Where Online Hate Speech Can Bring the Police to Your Door
web.archive.org
web.archive.org
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10668005/Man-avoids...
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43864133
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/politics/john-scriven-pla...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11066477/Veteran-ar... - literally arrested for a tweet that "caused anxiety".
If you want more, check out count dankula's (mark meechan) second YouTube channel, he covers pretty much all these high profile "offensive tweet" cases. Most of them are ridiculous.
Some of this stuff makes me uncomfortable about where to draw the line here. I, frankly, don't know. What makes me even more uncomfortable is not that the USA draws the line differently (better? worse? Just right? I don't know) but that so many USA'ians are so utterly cocksure that their way is right and everywhere else must be wrong if they do it differently (Edit: extensively in online posts such as here; in american's I've known I've very rarely found it). There seems no possibility in that mindset for any self-reflection or questioning, and that's dangerous.
Just my tuppence ha'penny.
It is a Central American value.
Even now that's the case where if you're wealthy you have more speech than others. You can call people all sorts of vile things and sic your fanbase on them, you can mouth off to police and if you want to you can sue people into the ground. The rest of us can get thrown in jail for vaguely insulting a man in blue's honor.
How quickly people forget that our political apparatus had a woman harassed and jailed for laughing at Jeff Sessons.
Only in a few narrow places & times might someone be "thrown in jail for vaguely insulting a man in blue's honor", and those are typically undone when the full process runs.
The anecdote you share, with the important details filed-off, is that a woman was prosecuted not for merely "laughing at Jeff Sessions" but the more specific charge of disruptive behavior during a government hearing. Opinions differ as to whether he behavior rose to the level of prosecutable disruption, but an actual criminal jury of 12 citizens was somehow convinced to unanimously rule her behavior merited conviction. But then when the full legal process ran, an appelate judge called the conviction 'absurd', throwing out the jury's conviction.
Ultimately, that demonstrates that like in other countries, officials in the US can misuse their powers-in-the-moment to attempt some amount of speech punishment, sure. But further that in the US, you can appeal to 'free speech' as a defense, and thus escape punishment for things that might keep you punished in the UK & other somewhat-liberal democracies with lesser speech protections.
Which again, you ignore that we had (and in many places still have) an amount of people which simply did not have the same free speech rights that you say America was founded upon.
This is indeed true, and a problem, and if you have ideas for how it can be improved, I'd be all ears.
But, I've not found any country/region/system that doesn't have some level of this problem. The US's system, of required public formalities for certain charges to proceed, & certain guarantees of time limits, & avenues for release/acquittal, is pretty strong compared to anywhere else. (In the Netherlands, a software developer has been in custody for a couple months now without any specific charges/case being revealed to him or the public.)
And, it's kind of inherent to any system for there to be some margins-of-abusive-discretion that are hard to eliminate, and time-limited steps-in-a-judicial-process where unavoidable "punishment" comes even from a process that hasn't decided yet. So mentioning the mere existence of such unevenness doesn't really say anything, either way, about the relative value the US culture, or legal system, puts on free speech.
What does shed light on the value the US puts on free speech is whether such irreducible annoyances are larger or smaller, with respect to speech, than other countries and other eras. And at every step of US history, even dark days like say Wilson's persecution of WW1 draft-resisters, or Hoover's mid-20thC persecution of civil rights movements, the US had more space for speech, more defenses for those accused of speech-related offenses, and larger cultural/social support (in both legal/political action and the commercial 'blocking-and-tackling' of actually publishing & disseminating speech without outsider veto) than almost anywhere else.
That's where people should be able to see the real, high, & enduring value the US has always put on free speech, if not neurotically obsessed on only negative examples, & scattered hypocrisies, blinding them to relative-magnitudes.
If Americans have not consistently enjoyed equal free speech – but even in such inequality, almost all Americans had far more free speech than they'd have had anywhere else – then that's more a knock on the US' value of equality, while confirming its leading value of free speech.
The last 2, gets a bit self-congratulatory. Jim crow laws (until 1965). Emmet Till didn't get much rights to free wolf-whistling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till And plenty more.
"If Americans have not consistently enjoyed equal free speech [...] then that's more a knock on the US' value of equality"
If you don't have 'equal free speech' then you don't have 'free speech', full stop.
Not at all. Free speech is not binary.
More is better, & the cultures that have consistently had more speech tolerance than elsewhere - like the US, in its formal documents & actual practices – are showing that free speech is a more central value to them.
Race is a far less salient variable affecting speech, in the US, than income or education.
Many of the US's most fearless speakers, often relying on our legal protections or cultural appreciation, especially with respect to criticizing the powerful, have been from categories of people that are otherwise economically disadvantaged.
