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Comment by postalrat | Hacker News Reader

The number of people who committed suicide after being harassed with memes or emoji must be higher than those harassed with deep fakes. Too bad nobody is interested enough in banning emoji to do a study.

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Why stop there? I think we'd all agree that "mean words", either written or spoken, have immense power to "cause distress" and have driven many a person to suicide. We should ban those.

We do. Incitement to violence or "true threats" for example already fall outside of 1st amendment protections. I personally see deepfakes created or disseminated for harassment purposes as an act of violence.

I'm neither referring to "true threats" nor making any kind of argument about the US constitution, so I'm unsure why you're bringing these up. I thought it would have been pretty clear that in the context of driving people to suicide, I was suggesting banning "insulting words". Hope that clarifies things for you.

It seemed like you were making a sarcastic comment about the policing of harmful communications. I mostly hear such arguments from US citizens so wanted to point out that even the US has precedent for limiting such expressions to deter violence.

Can you link to an article where emojis have been pivotal in an harassment case leading to suicide?

They've been around for 30 years, deepfakes as they are today have been around for less than a year. I'm not sure absolute numbers are the best thing to look at either way.

The emoji and meme industry has been hiding these stats for years. Facebook, X, TikTok, Apple, etc have the data you want but they won't give it to you.

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