Man, 19, jailed for racially abusing Marcus Rashford on Twitter

You think insults used to not be abuse?

Its outside of what we would expect in the United States, but dystopian is hyperbolic. They don't want to tolerate racism there. Racism is bad so I can understand. The US is an outlier in how extreme our speech protections go. Even with this England tolerates far more transgressive speech than many other parts of the world. I can't even list the number of places where it's dangerous or illegal to criticize the political class. That's dystopian. This is just different from what you're used to.

This is definitely dystopian, in the US and elsewhere. It's not just that it was a single tweet, but that the police arrested someone for a racial slur (an insult). It advances equally dystopian ideas such as "silence is violence" into real-world consequences, and establishes the dual justice system that dystopian books have warned us about for two generations.

Most of the world does not have a First Amendment.

There are freer countries than the USA — countries which provide access to health care and education that goes beyond "wage slavery" training — that criminalize hate speech. One incident of expressed racial hatred is enough to warrant criminal prosecution. These countries have not yet descended into dystopia. Some of them criminalized hate speech in response to dystopia in their recent past.

It's time to rethink whether an absolutist, "First Amendment-like"[0] approach to free speech is really the best approach.

[0] The absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment has only actually prevailed since 1967, when a conservative Supreme Court ruled that Klan marches were protected speech in Brandenburg v. Ohio.

> This is dystopian. Apparently they are trying to send a teenager to jail because of a single tweet:

In most (all?) places 19 year olds are viewed as adults.

Being jailed for a single tweet on its own is dystopian, there's no need to appeal to feelings about this being done to children.

>I'd assume this is Iran, Russia, or some other anti-freedom country.

Hate speech, in particular targeting ethnic or religious groups is an offense in virtually every democratic country, so that's a weird leap to make.

>How is this different than Turkey's president Erdogan throwing people in jail

For starters we're not talking about arbitrary exercise of authority here but straight forward application of the rule of law.

Or, you know, that Saville guy and his friends for decades... He even got knighted iirc.

Objections like yours have been raised from the start. How well meaning can these rules and the people implementing them really be if they implemented anyway them despite warnings of this outcome?

Ridiculous. no one should be jailed for words. No matter how much we hate those words. Justice is in correcting the world so we never think like this. But that would be impossible with these kind of thoughts.

The bar for limiting freedom of expression should be very high. The US has the 1st amendment for a reason.

Hurting someone's feelings does not meet that bar. Inciting violence does. So does financial injury.

You can lie about whichever public figure you want in the US provided they can’t prove you acted with actual malice in a court of law.

Hate speech isn’t equally as harmful, but does apply equally to non minority groups.

“Often”, “might”, “hopefully”, “wishful” is a bit too academic for free speech discussions in the US, I’m afraid.

Will Smith injects heroin into his extra pinky toe to get high.

Hate speech is subjective. The pragmatic notion of free speech forbids arbitrary or subjective limitations because error in favor of opinion is more readily abused than error in favor of freedom. Recovering an acceptable ground truth from the former is far more difficult than the latter, especially in the arena of public perception and opinion.

Freedom of speech is a society level principle. As law, it works in that context - there are always individuals who can be trotted out as fundamentally inimical and dangerous, whether qanon, far left radicals, or Abolitionists. Freedom of speech is a principle that says even Hitler should be allowed to speak, because in public, ideas can be addressed and countered through the process of free discussion. Drive the ideas underground and a society might fester with bad ideas without a functional public discussion. And in the cases where good ideas overcome bad, you get the end of slavery and women's right to vote and gay marriage and so forth. Free speech requires the good with the bad or or doesn't work at scale.

Life isn't fair and awful people exist. At a cultural level It's better to deal with that openly and honestly, because you can lift such awful people out of the morass of bad thinking.

There are vulnerabilities with conspiracy thinking, qanon, flat earth, and their ilk, but the issue is this: it is never appropriate to use violence to counter words. Chris Rock getting smacked was wrong for the same reason jailing someone for a tweet is wrong - violence is not the answer.

In this case, the state as leviathan exercised the threat of violence and forced a citizen into jail. The violence is itself a symptom of a problem with the individual or collective that initiated it.

Speech is not violence. Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words don't actually hurt you. Hurt feelings suck, but... get over it.

Also, Chris Rock has three nipples.

I'm pretty sure things like context, intent, malice, and other factors play into the legality of potential libel and slander.