And, their practice of free speech, aided by the underlying high value from the culture & legal system, has helped to correct those other inequities.
If you had a country where 95% of individuals had absolute freedom of speech but 5% did not, is that more or less free than a country where 100% of people had near-absolute freedom of speech?
What about when those percentages collide? When the free speech of the haves results in the suppression of the have nots? And historically the freedom in US has been in theory and not in practice what with how it's been used to hunt down perceived communists, minorities and dissidents.
The best possible evidence against the idea that more == better is played out in the various sites that try to have absolute freedom of speech. The end result is that you get a large amount of people that others either do not want to associate with or get chased out by the rabid angry mass. Websites and forums form a sort of microculture that prove you need some guardrails to prevent the bus from going off the edge.
But yes, more free speech – in terms of being able to honestly express your opinions, without the threat of punishment by the state – is better. From any particular state of "absolute" or "near-absolute" free speech, giving some people extra freedom to speak without state punishment is an improvement.
We were talking about the US, as a polity/legal-system. Private forums can and will set their own standards. But the US public-sphere, and what the government can get away with punishing, has for centuries had world-leading free-speech guarantees.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/08/562823691...
The mistake is assuming that the punishment begins upon conviction when going through the legal system is often punishment enough and a big chilling effect on free speech.
It was only since the decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio that the First Amendment has been interpreted broadly enough to protect all speech that is not otherwise itself an illegal act (as in CSAM) or does not incite "imminent lawless action".
However, my concerns with free speech would never include the types of things the UK is enforcing here. I am not worried about people being upset or hurt by mean things, I am worried about false information and propaganda.
Obviously it’s not okay or legal to threaten someone, but on the other hand we also get taught to a large degree that you have no right to not have your feelings hurt. This intuitively makes sense to me too-can you imagine if you tried to speak nearly anything and had to ensure that no one, anywhere, had their feelings hurt or felt anxious from it?
Speech outside that may not get you arrested, but it can certainly have personal and professional implications.
As an example (and they’re not all this clear-cut), it’s perfectly legal to espouse “plain racism” but it’s not a generally accepted thing, nor considered moral, and quite likely to cause you some backlash or, if applicable, loss of professional standing.
I agree, allowing bad opinions to be countered publicly is really important. Peer pressure is way more effective in changing bad opinions than unilateral pressure from someone preconceived to be a political enemy. The latter usually just cements bad opinions as justified.
But, hasn't the UK's "current system of government" been at least as continuous as the US for longer? (Has any regime-discontinuity happened since, say, the adoption of the US Constitution?)
That aside, I think there is enough evidence that restricting political speech in a democracy kind of defeats the point and it disenfranchises people. Some counter this by saying “well we only want to ban the extreme speech”, but I’d argue those are exactly the people who are likely to take up pitchforks first.
A right to only “moderate” political speech doesn’t make any sense. Moderate speech isn’t a target of censorship.
Forcing people into silence definitely will not solve the problem. It will only further convince people that they were right all along.
To fix this, SV needs to get their shit together and figure out how to solve the filter bubble problem. Traditional media used editorial discretion to solve this problem, but SV seems to think they can make more money by skipping that step entirely.
However, the current state of politics in the US is by far not as bad as many moments in our past.
But free speech must allow for filter bubbles and confirmation bias, and elevating controversy over quality. Free speech must permit manipulation and distortion, indoctrination and radicalization.
>Traditional media used editorial discretion to solve this problem, but SV seems to think they can make more money by skipping that step entirely.
SV was exercising editorial discretion by moderating content and banning troublemakers, but free speech supporters have decided doing so violated their free rights. You can't have your cake and eat it, too. "Editorial discretion" by definition is a mean of forcing people into silence, which you're against. You want the crazies to be able to express themselves, so the modern social media landscape is what you want, because that's exactly what it optimizes for.
I am criticizing SV for their choices, but I don't think they should be forced to do what I think is right.
Our ancestors gambled their lives (fighting, killing, and sometimes dying to your ancestors) for these rights.
So, please understand, our belligerence is an aspect of our culture we've had since the beginning.
And if you ever get sick of your government's antics and want somewhere to go, you can always move here! :)
So no questioning it, no evidence or justification given, just a plain "we're right"[1]. You've made my point.
[1] and by implication "everyone else is wrong"
Perhaps we learned it from our parent nation.
And, you're right. Everyone else is wrong on this issue. Unfortunately, you're going to have to live with that fact...
There are a lot of things to criticize the US for, believing people should be able to speak their minds aint one of em.
