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Comment by Amezarak | Hacker News Reader

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> A few years ago when people were being sentenced to prison for memes

Is this what you’re referring to? https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/10/23/dou...

I agree that the left did not take free speech as seriously as it ought to have. However, today the president is as opposed to free speech as the most rabid leftist university protestor from a few years ago, and that is a lot different.

Yes. Note that what Mackey did, and the content of his posts, was entirely legal and his conviction was overturned unanimously on appeal. To convict him originally, the government had to lie about him participating in a conspiracy - the reason the conviction was overturned is because they lied about the evidence of the conspiracy. There was never any dispute that merely posting what he did was legal.

I also wasn’t claiming his memes were criticizing Clinton.

Edit because I have been rate limited: if you contend that it was criminal, why did the government charge him only with a crime that it didn’t have actual evidence for?

It really isn't "entirely legal" to deceive people as to how/when/where to cast their vote, and I don't think you'll find much sympathy for the view that it should be even among vigorous defenders of the First Amendment.

His conviction was overturned due to lack of evidence of that he knowingly joined a conspiracy (required by the specific statute they charged him under) not because what he did is protected speech.

https://www.law.georgetown.edu/icap/wp-content/uploads/sites...

"Due to high turnout, polling stations are expected to be overloaded and the party I don't like should vote the day after election day" is a fairly standard joke. What he's described as posting isn't that different.

A jury felt differently.

I suspect the reason you didn’t just describe what he actually did is because you know that it’s different. No need to analogize, we can talk about the specific facts of this case.

You suspect wrong. I did not see an actual screenshot or direct quote of his post, and don't like relying on other people's descriptions of what people they don't like said.

What's described is "the party I don't like should vote by text message", which as I said is fundamentally the same as that long-standing known joke.

> For example, on November 1, 2016, in or around the same time that Mackey was sending tweets suggesting the importance of limiting “black turnout,” the defendant tweeted an image depicting an African American woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign. The ad stated: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” and “Vote for Hillary and be a part of history.” The fine print at the bottom of the deceptive image stated: “Must be 18 or older to vote. One vote per person. Must be a legal citizen of the United States. Voting by text not available in Guam, Puerto Rico, Alaska or Hawaii. Paid for by Hillary For President 2016.” The tweet included the typed hashtag “#ImWithHer,” a slogan frequently used by Hillary Clinton. On or about and before Election Day 2016, thousands of unique telephone numbers texted “Hillary” or some derivative to the 59925 text number, which had been used in multiple deceptive campaign images tweeted by Mackey and his co-conspirators.

Anyone can decide for themselves whether this sounds like a "hope my opponents vote on November 6th lmao!"-type post.

To help me take this argument seriously, could you give a specific examples of when the shoe was on the first foot?

> a few years ago when people were being sentenced to prison for memes

are you talking about the guy whose memes tricked thousands of people (of one political party) into thinking they could vote by texting a number?

You may want to read the Appeals Court ruling that overturned his conviction 3-0 because the government lied.

But also consider the point that everyone has a reason why their exact situation is different than the other sides when the outcome is the same. They would say for example that Kimmel was simply deplatformed because he also spread misinformation.

There’s no way out until everyone agrees it is the outcome that matters rather than doubling down because their ideology is so correct that it is beyond contestation and the other side are enemies destroying democracy rather than rivals.

>They would say for example that Kimmel was simply deplatformed because he also spread misinformation.

Okay, but they would be either misinformed or lying.

They would not. I love Kimmel, but it turns out the story of the gunman is now much more layered and nuanced than "the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them..." In Kimmel's defense, this was a developing story at the time, but it is not untrue, in hindsignt, that Kimmel spread misinformation.

Nothing Kimmel said in the quote you provided is untrue. His statement is about their actions in response to the event, not anything to do with the actual sentiment of the shooter.

I guess you didn't follow updates to the story. I turns out that someone who was a "huge Trump supporter" in 2020 can develop romantic feelings for his trans room mate in the intervening five years since -- and feel a different way on issues.

Only by stretching the facts to distortion can anyone claim the gunman was one of Maga's own in 2025.

Feels like the game needs reframing;

Also possibly time for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to get an update.

Everyone voted them down, but there's a kernel of truth here.

We were all in favor of it when Judicial Activism gave us approved Liberal outcomes starting in the latter half of the 20th Century. We didn't realize that the only thing preventing "the other side" from weaponizing the same tactic was a generation of politicians loathe to violate the separation of powers. Once they all passed away, all hell broke loose and here we are...

As the Left used to point out, "You can't legislate morality." Except... they did. And now they are shocked -- SHOCKED, I TELL YOU -- to discover that the Right has lost its scruples in resisting the same temptation.

"Strung up on the gallows prepared for their enemies" (ancient morality tales) and all that.

I don't recall the government using FCC to fire someone.

I'd rather wish the previous governments had closed down Fox News, though.

PS: not an USA citizen.

That’s the problem. Everyone makes tendentious arguments about how their exact reasoning and mechanism is justified, while the other sides’ is not justified. The outcome is the same.

Edit: I have been rate limited so I cannot reply, but note I was referring to prior administrations coercing media companies to censor and deplatform people, so yes, it is functionally the same whether it’s the FCC or Congress or other executive departments doing the coercing.

The outcome is not the same: allegedly repressive liberal administrations, internet businesses, and tv networks allowed openly authoritarian media to continually build momentum for a decade until that media delivered an authoritarian regime willing to actively dismantle the open system that allowed it to come to power. Contrast that with less than one year of the authoritarian regime, where the full force of the government apparatus is being used to crush political opponents by: defunding educational institutions, ending international soft-power programs, militarizing cities, threatening to de-license broadcasters, and classifying rights-based activist organizations as terrorists.

The liberal era was marked largely by criticism without consequence, where "deplatforming" was a social phenomenon that meant hopping to one of many other open networks, not the dogged federal punishment of institutions and individuals promoting inconvenient narratives. I'll join you in criticizing the liberal order any day, but it's beyond bad-faith to pretend the current administration is just more of the same.

> where "deplatforming" was a social phenomenon that meant hopping to one of many other open networks, not the dogged federal punishment of institutions and individuals promoting inconvenient narratives.

This is manifestly untrue. The government directly prosecuted people for their social media postings and ordered Facebook and Twitter to censor people, among many, many other acts.

> The liberal era was marked largely by criticism without consequence,

You are able to believe this because the government and the chattering classes were so efficient in their control of the narrative that their abuses were institutionalized as the norms: people that were punished were so bad we didn't question the idea they were extremists or Nazis, and even when the government clearly overreacted, the reaction was largely tepid because complaining too loudly would seem to empower the wrong people. Now that populists have reacted, we're all shocked. That's on us to be responsive democratically, or these things will continue to happen.

The mechanism is rather important though. Government coercing private parties based on content of speech is illegal. Private parties governing their own speech is not, and is in fact a key First Amendment-protected activity in and of itself.

> The outcome is the same.

That's the problem. The outcome is not the same. It couldn't be more different. That's how one side knows they're right.

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