3 ms·
I think that if in your hypothetical you were _directly_ inciting violence against a minority student (so, "let's go fuck up X" "let's go fuck up students with
by livueta 7y ago
I think that if in your hypothetical you were _directly_ inciting violence against a minority student (so, "let's go fuck up X" "let's go fuck up students with Y characteristic"), you'd also definitely (and uncontroversially) be implicated.
Where it gets harder is what most people seem to want "hate speech" provisions to cover are much more diffuse forms of incitement, if you can even call it that. When you can't make a direct causal mapping between speech and crime, you start having problems. If you didn't personally direct drunk college students to flip cars, but instead had previously posted online somewhere that flipping cars while drunk is fun, it's a lot harder to say that absent your speech, the illegal act would not have occurred. Say a large number of commentators talked up how fun car-flipping is. Does each now possess 1/nth of the criminal liability for incitement? Do we know the actors read a given post? Even if we do, can we quantity the degree to which a given post influenced their actions?
Obviously IANAL, but in my lay experience it seems that the sort of incitement liability we have is limited to no-brainer cases where it's quite obvious that the speech was the primary motivating factor for the subsequent criminal action. Anything further quickly gets into an enormous can of worms of unknowables.
I think the term of art is the imminence of the incited lawless action. Without imminence, causality is difficult, and you open the door to all kinds of crazy contributory claims - are the authors of the Anarchist's Cookbook liable for every bombing to occur following its publication?