Yes, we are better in that regard than any country that restricts speech more than us. Don't like what I just said? Don't care, I live in the US, where such things are allowed.
Free-speech absolutism is a position you might rethink if you had panzerkampfwagens rolling over your fields in living memory. Visit Auschwitz, then have a think.
And fwiw, there are limits to free speech in the US, too. You could get yourself arrested for shouting "Fire!" in a cinema. Does that bother you? Do you feel your rights are curtailed, if you cannot freely express your opinion that a cinema is on fire?
> You could get yourself arrested for shouting "Fire!" in a cinema.
Not only is that not true, the justice that quote is based off of later changed his mind.
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> Visit Auschwitz, then have a think.
The US is not a perfect country by any means, but in this we are superior. Freedom is risky, the question is whether the curtailing of freedom is worth it.
No way in hell is it worth having the police show up at your door because of a meme image you shared on facebook.
And I agree. But that wasn't the point at all. Please re-read my post.
On the one hand, there’s a long tradition of free speech absolutism, but on the other, also a long tradition of punishing speech. Then it ends up in court where usually it’s declared to be protected by the Bill of Rights.
Freedom needs to be re-litigated periodically.
Isn't this some kind of mob rule basically? This is hard to avoid I think, but it is certainly detrimental to any society. It's at least something that this is not cast into legislation in the US (yet).
Nothing else is indication of any crime whatsoever.
That’s a crystal clear threat of violence.
https://preview.redd.it/mmksakh888t21.jpg?auto=webp&s=f4dc90...
Say it in a bar with your friends if you wanna make a stance or a joke, avoid global social networks.
Maybe UK is simply showing its true face, but exposing in public your ingenuity has never ended well.
There's a reason why McDonalds writes "Caution: Contents Hot" on their hot beverages.
Long story short: if you know sth can happen, you should try to prevent it, or you'll be considered part of the problem, even if only partially, the consequences could be bad.
EDIT: as explained here[1], the true story is a story of underestimating the risks.
Free speech on social private networks is not the same thing as free speech in person and it's absolutely not risk free.
People know that, but keep thinking "it won't happen to me" despite the fact TOS say very clearly what can and cannot be said and that a big "report" button is there for anyone to use.
nobody has ever been arrested for saying horrible things at the pub with their friends. Nobody would have ever said the same things on national TV. But suddenly we started thinking social networks are like the pub while they are more ubiquitous than the TV.
The woman was deemed partially responsible for the burns, because she was, the real reason is that McDonalds knew that people burnt themselves before, but did nothing to inform to customers of the risks.
People know that stunts on social networks have been punished, but keep making them anyway.
Which is not exactly a smart move and doesn't limit anyone's free speech, I am still free to say the same things, just not in front of a WorldWide audience.
Social networks will report immediately any "not conforming" opinion to avoid being the next McDonalds, but on a global scale (billions in fines instead of the 640k dollars MD paid)
https://www.enjuris.com/blog/resources/mcdonalds-hot-coffee-...
It would have prevented Stella Liebeck from even starting a lawsuit.
McDonalds coffee temperature is the same that it's commonly used for hot tea in England (on the lower side, to be precise)
The water temperature for black tea should be 90 to 98 C and for green tea around 80 C.
It's all about not warning customers of the risks involved in managing hot beverages (in England they are probably asking how is it possible that adult people can't handle hot water, but that's another story, for another time)
there is no such thing as "temperature the coffee should be served at"
hot tea is still served at an higher temperatures than coffee
your missing the point: don't use social networks as they ate are a private space, they are not and they even warned you about it.
please.
These raids are now happening in places like the UK and Canada too, places with a history of protecting speech.
It seems unless your legal system has enshrined free speech as unassailable at the highest levels of law, you will slowly have those rights removed one step on a slippery slope at a time.
I don't know about Canada, but I've never considered the UK to have "a history of protecting speech", or indeed a culture that particularly values free speech. They seem very keen on censorship and surveillance.
That suggests to me that the people and their representatives want these laws to be in place.
Just like the people and their representatives in the USA don't want to change the constitution to remove the first amendment.
The constitution in the US protects so much only because its government is otherwise dysfunctional - nobody ever has a majority large enough to change things. This doesn't happen in other countries - the current UK government has had a sizeable majority since 2019.
As for all the Europeans that like to call the world’s oldest democracy dysfunctional - the fact that it’s hard to do things nationally without widespread support is a feature, not a bug.
I don't see anything about the constitution that protects it against the whims of the public.
If a majority of the people in the US (and the people they elect) all agreed to change part of the constitution, that could happen.
