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You may be reading too much into what I wrote. My standard here is simply that I think if a website is literally organizing something which explicitly, literall

by gfodor 6y ago

You may be reading too much into what I wrote. My standard here is simply that I think if a website is literally organizing something which explicitly, literally, supports violent overthrow of the government, then I'm going to yield to the legal system to enforce whatever laws exist to properly regulate that speech. I don't have a strong opinion beyond that since I am not a lawyer. My point is that if the mechanism to enforce those laws includes SSL or CDN interference, I won't include such interference on the list of things I'd be concerned about in my bucket of "corporate interests mediating acceptable global speech."

jcranmer 6y ago
I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but in the US, the current standard for free speech (Brandenburg v Ohio) holds that literally advocating for violent overthrow of the government is constitutionally-protected free speech. The bar that you have to hit is incitement to "imminent lawless action." This standard of free speech is much higher than most of the rest of the world.
- gfodor 6y ago
  That makes sense - I appreciate the info and upon first glance that seems like a sane standard. (Beyond being ignorant on the legal aspect to this, my phrasing lacked the specificity in that what was going on on TDW, especially ex-post, was clearly organizing such imminent action at a specific time and place. I'd suspect the standard you mention would have been met.)
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  Thanks for this clarification. I am also still confused as to why Trump himself has been the target of all these tech/social media platforms. As far as I can tell he has not incited violence - imminent or otherwise. Yes he has made exaggerated/false claims about the election, yes he has not condemned the criminal acts of the capitol rioters, but as far as I can tell he has not encouraged or incited violence. And each time I have asked this question of friends or on HN, I've not received a substantive answer.
  - blisterpeanuts 6y ago
    He has repeatedly condemned the criminal acts of the rioters, but his words tend not to be broadcast on mainstream news. You can find it on OAN, RSBN, Golden State, and other conservative channels, however.
  - gfodor 6y ago
    The argument is that leaders ought to have an understanding of which way they're blowing the wind - their own personal thresholds have little bearing on how far the people they're speaking to will go unless the take a hard stance on where that threshold is. In this case, Trump at the very least failed to articulate beforehand where the line was, and it was very clear the line not being clear was a big problem. A secondary problem seems to be selective recognition of this: people are easily able to see the potential second order effects of Trump's rhetoric and react to it, but the same levers are not being pulled as actively when other people take similar rhetorical risks that have plausible deniability as contributing to violence for the reasons I mention.
  - jcranmer 6y ago
    The exact words that Trump used in his speech on Wednesday morning was something along the lines of "we're going to march down to Congress and tell them what we think." By itself, that is not damning, and would (and should!) easily be protected speech. However, context may tell a different story. It was known to anyone who follows Qanon conspiracy theories that Wednesday was one of the days of the predicted coup (of course, virtually every other milestone in the past two months have had the same prediction and came and passed without incident). It is totally reasonable to assume that some of the crowd at that rally were Qanon believers ready to participate in a coup, were listening for the magic words to start the coup, and took these words to be them. I actually expect some of the investigations to uncover people who followed this exact chain of events. In short, that people took his words to be an incitement to imminent lawless action is a conclusion that I expect to be substantiated by facts. But even that is not enough to say that Trump fails the Brandenburg test (and this is why my personal legal knowledge starts getting shaky): it's not enough to say that people were incited; you have to demonstrate that Trump expected (or should have expected) that these people would be incited by those words. And... honestly? I'm not sure if that's the case. Given the knowledge of what happened later, it would now (to me) be willful ignorance to suppose those words would not be incitement, but I'm not sure I can say that the same is true merely hours before it happened. On Wednesday night, I watched a livestream with several lawyers talking about what laws were and weren't broken [1] on Wednesday. When it comes to Trump's legal woes, the main phrase was "matter of first impression": no court has heard a similar enough case for there to be any guideline on how the facts and the law should be interpreted. Does it matter that it's the President saying these words? Does it matter that he is seeming to endorse attacks on another branch of government? There's no precedent... we don't know... and we can't predict. [1] Definitely no treason, and it doesn't look like anything qualifies as felony murder in DC or federal law, although this was obviously before we knew a police officer died. Definitely sedition though!
crististm 6y ago
Is your standard portable to an arbitrary other country and arbitrary other timeline? Are there nuances to be observed or the process is applicable regardless of the context in which it is implemented?

