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A society where: - you are held responsible for other people's feelings, and for their feelings as a result of your words and actions, and: - anything that ca

• _fat_santa 5y ago
  > The proposed law change will shift the focus on to the “harmful effect” of a message rather than if it contains “indecent” or “grossly offensive” content, which is the present basis for assessing its criminality. I'm feeling very harmed after reading your comment. I realize the content's of your message are objectively harmless, but I "feel" harmed. So...off to jail you go. --- But on a more serious note. Like you said I it's insane that we have come to the point where what you actually say, you intentions, are completely irrelevant, it's all about how your message is perceived. What are the guardrails here? Harmful effect can be anything. I could plagiarize the top ShowHN post from yesterday, post it here and get called out. Then try to get all the commenters prosecuted because my feelings were hurt? Is this seriously how this law works? Hell an even more extreme example could be "hey it's really nice and sunny outside today", and someone will comment "I identify as darkness, this is hurtful to my people". Am I headed to the slammer for saying that the weather was nice?
  • umvi 5y ago
    > we have come to the point where what you actually say, you intentions, are completely irrelevant, it's all about how your message is perceived The way this is typically framed is "impact matters more than intent". Like if you weren't watching where you were walking and accidentally stepped on someone's foot. You didn't _intend_ to harm them, but the overall _impact_ was that you did harm them. As you rightly point out though, the elephant in the room is that impact in this context is not falsifiable. Unlike stepping on someone's foot where you could use instruments to measure how many capillaries were broken or if the bone is cracked, with words and feelings you can't actually empirically prove harm was done which is why I think enacting laws and policies that directly correlate with impact is a recipe for disaster... IMO the best way to deal with impact has to be at the cultural level. "Hey, I find swear words offensive, can you stop?" "Oh sure, sorry about that, I won't swear around you". Bam, problem solved. A society that transitions to: "Hey, I find swear words offensive, I'm going to report you to the psychological harm police" is one on the fast track to dystopia.
    • zepolen 5y ago
      Hey, I find your comments offensive. Can you stop?
      • citizenpaul 5y ago
        Hello I am Internet Officer Badge #762783. Do you feel that user "clairity" harmed you? If so I will begin the paperwork for detainment and evaluation for reeducation by the Internet Feelings Agency (IFA).
        • techbio 5y ago
          Sounds like you have qualified immunity, and I am required to report, your status of legal superiority offends my sensibilities.
    • clairity 5y ago
      as happens so often, basketball provides a microcosm. fouls are called (and varying penalties assessed) for illegal moves that lead to an unfair advantage. implicit in that is that intent matters. many times, a foul isn’t assessed for an illegal maneuver because the intent to gain advantage wasn’t there (contact was happenstance) or no advantage was gained. however, some fouls are so dangerous (e.g., undercutting a shooter), that intent does not matter, and a foul is called even when done completely unintentionally. as always, we have to consider the nuance and avoid overly broad statements/policies.
• jl6 5y ago
  With you until the point where it is suggested that Web 3.0 can solve anything!
• KittenInABox 5y ago
  > You are responsible for making yourself happy, for asserting yourself, for setting any boundaries you choose. People on Twitter can just block, or mute, or turn off their DMs for people they don't follow. This solution does not account for the following ways a troll can harass you: * sockpuppets pinging you, * sockpuppets impersonating you, * sockpuppets mass reporting you, thereby suspending your accounts * finding people you are friends/family with and sending them rape/death/bomb threats or doing the above, * finding where you work and sending your workplace similar threats, * putting up websites involving your legal name and face to make allegations you're a child predator/criminal optimized for search engines.
  • concinds 5y ago
    It might seem callous, and it might be (and I know some people have poor mental health at times and social media onslaughts won't help) but my solution is to not let things affect me. If Viktor Frankl could do it in death camps, I think it's something everyone can rely on. You can also become the heel, become the "villain", and use that abuse to gain influence rather than lose it; most social media abuse is unjustified so there's nothing unethical about this. The alternative is having people go to jail or get a suspended sentence because they insulted J.K Rowling in a tweet.
    • KittenInABox 5y ago
      Honestly I like to hope there is a middle ground between "insulting a public figure is grounds for jailtime" and "sending constant rape and bomb threats to non-public figures and all of their family for years on end is a perfectly legal thing to do that people should just get used to, I mean, if someone could endure literal genocide someone else should endure constant threats to their and their social circle's safety".
      • raxxorrax 5y ago
        You are without a doubt a public figure if you put yourself on social media. Many people have warned against oversharing and have stated that people will want regulation when they get exposed to the negative side, the reason why PR agencies exist. But these laws would affect everybody.
• sofixa 5y ago
  > The most fundamental piece of applicable psychology is the idea that you are responsible for your own thoughts, feelings, and actions, period. You are responsible for making yourself happy, for asserting yourself, for setting any boundaries you choose. People on Twitter can just block, or mute, or turn off their DMs for people they don't follow. What's wrong with that? Now there's a human right to use Twitter unhindered? They just spent the last decade telling us there wasn't! You should try telling this to those who get abused online. I think people who regularly get rape threats and racial abuse, many of whom are calling for such legislation ( recently there have been numerous cases with black footballers and also some with female journalists), have a slightly higher priority than people who just want to insult freely without fear of consequences. Considering people have committed suicide over online harassment, it's not as simple as "just block the baddies".