And obviously a piece of parchment cannot force people to do something if people unanimously decided to do otherwise.
But preventing the whims of the just-barely-a-majority-of-those-who-voted from changing such an important thing, is important and useful.
Left wing activists were spied on, imprisoned, and harassed all through the 20th century. With approval from people who otherwise crow on about the constitution.
Pacifism was illegal in WWI and people were jailed for speaking out against the war. Trade unionists were rounded up and beaten by police. Socialists had their phones tapped. Black nationalists and civil rights activists thrown in jail. Communists blacklisted and lost their jobs.
Free speech absolutism is a fantasy from the right. Only for protecting speech emanating from the right. When they are threatened by communism or related ideologies, they are more than willing to toss it out the window and did so constantly over a 100 year period.
Which makes all the current crowing from the right about their feelings of persecution around identity politics and "cultural marxism" twice as ridiculous.
Even here in Canada-- when left wing activists gather in downtown cores and try to disrupt things even a 1/10th of the level that the "freedom convoy" did last winter, they are tear gassed within an inch of their life. I was there in Quebec City at the Summit of the Americas and that's what was done to us. Same at the G20 protests in Toronto, where hundreds were kettled and illegally detained by police within a couple hours of the initiation of protests.
When far rightists did it, they were left to occupy international border crossings (with arms!) and disrupt commerce and traffic in our capital city for four weeks before police finally intervened. And I get to hear from Americans on hackernews about what an oppressive state Canada is. It's preposterous.
It’s sad people are duped by this bad reasoning. You’re seeing the world through tribal scorekeeping lens.
The obvious solution is to extend the rights more universally. This used to be what the ACLU did in America - fight for everyone’s access to free speech. (Sadly they’ve lost their way and no longer do this.)
But I am arguing about the nature of said rights and where they come from.
People like me on the socialist left have never harboured any illusion that pieces of paper like constitutions protect people from oppression by the state.
Rights come from collective, mass power. People in the streets. When the state and its corporate masters is threatened, it will use force to put it down.
It's not a matter of favoured tribe. It's a matter of pointing out the preposterous nature of libertarian ideology. It tries to refocus the frame out of the actual material conditions of what is happening to the world, onto pieces of paper. But remains blind to the actual physical conflicts in the world. And in the end most so-called constitutionalists will turn a blind eye to repression of the left when it becomes a threat to the order that they benefit from.
Citation needed.
It sounds like you and they agree on a lot of stuff. Great. There are a lot of other people who find that rights they believed were guaranteed are in fact not. And I would not be so sure you will continue to agree with those five people indefinitely.
If something is a crime, it might not be legal to instruct people on how they can go about doing it? Which does seem like it could be problematic.
I’m not certain quite what your point is.
I don't even know what I would do if the government "confiscated" my devices. First, probably freak the fuck out. Then, try desperately to log out of every service I was logged in to? Hope they aren't interested in my nudes? Go crawling to HR and explain that our entire codebase, and probably a couple sensitive keys, are now at some police department until, who knows when? And then go buy a new $1000 phone and $3000 laptop.
"Confiscating devices" sounds like such an ordinary, routine thing, but it is so incredibly, profoundly invasive and would upend my life as much as being throw in jail for a week, only it would cost me a lot more. The bar should be ridiculously high for that kind of government intrusion.
You do something (full disk encryption) before the government confiscates your devices.
UK doesn't have a concept of presumption of innocence. So guilty until proved otherwise
Considering we didn't know governments were using and abusing Cellebrite until recently, and didn't know about the 0-days they hoard until recently, I'm going to assume they can decrypt phones/disks until proven otherwise. The government has a _lot_ of resources.
This should not stop anyone from working towards encrypting everything. Even if it can be decrypted or avoided it still increases the overall resources needed for surveillance.
The actual solution, long term, needs to be a social one. As a society we need to realize the sensitive nature of those devices and find reasonable boundaries for law enforcement.
In Germany it is quite normal nowadays. The legislation for protecting your own home has been weakened over the course of a decade to a point where you have to expect it if you share anything online that is not 100% clean, especially if it goes against current administration.
In the article it sounds like they argue that this is to prevent another Nazi Germany, but it sounds a lot more like fashism what they try to achieve here. You can happily spread misinformation and hate about politicians of non-established parties. You might get sued under civil law, but your home is certainly not invaded, you get arrest and your stuff confiscated.
Another case that exemplifies this is "Pimmelgate" where a Twitter user said to a Andy Grote (senator of Hamburg at that time iirc) "you are such a dick/cunt"* (Du bist so 1 Pimmel) and found himself in the same situation as the guy in this article.