by gfodor 6y ago

jcranmer 6y ago

I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but in the US, the current standard for free speech (Brandenburg v Ohio) holds that literally advocating for violent overthrow of the government is constitutionally-protected free speech. The bar that you have to hit is incitement to "imminent lawless action." This standard of free speech is much higher than most of the rest of the world.

gfodor 6y ago
That makes sense - I appreciate the info and upon first glance that seems like a sane standard. (Beyond being ignorant on the legal aspect to this, my phrasing lacked the specificity in that what was going on on TDW, especially ex-post, was clearly organizing such imminent action at a specific time and place. I'd suspect the standard you mention would have been met.)
throwawaysea 6y ago
Thanks for this clarification. I am also still confused as to why Trump himself has been the target of all these tech/social media platforms. As far as I can tell he has not incited violence - imminent or otherwise. Yes he has made exaggerated/false claims about the election, yes he has not condemned the criminal acts of the capitol rioters, but as far as I can tell he has not encouraged or incited violence. And each time I have asked this question of friends or on HN, I've not received a substantive answer.
- blisterpeanuts 6y ago
  He has repeatedly condemned the criminal acts of the rioters, but his words tend not to be broadcast on mainstream news. You can find it on OAN, RSBN, Golden State, and other conservative channels, however.
- gfodor 6y ago
  The argument is that leaders ought to have an understanding of which way they're blowing the wind - their own personal thresholds have little bearing on how far the people they're speaking to will go unless the take a hard stance on where that threshold is. In this case, Trump at the very least failed to articulate beforehand where the line was, and it was very clear the line not being clear was a big problem. A secondary problem seems to be selective recognition of this: people are easily able to see the potential second order effects of Trump's rhetoric and react to it, but the same levers are not being pulled as actively when other people take similar rhetorical risks that have plausible deniability as contributing to violence for the reasons I mention.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  The exact words that Trump used in his speech on Wednesday morning was something along the lines of "we're going to march down to Congress and tell them what we think." By itself, that is not damning, and would (and should!) easily be protected speech. However, context may tell a different story. It was known to anyone who follows Qanon conspiracy theories that Wednesday was one of the days of the predicted coup (of course, virtually every other milestone in the past two months have had the same prediction and came and passed without incident). It is totally reasonable to assume that some of the crowd at that rally were Qanon believers ready to participate in a coup, were listening for the magic words to start the coup, and took these words to be them. I actually expect some of the investigations to uncover people who followed this exact chain of events. In short, that people took his words to be an incitement to imminent lawless action is a conclusion that I expect to be substantiated by facts. But even that is not enough to say that Trump fails the Brandenburg test (and this is why my personal legal knowledge starts getting shaky): it's not enough to say that people were incited; you have to demonstrate that Trump expected (or should have expected) that these people would be incited by those words. And... honestly? I'm not sure if that's the case. Given the knowledge of what happened later, it would now (to me) be willful ignorance to suppose those words would not be incitement, but I'm not sure I can say that the same is true merely hours before it happened. On Wednesday night, I watched a livestream with several lawyers talking about what laws were and weren't broken [1] on Wednesday. When it comes to Trump's legal woes, the main phrase was "matter of first impression": no court has heard a similar enough case for there to be any guideline on how the facts and the law should be interpreted. Does it matter that it's the President saying these words? Does it matter that he is seeming to endorse attacks on another branch of government? There's no precedent... we don't know... and we can't predict. [1] Definitely no treason, and it doesn't look like anything qualifies as felony murder in DC or federal law, although this was obviously before we knew a police officer died. Definitely sedition though!

crististm 6y ago

Is your standard portable to an arbitrary other country and arbitrary other timeline? Are there nuances to be observed or the process is applicable regardless of the context in which it is implemented?