  • sokoloff 5y ago
    We already have a crime of assault (as distinct from battery or rape). A credible threat is already a crime of assault and that’s as it should be. “<Foobar> is a poopyhead”, even if it provokes an outsized negative reaction on Foobar’s part, is nowhere near the same thing.
    • sofixa 5y ago
      Someone hurling racial slurs on Twitter or sending rape threats, from the comfort of their home without any credibility, isn't a "credible threat", but isn't insignificant.
      • chrismcb 5y ago
        Someone hurling racial slurs is not the same as someone sending rape threats
      • skinkestek 5y ago
        It is also already now punishable by existing, sane laws in many countries.
  • 5y ago
• floatingatoll 5y ago
  Is it morally appropriate to get together a group of your friends and pressure someone to commit suicide on social media? By your logic, it seems that it is; their suicidal reaction to malicious and intentional verbal abuse is not anyone else's problem but their own. Many people seem to feel otherwise, and there are laws in place in various regions as a result. Are they wrong to choose to restrict your speech in favor of the collective good? If not, then what is the dividing line between "verbal abuse is okay" and "verbal abuse is not okay"? If it merely drives them to self-harm rather than suicide, is that morally acceptable, in some way that causing suicide is not? Societies have a long-standing tradition of restricting individual behaviors for the collective good. Wishing that societies wouldn't this is hopeless, because it seems like every society that doesn't restrict individual behaviors to some degree ends up becoming a textbook example of how not run a society. I read your moral position here as "if you are too frail to resist someone's words, you don't deserve protection from their verbal abuse with malicious intent". If I have misunderstood how your moral reasoning applies to the topic under discussion — trolls willfully causing psychological harm on the Internet — please help me understand where I've misapplied your logic.
  • scotuswroteus 5y ago
    >Is it morally appropriate to get together a group of your friends and pressure someone to commit suicide on social media? By your logic, it seems that it is; their suicidal reaction to malicious and intentional verbal abuse is not anyone else's problem but their own. Did you intend to pressure them to do that? If you acted with that INTENT, and external evidence proves it, then NO, by OP's logic, that abuse is the perpetrator's problem. >Societies have a long-standing tradition of restricting individual behaviors for the collective good. In the UK? Come off it.
  • teakettle42 5y ago
    > I read your moral position here as "if you are too frail to resist someone's words, you don't deserve protection from their verbal abuse with malicious intent" I’m not the original parent, but I read (and share) the position as: Barring intent by the speaker to inflict direct and immediate physical harm, if you are too frail to maintain your mental health in the face of someone else’s speech (or you pretend to be), then you are not served — and neither is justice, fairness, or truth — by the state applying its monopoly on violence to forcibly silence others at your behest. Instead, each individual is personally responsible for their own mental well-being, while the state’s responsibility extends no further than offering services and support to help enable your own individual resiliency.
• sky_rw 5y ago
  This is what the beginning of a matriarchal tyranny looks like.
• rdtsc 5y ago
  > you are held responsible for other people's feelings, and for their feelings as a result of your words and actions, and It also makes it impossible to distinguish between those whose feelings are truly hurt and those who pretend their feelings got hurt. On social media there is an appealing incentive for this later group to be more vocal and to inflict more harm as there is more audience. It's also a form of trolling: "Wonder if I can pretend to be offended and ban/cancel/pile on so and so. I'd get soooo many likes/retweets/upvotes etc!". We'd like to believe only a tiny fraction of people would engage in the later, but with online visibility and with no way to distinguish the two, the later group I think will start to get larger and larger over time. This is also a benchmark of totalitarian nightmare. Can I denounce my neighbor and tell the ruling party they made anti-governmental remarks and have their family deported to a labor camp, if I don't like the choice of flowers in their garden? If the answer is "yes" then I may be living a totalitarian nightmare.
• moss2 5y ago
  I can tell you're not a fan of Reddit
• II2II 5y ago
  We are reacting to a tweet that has very little content, notably how high is the bar for psychological harm. It is undoubtedly higher than making someone feel bad, but the question is: is it high enough? Consider your words, "you are responsible for your own thoughts, feelings, and actions". For the most part, that is true. On the other hand, we also consider some segments of society as vulnerable. In some of those cases they do not have full control of their thoughts, feelings, or actions. Sometimes it is due to a lack of understanding or experience (e.g. children and youth), sometimes it is due to psychological disorders. The question becomes, who is actually responsible in cases where trolls unintentionally or intentionally exploit that disorder? The other thing must be considered is the magnitude of the infraction. A competent person may be able to handle a random death threat. The person would have to be considerably more resilient to endure an effectively anonymous person stalking them and threatening them. I would question the ability of anyone to handle that sort of behaviour for an extended period of time unless they have the means to prove the threat is not credible or to protect themselves. There is a reason why some people of means go around with bodyguards, and it isn't solely about their physical protection.