Hate speech legislation is especially stringently interpreted when it comes to higher officials.
*: I'd say the harshness of the insult is in between those words. It's slightly more than nothing.
The other thing is, do we really want a sacred caste of people who can't be criticized? This gets uncomfortably close to the incredibly oppressive lèse-majesté laws that some jurisdictions have.
That's effectively what a supreme court justice said should be the case last week.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/09/29/supreme-c...
Were you thinking of a different quote from your source? This quote, which seemed closest to your intent, does not at all say what you were suggesting.
Since 1948, all people are due the basic human right of dignity. Sacred caste or not.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Hum...
“No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.”
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
“All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.“
And otherwise:
“In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.”
The harm is in stochastic terrorism. You can make up lies that are intended to spur people who feel they have nothing to lose into action.
https://csl.mpg.de/en/projects/philosophical-and-public-secu...).
It's similar to the concept of blood libel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel
For example, imagine that online discourse on some fringe website that has a few hundred thousand members devolves into a theory that some house in your neighborhood is harboring a secret dungeon full of children underneath it. There is no direct threat to you per se, but a few hundred thousand people think that a house - maybe your house - has a basement full of unspeakable horrors. As the rumor spreads and grows the chances of your house being broken into by one of the believers goes up exponentially. Suddenly nobody in your neighborhood is safe anymore as random weirdos keep scoping out your houses and following you to and from the grocery to see if you're the one with the dungeon beneath your house. Eventually one of these weirdos pulls a gun on your neighbor and demands to see his basement and while there was no dungeon the firearm accidentally went off and killed your neighbor. Your neighbor's death would trace directly back to the spread of this rumor.
Is it possible to accurately define this in law and policy, such that actions against it can be fairly enforced?
If you spread lies about a group that demonizes them you put members of that group at risk.
For instance, if I started a viral rumor that white male computer programmers all keep sex slaves under their houses and enough people believed it a lot of the people on this website would suddenly be living much more difficult and dangerous lives as lots of strangers would assume that they were evil monsters who needed to be put down for the sake of children without even getting to know them. The murder rate against white male computer programmers might even rise noticeably as they became a target for random violence by people who wanted to do a "good deed" on their way out of this life.
That seems to me a highly disproportionate infringement of this person's freedom of expression, as well as being completely pointless. If you're going to have the police arrest people for posting conspiracist idiocy on the internet, they'd have no time left to investigate real crimes that meaningfully affect people.
If it reaches a point of causing public disorder or harming the general welfare of a democratic society, then why not arrest?
Is there a more intellectually dishonest idea? That someone somewhere could misconstrue your words as a call to violence by virtue of the large number of people in the world? And what better way to enforce censorship than to selectively enforce this idea on the topics most important to the party in power?
stochastic terrorism appears to be the academic way of saying “inciting mob violence”
seems pretty straightfoward and honest, to me
Do you have an example where you think those two concepts could be used interchangeably in academia?
I weren't able to find one and I don't think those terms describe similar ideas. Mob dynamics might be about scale in some form, but they are usually not about what we would commonly refer to as terrorism.
“As described by leading scholars, stochastic terrorism involves ‘the use of mass media to provoke random acts of ideologically motivated violence that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable’ (Hamm and Spaaij, 2017)”
maybe inciting “distributed mob violence” would be a better way to translate it for laymen.
You can place blame anywhere depending on your agenda.
That would depend on what evidence you can show to the court that convinces them that you were actually inspired by them.
The court of law operates with letters in the mail, not comments on a website.
Are hasbara organizations stochastic terrorist in nature? Someone told me they exist to distract from settler-colonial violence against Palestinians.
Who should get to decide which warrants investigation?
I believe that, in the United States, prosecutors, law enforcement officers, and congress are the ones who decide what warrants investigation, generally speaking.
It’s appalling that one can justify these rules as needed because of the harmfulness of the content while simultaneously allowing their chosen target to be fair game.
It also seems that they're quick to act (and with surprising force) if politicians or the police are the targets of "hate speech", while it's generally ignored if it's your average citizen.
What they are claiming to be preventing is exactly what they are doing. Is there a general rhetorical term for statements like this?
There's literally an infinite space of inflammatory but believable lies for bad actors to pick from and only a very small space of equally viral true information. The asymmetry is too much in favor of the bad so something has to tip the scales back toward sanity. It may seem trivial to police what someone's racist uncle says on Facebook but it's not one racist uncle, it's 10 million racist uncles who own firearms (in the US at least). Eventually some of them will decide they have nothing to lose and go on the hunt.
Are there two genders? Should I get arrested if I say yes? Should I get arrested if I say no?
