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Comment by throwaway98797 | Hacker News Reader

imagine this thought experiment

“You are presented incontrovertible evidence for the fact that your post inspired someone to kill”

should we lock you up for murder?

I think you meant this to be silly, but we do actually do this. Cult leaders are held responsible for the actions of their adherents, given the degree of control necessary to compel someone to kill on their behalf.

Only if they instruct their followers to actually commit violence though.

Right. That's the "incontrovertible evidence" part. The analogy requires each step to actually be true.

…yes?… but it’s more than you were a cult leader and your follower did something bad. You have to have psychologically manipulated them as well -ala Manson.

Yes, hence "incontrovertible evidence." I think the GP was trying to introduce some ambiguity with "inspired" instead of "manipulated."

this helps the point

reasoning by analogy across different criminality is filled with risks

i’m hopeful society and eventual the law will catch up with what is reasonable. sadly, i suspect what is reasonable to the majority won’t be reasonable to me.

or worse yet the flaw of reasoning will be borne by future generations like the blood letting cures of prior centuries

i offer no solution only the occasional comment bordering on full blown troll.

If it could be proven that:

1. You intended to inspire that person to kill.

2. You could reasonably know that someone who would read your post would actually murder someone.

Then yes, this is clearly murder by proxy. Tornado has never been shy about mentioning how it could be used for illegal purposes, nor was it unknown that NK was using it to launder their ill-gotten gains. Being sanctioned was only a question of time IMO.

That analogy makes no sense. If I point a gun at something and pull the trigger, it’s going to get shot, because that’s how guns work. It’s not a random other event that just so happened to occur after the first — it’s the expected outcome.

Yes. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/373

This only applies to directly soliciting a specific crime. That isn't what's happening here.

How is killing not a specific crime? Like usually the “incontrovertible” is the hard part.

It depends on what was said. If the post spoke the whole truth and nothing but the truth, e.g. "your wife has an affair", then no. If the post is "I'll give you $x for offing him", then yes. If the post is manipulative and slanderous it becomes more complicated. Maybe some of the blame, but not all of it?

The recent Kiwifarms incident suggests that the answer is "yes".

No, it's even worse than that. Because the question with KF is more like: "if someone unrelated and at a later time, screeches over and over about how someone killed themselves because of your posts, but just forgot to mention you when they did it while listing their reasons, is it your fault?"

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