  • nradov 5y ago
    Credible death threats are already illegal and can be handled through both criminal prosecution and civil restraining orders. We don't need any new laws. Sometimes the existing laws aren't enforced effectively, but piling on more laws won't solve that problem.
    • citizenpaul 5y ago
      You are right. We should probably have a law the prevents adding laws to already handled laws.
• unclebucknasty 5y ago
  I'll take the other side of that argument. In a world where we spend increasingly more time online, sociopaths and other bad actors have been handed far too much power/influence and that's net negative for society. Like it or not, the online world has become a public space--The Public Space. And, now we're talking about metaverses that will further immerse us. If someone were to follow a person down a public street, screaming obscenities and generally harassing them, of course we'd want the rightful laws on the books against such a thing to be enforced. Why should this be any different in the online world?
  • teakettle42 5y ago
    > … sociopaths and other bad actors have been handed far too much power/influence and that's net negative for society. Why would you assume that the sociopaths and bad actors wouldn’t be the ones exploiting laws like this to do great harm to those they disagree with?
  • nradov 5y ago
    The San Francisco Police generally don't do anything to stop deranged homeless drug addicts from following people down the street, screaming obscenities and generally harassing them. SF residents seem to be fine with that state of affairs, or at least it doesn't bother them enough to vote to change it. And to be clear I don't intend that as a criticism of SF necessarily. The point is that there is no universal worldwide standard of tolerable behavior, and some people are apparently willing to put up with a lot. Would you be happy if the laws of Saudi Arabia or North Korea were enforced online? They might consider you a sociopath and bad actor.
    • unclebucknasty 5y ago
      >The San Francisco Police generally don't do anything to stop deranged homeless... I don't know that that's true, but I think it's pretty clear that homeless, mentally ill drug addicts are a different problem. >The point is that there is no universal worldwide standard of tolerable behavior These arguments always baffle me, as they essentially suggest that nothing means anything and we have no way of determining what a civilized, functioning society should look like. Yet, here we are — with laws and everything. There's a reasonableness standard applied to these things. We apply it for every scenario where gray areas exist. It's also why we have judges, juries and a court system. >Would you be happy if the laws of Saudi Arabia or North Korea were enforced online? I'm missing how the laws of Saudi Arabia or North Korea have anything to do with this case in the UK or a hypothetical one in the US.
• strogonoff 5y ago
  The problem is not with trolling per se (there is troll-like behaviour IRL, and we have learned to deal with it appropriately) but with scale and amplification of trolling by that oligopoly of a small handful of social platforms serving millions of locked-in users each with tailored content that their algorithms consider “engaging” for this particular person. Big Social is in symbiosis with trolls and profits by giving them platform, and I suspect this will remain so for as long as their business model has the advertisers as primary paying customers and main source of revenue. That said, targeted persistent trolling (I prefer to call it bullying though) is horrible, and I’m sure there are extreme cases where jail may actually be warranted.
• 908B64B197 5y ago
  > The fundamental problem with it, is it makes society more enmeshed (a pathological relationship dynamic). People start caring more about going with the grain, the mainstream opinion, and rejecting the troublemakers, because they don't want to be cast out too; and they self-censor more. This is by design. Before social media, to have your voice heard you needed to get help from either: a billionaire-owned TV Station or Newspaper or the State Sponsored Approved truth Station (in this case, the BBC but CBC and whatever official news network the party maintains in your local dictatorship will do). Now, all you have to do is simply post it online on a property owned by some billionaire who doesn't really care (as long as it's legal he'll pocket the add revenue) in faraway California. You can guess who's mad about loosing all that control over who gets to be in the news and who doesn't...
• Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
  I'm not a fan of any law which could be potentially be misused to inhibit free speech, But the context of this law reminded me the row of Elon Musk calling the U.K diver Unsworth who played a major role in rescuing the Thai children struck in underwater cave - a 'Pedo Guy' on Twitter because Unsworth called the submarine supposedly fielded by Elon for the rescue as a P.R. stunt. Elon did get acquitted in the U.S. court for the defamation suit on this as free speech laws in U.S. has very little riders, But I wonder if this supposed 'pychological harm' law could have delivered a verdict in favor of Unsworth in a U.K. court. >Unsworth testified that “being branded a pedophile” had made him feel “humiliated, ashamed, dirty”. “I was effectively given a life sentence without parole,” he said. “It hurts to talk about it.”[1] As a side note, Free speech laws in India has very specific riders when it comes to defamation, which of course are constantly abused[2]. But theoretically, Elon would have definitely been found guilty under that law; Theoretical because he's rich. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/dec/06/elon-musk-vernon-unsworth-trial-verdict https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/dec/06/elon-musk... [2] https://blog.ipleaders.in/right-to-freedom-of-speech/ https://blog.ipleaders.in/right-to-freedom-of-speech/