Horrible approach that Germany is taking against a fundamental right to free speech. Gestapo like
When you really think about the middle ground, the examples get very murky. They are not simple.
For example spreading false rumors that children's hospitals are giving sex changes to young children and saying that "somebody needs to put a stop to these evil monsters mutilating children" [2][3] is definitely incitement. Calling teachers that mention the fact that they are in a gay marriage "groomers" which implies that they are child molesters is also incitement. That's not good faith debate. It's smearing people in the hopes that someone will harm them.
1. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/150/2/e20210...
> We found that an average of 5 years after their initial social transition, 7.3% of youth had retransitioned at least once. At the end of this period, most youth identified as binary transgender youth (94%), including 1.3% who retransitioned to another identity before returning to their binary transgender identity. A total of 2.5% of youth identified as cisgender and 3.5% as nonbinary. Later cisgender identities were more common among youth whose initial social transition occurred before age 6 years; their retransitions often occurred before age 10 years.
2. https://tennesseestar.com/2022/10/03/matt-walsh-announces-ra...
3. https://www.losangelesblade.com/2022/03/28/gubernatorial-say...
You didn't give us examples from either side of the line to show us where the line is, you gave one example that's totally fine ("X is a jerk" isn't going to get anyone arrested in the US) and one that's a direct incitement to violence. The examples are miles apart and the line could be anywhere between them.
The Matt Walsh example doesn't really help either. If I said "someone needs to put a stop to these evil monsters pumping carbon into the atmosphere" in the context of protesting a new coal mine, pretty much everyone would understand there was an implied "...by turning up to my legal protest next Tuesday and waving some placards around" on the end. Saying the owners needed to be lined up and shot may or may not be incitement, but again that's a pretty extreme example, and it still doesn't look simple.
They used extreme examples precisely because they wanted to avoid the challenge that will necessarily come otherwise.
I think your argument demonstrates a slippery slope.
I think probably claims should have to be more specific and inciteful to be considered illegal.
Also - I think proportionality matters as well. Saying 'the kids who died at Sandy Hook were not real people but actors' - on a personal level should be legal. But if you have an audience of 400M people and scream that nonsense, I think this might be a problem. Right now it's handled in civic courts, but we could think a bit about what that means.
It's very hard, and there are a lot of slippery slopes. Risky.
Meanwhile transgender sacrificing children would be a falsehood wholly invented to smear a group that already frequently suffers violence and harassment and with the blatant intention of promoting and justifying further violence and harassment. The statement is in effect part of the process of harassing, harming, and ultimately killing people. It ought to be illegal in the same way that breaking into a home to commit rape is also illegal and liable to be punished more harshly itself than if the burglary was part of mere trespass.
I also take issue with drawing a line between a harmful lie like Sandy Hook and mass promotion of same in the fashion you have. Both should be illegal in the same way that starting a house on fire isn't any more legal than setting a fire that burns down whole housing development. The punishment may be harsher but its ultimately the same crime. It's also not a slippery slope AT ALL.
Passing on a falsehood that the individual knew or should have reasonable known was false is not at all like parsing the difference between police arbitrarily or unnecessarily killing black people. We can forgive trespasses where the truth is a matter of opinion, phrasing, or debate while trivially punishing people who blatantly lie or spread harmful nonsense.
If you don't know that dead children aren't crisis actors or forest fires aren't caused by jewish space lasers and you can't be educated you should probably be fined or imprisoned into silence so that the rest of society can move on.
This is plainly false.
Claims that police arbitrarily kill people, or are 'killers' etc. are all over the web..
That you would blind yourself to the radical populism in some corners because maybe you don't want it to exist is not helpful.
Here's a completely random example:
"cops are serial killers. paid, protected serial killers who believe their jobs entitle them to take human life. over and over. they lie. they kill. they lie again. repeat. "
This is one of literally millions of such Tweets.
How could you possibly suggest that such language does not exist when it's rampant?
If that example isn't specific enough for you, then just Google a bit and you'll have your examples.
"a harmful lie like Sandy Hook and mass promotion of same in the fashion you have. Both should be illegal in the same way that starting a house on fire isn't any more legal "
Again, utterly false.
So plainly wrong, that I'm sure you can't have actually thought it through.
Do realize this Orwellian implications of governing speech to the point wherein saying something that is 'non factual' is tantamount to a crime?
It's not even a 'slippery slope' it's already ultra authoritarian.
Again: hop on to Twitter, right now, by your logic, millions of people would be charged with crimes, daily.
"If you don't know that dead children aren't crisis actors or forest fires aren't caused by jewish space lasers and you can't be educated you should probably be fined or imprisoned into silence so that the rest of society can move on."
