Japan to start jailing people for online insults | Hacker News Reader

Japan to start jailing people for online insults

theverge.com

37 pointsassttoasstmgr30 comments

Here in Germany we once had a guy have his apartment raided by 6 cops because he wrote a tweet to a local politician that said "You're such a dick". That's all he said.

If anything, politicians should be the first people you are protected to critisize. Politicians work for you — the voting citizen — and if they are doing a poor job you have the right to let them know.

It is frankly insane to watch the frog boil in places where you can have your house raided for insulting someone online. There is a wave of government authoritarianism in many places around the globe, and many citizens are happy with these growing nanny states.

It was more like „you’re such a wiener“. The most harmless way of referring to a penis. Pimmelgate made it to Wikipedia.

Do you have some article related to this I could read ?

Germany is really similar to Japan in that it’s exterior seems very different to what’s going on internally.

I don't know of any in English; here's a German one. https://m.tagesspiegel.de/politik/pimmelgate-um-andy-grote-t...

English version, thanks to Google translate

https://m-tagesspiegel-de.translate.goog/politik/pimmelgate-...

This isn't a start. Its an increase of the maximum prison time of an existing law. It is a response to the bullying of Hana Kimura that led to her committing suicide. Two men connected to bullying her were fined 9,000 yen.

This law will be abused even if it had good intentions.

9000 yen? It does seem like if you’re going to have the law in the first place a fine that cheap sort of undercuts it. The crime enters the news, and then everyone sees the fine is less than the cost of a special edition fancy blu ray of her wrestling.

Just wait until someone indults an elected official.

‘Elected official’, appointed by default

This will really only help to secure Japans one party rule in my opinion. If it was really about peoples feelings, Japan would do a lot more for peoples mental health.

Posted about this also a few weeks back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31741219

"Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries." Insult?

Believe it or not, straight to jail.

That was a $2200 mistake.

Every law gets abused by politicians instead of it's original intent - Norwalk's Law

There should be some actual culpability for making decisions this obviously wrong.

How is it wrong? If you are a public figure getting bombarded with death wishes/threats or vile comments about how someone will kill and mutilate your family what are you supposed to do just take it? There has to be consequences for people like that, like there are in real life.

The issue, as the article says, is that the law doesn't define what an insult is. That means that a death threat or saying "you're stupid" could potentially both be prosecuted under this law.

That stems from the fact that any definition of an insult will be either incomplete or incorrect.

Not saying you're wrong, but why is this a fact?

Surely for a legal purpose you could make a pretty solid definition. If you want it to be fully black and white, you could enumerate all 'banned' insults.

> why is this a fact?

It is a rhetorical flourish, but my gut says that language is complex enough to craft statements that both meet the legal definition but aren't insults, or are insulting but don't meet the legal definition.

I'm also discounting circular definitions like insults are statements that are insulting which are tautological, but don't reveal any extra clarity.

> you could enumerate all 'banned' insults

I'd argue that this is not possible due to the set of insults having at least countably infinite cardinality.

It's irrelevant if the set of possible insults has infinite cardinality since we only care about the actual insults litigated on. If there is an insult which isn't in the list, the courts could decide if it fits their definition and through precedent it would be implicitly added to the list.

It's very relevant if you want a 'perfect' definition/insult list, but noone in policy land aims for perfection because they live in the real world.

A death threat is clearly different from an insult. And I'm not sure why you lump death wishes in with threat. Those are also clearly different.

Death threats are different, but insults can also lead to death (there's already an history of suicide as a direct result of sustained bullying)

In a distorted way, insults can have more critical consequences that threats.

No they are not. At least not in the so called civilised countries.

A threat of action is different than mean words. A threat of action is a violent act, where as saying mean things is just rude. A threat of action is a crime in multiple countries.

>“At the moment, even if someone calls the leader of Japan an idiot, then maybe under the revised law that could be classed as an insult,” Cho said.

You think someone who calls their leader an idiot should be jailed?

" MATTHIAS: Look. I-- I'd had a lovely supper, and all I said to my wife was, 'That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah.'

CROWD: Oooooh!

OFFICIAL: Blasphemy! He's said it again!"

This is this just criminalizing libel or does the prosecutor need to prove someone has been offended ?

The plain text exactly contradictions your question "The law says an insult means demeaning someone without a specific fact about them — as opposed to defamation"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com