters, and laid out how societal structures permit such a new law to be passed.

The original article does a credible job of explaining why a new law may be passed. You may agree or disagree, or you may require more information than is yet available, but that's for you to determine on your own.

Whether there are already societal structures in place isn't relevant. If there weren't they would just create them anyway.

>Is it morally appropriate to get together a group of your friends and pressure someone to commit suicide on social media?

You are mistaking morality with legality. Morally its wrong, legally it shouldn't be.

>I read your moral position here as "if you are too frail to resist someone's words, you don't deserve protection from their verbal abuse with malicious intent".

Again, mistaking morality with legality. I'm not the OP, but that's my legal position, though it's not my moral position.

>Societies have a long-standing tradition of restricting individual behaviors for the collective good. Wishing that societies wouldn't this is hopeless, because it seems like every society that doesn't restrict individual behaviors to some degree ends up becoming a textbook example of how not run a society.

All coherent societies restrict individual behavior for the collective good. That doesn't mean that these restrictions should be dependent on entirely subjective things like thoughts and feelings. Minimal restrictions on individual behavior such as barring interpersonal violence or stealing property are more than ample for a society to run just fine without devolving into anarchy. I would argue we already have far too many legal restrictions on behavior, and we should be seeking to trim these restrictions away instead of pile more on and strip away what few freedoms we have left.

> That doesn't mean that these restrictions should be dependent on entirely subjective things like thoughts and feelings.

That doesn't necessarily mean that restrictions should be dependent on entirely subjective things.

Subjectivity alone is not sufficient cause to refuse considering whether the benefits of a proposed legal restriction on behavior outweigh the drawbacks. Subjectivity is a drawback, not a deal-breaker, and must be evaluated in full context alongside the benefits of the proposal. Subjectivity is a serious concern, and should never be glossed over or minimized in such evaluations. Subjectivity carries great risk, and should be revisited and reevaluated over time to ensure that the outcomes are considered against the intentions.

We are reacting to a tweet that has very little content, notably how high is the bar for psychological harm. It is undoubtedly higher than making someone feel bad, but the question is: is it high enough?

Consider your words, "you are responsible for your own thoughts, feelings, and actions". For the most part, that is true. On the other hand, we also consider some segments of society as vulnerable. In some of those cases they do not have full control of their thoughts, feelings, or actions. Sometimes it is due to a lack of understanding or experience (e.g. children and youth), sometimes it is due to psychological disorders. The question becomes, who is actually responsible in cases where trolls unintentionally or intentionally exploit that disorder?

The other thing must be considered is the magnitude of the infraction. A competent person may be able to handle a random death threat. The person would have to be considerably more resilient to endure an effectively anonymous person stalking them and threatening them. I would question the ability of anyone to handle that sort of behaviour for an extended period of time unless they have the means to prove the threat is not credible or to protect themselves. There is a reason why some people of means go around with bodyguards, and it isn't solely about their physical protection.

Credible death threats are already illegal and can be handled through both criminal prosecution and civil restraining orders. We don't need any new laws. Sometimes the existing laws aren't enforced effectively, but piling on more laws won't solve that problem.

You are right. We should probably have a law the prevents adding laws to already handled laws.

With you until the point where it is suggested that Web 3.0 can solve anything!

> The fundamental problem with it, is it makes society more enmeshed (a pathological relationship dynamic). People start caring more about going with the grain, the mainstream opinion, and rejecting the troublemakers, because they don't want to be cast out too; and they self-censor more.

This is by design.

Before social media, to have your voice heard you needed to get help from either: a billionaire-owned TV Station or Newspaper or the State Sponsored Approved truth Station (in this case, the BBC but CBC and whatever official news network the party maintains in your local dictatorship will do).

Now, all you have to do is simply post it online on a property owned by some billionaire who doesn't really care (as long as it's legal he'll pocket the add revenue) in faraway California. You can guess who's mad about loosing all that control over who gets to be in the news and who doesn't...

I'm not a fan of any law which could be potentially be misused to inhibit free speech, But the context of this law reminded me the row of Elon Musk calling the U.K diver Unsworth who played a major role in rescuing the Thai children struck in underwater cave - a 'Pedo Guy' on Twitter because Unsworth called the submarine supposedly fielded by Elon for the rescue as a P.R. stunt.

Elon did get acquitted in the U.S. court for the defamation suit on this as free speech laws in U.S. has very little riders, But I wonder if this supposed 'pychological harm' law could have delivered a verdict in favor of Unsworth in a U.K. court.