You seem to have a wilful lack of understanding of what is happening in pop culture and in the commons, and yet want to enact vicious authoritarian violence on people for arbitrary words?
I wonder if you realize that you're a fascist authoritarian?
You are exactly what we are afraid of.
People can believe what they want to believe and say what they want to say, unless it really starts to damage others, and that's a high bar.
[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/sheerohero666/status/127598615903...
Wouldn’t some think that it would be e.g. justified to set fire to a police station or something? I mean, seeing as riots include things like other places being set aflame.
There are limitations.
Saying that the corona started in a lab without evidence can be defamation, which is not protected by free speech, not even in the US.
Saying that two genders exists or not has never been questioned, but telling a trans person that they are an aberration of the nature is "fighting words" and is not protected.
Telling a kid "you're a f*ot and should kill yourself" is not protected by free speech.
etc.
If you were to scream it at them in a way that would suggest to an ordinary person they are in danger of attack it would be fighting words. If you merely slung it on the street you would have no realistic means of legal redress. No cop is going to arrest them for offending you nor prosecutor press charges.
but if you write it on a social network they will probably come and knock at your door.
that's the point.
when you're writing something on a globally accessible platform you're basically making a public statement and it makes all the difference
people need to realize that freedom of speech is not the same thing as freedom of publishing anything they like without consequences
> Telling a kid "you're a f*ot and should kill yourself" is not protected by free speech.
This would be absolutely awful but you would be unlikely to face legal consequences.
Are you saying we can't agree on what reality is?
If you provide bullshit medical advice to people you should go to jail frankly, for example.
But misinformation, when it's applied broadly, does have consequences and that will have an effect.
Right now we actually do contend with it i.e voting machine lies, lies about Sandy Hook children - but we handle that in civil cases where people sue each other for 'damages' in which case we have to arrive at some truth. Point being - we legally identify 'damages' there.
But the government is responsible for protecting people from 'damage' as well, in which case we could feasibly have the DoJ take people to court for civil-ish kinds of things, or, find some way forward.
I don't know what the answer is, but it doesn't have to be entirely strict or all encompassing and may have thresholds for proportionality etc. or even depend on the integrity of institutions.
We already draw a lot of boundaries around medical information and could do the same. For example, there could be a requirement to indicate lack of authority / seek a doctor's opinion when discussing health matters. Like I like Joe Rogan, but absolutely detest when he starts yapping about vaccines etc. as his position de facto amounts to misinformation which actually can cause harm. If he were required to consistently remind people "I am not a doctor. This is entertainment. Please consult your doctor for advice concerning COVID." (He should have done this without being asked), then I think those kinds of things can help.
And probably we should err on the side of freedom of expression.
But there is a huge risk in getting into an authoritarian situation as people want to regulate others opinions, and yes, as you say, declaring that there are 'only two genders' is considered 'hate speech' by some and they will push hard to stop others from saying this, which is scary.
I'm wary that our governments have the ability to split hairs on these hard issues.
you get arrested when you ask to lock up transgender people, when you suggest anti-vaxxers (or vaccination supporters) "have a death wish", suggesting you'll look away if someone attacks them.
you get arrested for shouting group XYZ "should die"
§130StGB is about respect in political discourse. if you can't say it with respect shut the fuck up until you can.
any and all examples in your comment have their position not only freely stated online, in Germany, but even on print media, at lengths.
Not it's not, it's about protecting minorities. You're free to say "Germans are a race of dogs" in response to parliament voting on recognizing the Turkish genocide against the Armenians, for example, because Germans are not a minority. You wouldn't be free to say "Turks are a race of dogs", that would be illegal.
it's about inciting unrest against the peace of the land, specifically targetting some specific group of humans.
https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
so a better example would be ditib mosques to systematically suggest to their faithful to poorly service Germans and give them higher prices.
or some German political party to suggest that our current problems are caused by "the Russians" and to suggest discriminating against kids off Russian expats is fine at school.
No, it's really not, we know this, because it's been tested. Look up Malik Karabulut who said exactly what I wrote (he was also insulting individual officials, but that's not what this is about). The DA did specifically say (and that wasn't a controversial decision outside of right-wing circles) it does _not_ apply to the majority.
People are not burning down Children's hospitals, moreover, the kinds of 'misinformation' you're alluding to generally fall way, way within the boundaries of 'hate speech'.
Twitter is a private company they can mostly do what they want.
Some companies rise to the point of 'kind of public service' and therefore we might need basic regs (i.e. at least guaranteeing that Twitter act consistently within their own stated rules).
