4 ms·

No, you are not going to get arrested in America for making a joke about George Washington. Enough with the irresponsible moral equivalence arguments. There a

No, you are not going to get arrested in America for making a joke about George Washington. Enough with the irresponsible moral equivalence arguments. There are glaringly material differences between 'Google software scanning your mails to target ads' and 'the police having $2/hour folks reading private chats to arrest you for totally arbitrary reasons'.

Barrin92 7y ago
>No, you are not going to get arrested in America for making a joke about George Washington. If someone leaks you joking about repeating a historical terrorist attack the chances that the police at least pay you a visit is very high, in the United States and other Western countries. There's actually a whole array of news articles you can find on your search engine of choice about arrests after people made social media posts about threatening politicians. Which I might add, joke or not is very reasonable.
- siphon22 7y ago
  Joke about a person vs planning a terrorist attack
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    and authorities don't know whether you joke or not, so this falls squarely into the category of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes", and again this is the same in the US. Quite a lot of people have been joked about killing Obama, and got a pretty quick visit by the police as a result. This isn't unique to China and there's nothing wrong with it.
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  Yes, if you joke about 'murdering the head of state' - any reasonable state is probably going to look into it. But in this case, joking about a historical event, inviting a foreign country to invade is way beyond reality, obviously. So, if you invited the 'Germans to invade America' again, nobody will come knocking except the Twitter Nazis. (Pun intended).
aembleton 7y ago
It's not the US, but UK police do carry out arrests for jokes on social media: - https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/12/23/glasgow-crash-tweet_n_6371428.html?guccounter=1 https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/12/23/glasgow-crash-tw... - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925 - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/02/social_media_arrests_up_37pc_london_section_127_communications_act/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/02/social_media_arrest...
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  Yes, it's terrible, especially considering that these are for 'offensive jokes' not even specific calls for violence. But this is the states terrible job at trying to hamper hate speech, mostly with fines. The world is not turning upside down. If people dissapear off the streets because they say 'we deserve democracy' then we have a problem.

Barrin92 7y ago

>No, you are not going to get arrested in America for making a joke about George Washington. If someone leaks you joking about repeating a historical terrorist attack the chances that the police at least pay you a visit is very high, in the United States and other Western countries. There's actually a whole array of news articles you can find on your search engine of choice about arrests after people made social media posts about threatening politicians. Which I might add, joke or not is very reasonable.

siphon22 7y ago
Joke about a person vs planning a terrorist attack
- Barrin92 7y ago
  and authorities don't know whether you joke or not, so this falls squarely into the category of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes", and again this is the same in the US. Quite a lot of people have been joked about killing Obama, and got a pretty quick visit by the police as a result. This isn't unique to China and there's nothing wrong with it.
sonnyblarney 7y ago
Yes, if you joke about 'murdering the head of state' - any reasonable state is probably going to look into it. But in this case, joking about a historical event, inviting a foreign country to invade is way beyond reality, obviously. So, if you invited the 'Germans to invade America' again, nobody will come knocking except the Twitter Nazis. (Pun intended).

aembleton 7y ago

It's not the US, but UK police do carry out arrests for jokes on social media: - https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/12/23/glasgow-crash-tweet_n_6371428.html?guccounter=1 https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/12/23/glasgow-crash-tw... - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-43478925 - https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/02/social_media_arrests_up_37pc_london_section_127_communications_act/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/02/social_media_arrest...

sonnyblarney 7y ago
Yes, it's terrible, especially considering that these are for 'offensive jokes' not even specific calls for violence. But this is the states terrible job at trying to hamper hate speech, mostly with fines. The world is not turning upside down. If people dissapear off the streets because they say 'we deserve democracy' then we have a problem.