>Unsworth testified that “being branded a pedophile” had made him feel “humiliated, ashamed, dirty”. “I was effectively given a life sentence without parole,” he said. “It hurts to talk about it.”[1]

As a side note, Free speech laws in India has very specific riders when it comes to defamation, which of course are constantly abused[2]. But theoretically, Elon would have definitely been found guilty under that law; Theoretical because he's rich.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/dec/06/elon-musk...

[2] https://blog.ipleaders.in/right-to-freedom-of-speech/

The problem is not with trolling per se (there is troll-like behaviour IRL, and we have learned to deal with it appropriately) but with scale and amplification of trolling by that oligopoly of a small handful of social platforms serving millions of locked-in users each with tailored content that their algorithms consider “engaging” for this particular person.

Big Social is in symbiosis with trolls and profits by giving them platform, and I suspect this will remain so for as long as their business model has the advertisers as primary paying customers and main source of revenue.

That said, targeted persistent trolling (I prefer to call it bullying though) is horrible, and I’m sure there are extreme cases where jail may actually be warranted.

I'll take the other side of that argument.

In a world where we spend increasingly more time online, sociopaths and other bad actors have been handed far too much power/influence and that's net negative for society.

Like it or not, the online world has become a public space--The Public Space. And, now we're talking about metaverses that will further immerse us.

If someone were to follow a person down a public street, screaming obscenities and generally harassing them, of course we'd want the rightful laws on the books against such a thing to be enforced. Why should this be any different in the online world?

> … sociopaths and other bad actors have been handed far too much power/influence and that's net negative for society.

Why would you assume that the sociopaths and bad actors wouldn’t be the ones exploiting laws like this to do great harm to those they disagree with?

The San Francisco Police generally don't do anything to stop deranged homeless drug addicts from following people down the street, screaming obscenities and generally harassing them. SF residents seem to be fine with that state of affairs, or at least it doesn't bother them enough to vote to change it.

And to be clear I don't intend that as a criticism of SF necessarily. The point is that there is no universal worldwide standard of tolerable behavior, and some people are apparently willing to put up with a lot.

Would you be happy if the laws of Saudi Arabia or North Korea were enforced online? They might consider you a sociopath and bad actor.

>The San Francisco Police generally don't do anything to stop deranged homeless...

I don't know that that's true, but I think it's pretty clear that homeless, mentally ill drug addicts are a different problem.

>The point is that there is no universal worldwide standard of tolerable behavior

These arguments always baffle me, as they essentially suggest that nothing means anything and we have no way of determining what a civilized, functioning society should look like. Yet, here we are — with laws and everything.

There's a reasonableness standard applied to these things. We apply it for every scenario where gray areas exist. It's also why we have judges, juries and a court system.

>Would you be happy if the laws of Saudi Arabia or North Korea were enforced online?

I'm missing how the laws of Saudi Arabia or North Korea have anything to do with this case in the UK or a hypothetical one in the US.

I can tell you're not a fan of Reddit

> You are responsible for making yourself happy, for asserting yourself, for setting any boundaries you choose. People on Twitter can just block, or mute, or turn off their DMs for people they don't follow.

This solution does not account for the following ways a troll can harass you:

* sockpuppets pinging you,

* sockpuppets impersonating you,

* sockpuppets mass reporting you, thereby suspending your accounts

* finding people you are friends/family with and sending them rape/death/bomb threats or doing the above,

* finding where you work and sending your workplace similar threats,

* putting up websites involving your legal name and face to make allegations you're a child predator/criminal optimized for search engines.

It might seem callous, and it might be (and I know some people have poor mental health at times and social media onslaughts won't help) but my solution is to not let things affect me. If Viktor Frankl could do it in death camps, I think it's something everyone can rely on. You can also become the heel, become the "villain", and use that abuse to gain influence rather than lose it; most social media abuse is unjustified so there's nothing unethical about this. The alternative is having people go to jail or get a suspended sentence because they insulted J.K Rowling in a tweet.

Honestly I like to hope there is a middle ground between "insulting a public figure is grounds for jailtime" and "sending constant rape and bomb threats to non-public figures and all of their family for years on end is a perfectly legal thing to do that people should just get used to, I mean, if someone could endure literal genocide someone else should endure constant threats to their and their social circle's safety".

You are without a doubt a public figure if you put yourself on social media. Many people have warned against oversharing and have stated that people will want regulation when they get exposed to the negative side, the reason why PR agencies exist. But these laws would affect everybody.

Surely there must be independent legislation against at least part of that behaviour.

Honestly half of that is already illegal and the other half is more of a problem with how social media fundamentally works. The idea of making laws so someone doesn't spam pings is preposterous.