The bar for hate speech out to be very, very high.
Calls for direct violence have always been illegal.
'Disinformation' is absolutely another issue altogether. Lying about moon landing conspiracy theories is irrelevant, but lying about school shooting victims being 'actors' is something a bit different, as is lying about the effect of vaccines during a pandemic, as is lying / providing medical advice without any kind of appropriate designation. Free speeches probably don't like it but those things do have an effect, and proportionality matters: if you want to say something to your neighbour, fine, but if you're going to go in front of 400M people and broadcast it, and it causes serious harm due to direct minsinfo ... most us don't want that. I don't suggest we have the answer there but I bet if we think about it we can find a reasonable way for the insane idiots to be among each other and for them to not scream non-factual things.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/16/gender-care...
Maybe a private/social response will prevent disaster. I'm unsure. The closest historical parallel I can think of to this is the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (a popular document that helped encourage Germany to liquidate Jewish people) being printed and distributed around the USA by Henry Ford. Luckily Henry Ford didn't manage to convince the US population that Jewish people were plotting to enslave them, but the Germans weren't so lucky which is probably why they're so wary of letting it happen again.
Basically, you're suggesting that 'being wrong' about something, is effectively a crime.
That's one hell of a slippery slope.
Alex Jones has an audience of 400M people.
You and I do not.
You and I absolutely should be able to say 'Sandy Hook children were actors'.
Maybe one of us is a total idiot and actually believes that. Is that a crime?
Proportionality etc. matter.
Also - you are hugely downplaying how much censorship Twitter enacts (I'm not saying this is good or bad, but they do it).
Just like the regular police keep a lid on crime, as in, if they were to disappear all hell would instantly break lose (in Montreal the cops went on strike and immediately there were mass bank robbing etc) - Twitter keeps the total insane hate speech and death threat people off the platform.
In 2020 - the 'Protocols of the Elder's of Zion' - should be hugely and widely disseminated if it were powerful. But it's not. Why? Because we have controls. Google, Twitter etc. tamp that stuff down.
We probably need 'some' laws, but we ought to be very, very careful about it and I suggest it probably be limited to inciting violence and medical misinformation.
We regularly punish people in civil court for lies or flagrant disregard for the truth while leaving matters of opinion lie. The system prevents abuse by requiring the substantial safeguards and standards as it well could in similar criminal actions. It only takes 1 in 12 to negate any attempt to convict and the net result is people that share blatant lies will be over time fined into silence.
It’s so jarring and depressing to see this stuff happening.
The only solution to bad speech is MORE good speech, not censorship.
Welcome to the world of social implants.
Where we surveil one another and the historic footage of war-crimes and deeds, can be used to shame generations to come for there fathers. Making the species more reliable social. Even if it does not want to. External social control, shall force even the most uncaring socio-path to put up the act.
Free entertainment as far as the eye can see, so you will never feel the need to interact with/ change the real world.
Were the scissors in the head cut controversial thoughts and actions, long before they even reach the surface of socety.
Were all technology rolled and handed out is by definition not exponential and nice, linear, safe. No grey goo, no fission, no flying cars. All safe gentleman, forever.
Welcome, to a child proof, accessible earth, created, because the wide spread retardation of the species make a science fiction future unreachable and in fact a death trap, known as the great filter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nature...).
And all visions of overcoming those handicaps, have been proven to be glorified wishful thinking.
It is a well known fact that, before the internet, these things didn't exit.
§130 StGB is the result of hard lessons learned on the back of minorities.
its about no bullying in politics. it's about a discourse with respect and dignity.
if you can't say it without dehumanizing your opponent, don't say it. that's the rule to protect inner peace, even in dissent.
freedom of speech with no obligation for respect only serves the political bullies.
Ultimately I do think Germany is a bit too heavy handed in what it's trying to do, but at the same time this is also the direct result of communities being overly tolerant of neo-Nazis and creating festering grounds for them to eventually take to action and cause real world harm. It's like what that one bartender mentioned for why he always kicks out neo-Nazis. If you don't, eventually they bring in their friends and their friends of friends and soon enough you have a neo-Nazi bar and you can't kick them out without causing trouble.
How do I break up with someone because I'm unhappy without harming them?
I can't. It just is. Some things just are.
The parents would never have suffered that particular harm if they were disallowed from having children. Is that a solution? It seems a rather effective solution to this particular problem.
Or maybe we can agree that things such as freedom has inherent risks involved and we should seek to mitigate where practical rather than solving it.
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I mean, I could go on. boys going through puberty can sometimes be embarrassed by unplanned erections in school. Removing them from school would solve the problem, should we do it?