Item — HN Reader

For Americans, if it were legal for you to post something today, your actions are legally protected thanks to Article 1, Section 9, Clause 3 of the Constitution, which prevents “ex post facto” laws, or laws which retroactively change the legal consequences of past actions.

Most countries have some version of this protection, so your legal advice to your daughters is probably incorrect.

10 comments

Not if your families beliefs are outdated or otherwise bigoted. My older family members are racist. I harbored racist beliefs, and told plenty of racist jokes as a boy. My "opinions", I posted on twitter, as a teenager, would be more than enough to get me expelled from society today. Be it culturally cancelled in the US, or imprisoned in the UK.

Not everyone is raised by good people. Thankfully I had a seismic event (Perma banned from a favorite game after sinking 1000s of hours for being offensive) correct my behavior. I thank my lucky stars it was merely me being banned from a video game that caused me to reconsider how I act, and not something much more serious.

> I harbored racist beliefs, and told plenty of racist jokes as a boy. My "opinions", I posted on twitter, as a teenager, would be more than enough to get me expelled from society today. Be it culturally cancelled in the US, or imprisoned in the UK

that's not a problem with you, but with cancel culture in general.

Fascinating story! Interesting counter-narrative to tropes about video games being harmful to ethics or personal growth. Have you written about your experiences at any length?

It is basically impossible to get imprisoned in the UK for mere verbal racism, and highly racist opinions are posted in the newspapers all the time. Even the "gas the jews" Nazi dog guy was only fined £800 and it didn't stop him standing for election.

"only fined £800" for a joke. Might not be prison, but it's still extremely worrying.

Nah, he put a lot of effort into getting a particularly blatant piece of anti-Semitism heavily publicised.

The use of highly selective and unsubstantiated accusations of anti-Semitism is becoming a problem, but not in this case.

He says he never expected it to get farther than a few friends. It went viral without any promotion on his part. Is there any actual evidence it was all some carefully planned sinister plot to spread a few Hitlery catch phrases for some reason and not something done to annoy his girlfriend and amuse his friends or are you making a judgement based on something other than evidence?

> It went viral without any promotion on his part

How many youtube subscribers did he have at the point he posted it?

He subsequently turned it into an "edgy" comedy career, career in politics, and ~1m youtube subscribers across his various channels. Pretty good return on investment.

> spread a few Hitlery catch phrases for some reason

This not an argument in his favor.

> How many youtube subscribers did he have at the point he posted it?

I looked it up. He had all of 400 subscribers when the video was uploaded. He clearly wasn't trying to leverage his massive youtube fanbase at the time. His girlfriend testified in court that her boyfriend wasn't racist. They were both caught off guard by the video's popularity and the response it got from authorities.

She said "I know what kind of person he is. It is just not a very nice thing to say obviously. I didn't think about it being anything other than him annoying me, I didn't think it would have the effect that it did."

> He subsequently turned it into an "edgy" comedy career, career in politics, and ~1m youtube subscribers across his various channels. Pretty good return on investment.

I mean, on one hand he's got more youtube subscribers than ever, but on the other he lost his job and will struggle to get hired for the rest of his life because people will assume he's a racist because of a joke... I'm not sure I'd call that a win exactly, but I can't blame him from trying to make the best of the situation any way that he can. He seems genuinely interested in fighting against what happened to him so that it doesn't happen to others.

> This not an argument in his favor.

That was your theory, although I still can't imagine what you thought the end goal there was. He goes through all that trouble to manufacture and promote a viral video with a couple seconds of hitler in it but for what exactly? If he were a secret nazi and this was all some kind of master plan what is the pay off here?

If you're really without any evidence that the video wasn't just a joke that people took too seriously, why have you accused him of being a racist with a nefarious plan? What kind of evidence do you think a person should have before they make a claim like that about another person?

I think you're not quite getting bikeshaving's point. Certainly in the US, you can't be jailed for past behavior even if it's outlawed now. It seems like Great Britain isn't quite as absolute, but the European Convention on Human Rights bans it explicitly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R...

I also think "expelled from society" is a touch dramatic. As best I can tell, not a single famous racist has starved to death, or even been forced back to subsistence agriculture. I think the most extreme penalty I've seen is having to change jobs/industries, or perhaps losing some friends.

So your standard for whether something is serious is whether someone literally dies as a direct result of it?

For most of us, losing your career and all or almost all your friends is kind of a big deal.

People have committed suicide over this.

Try applying your standards to things you believe in some time. "He says he was a victim of racist discrimination? Well, he still seems to be alive and fed, and has stable employment at Walmart. So that's a touch dramatic."

That is not my standard for "serious". But my standard for "expelled from society" is actually that they be expelled from society.

I agree that the social penalties for racism can be serious. Although I look forward to you naming 3 people who because of teenage postings lost their "career and all or almost all [their] friends", because again I think you're being hyperbolic in a way that undermines your point.

However, I also think that racism is serious. Perhaps this seems crazy to you, but I'm much more concerned with the many lives destroyed by racism (very much including actual murder) than I am with the social consequences racists (very rarely) experience.

You're focusing on a turn of phrase used by an earlier poster in order to ignore the larger discussion. There is no value in litigating the exact phrase "expelled from society". Whatever you want to call it, the point is that lives get ruined and people commit suicide over things that don't reflect who they are.

Demanding evidence of ruined lives for 'teenage postings' is again, an arbitary limitation that doesn't make sense given that we are talking about things that will be happening in the future, not things that happened in the past. We need to wait for social mores to change enough since teenage postings even started existing around 10-15 years ago.

However despite you deliberately trying to set a standard that makes no sense given the topic, I Googled for 5 minutes and satisfied it anyway:

Teenage girl killed herself amid fears she would be branded racist over joke photo she sent friends, inquest hears

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/28/teenage-girl-kil...

White teen who posted racist video of black HS classmate eating chicken could face criminal charges

[1] https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/white-teen-made-ra...

Teen commits suicide after cyberbullies share explicit messages outing him as bisexual

[2] https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/10/01/teen-commits-sui...

Two of these kids actually died, which I think is even more than losing their "career and all or almost all [their] friends".

Nobody is arguing for racism. What you're wrong about is the poo-poohing the threat that the combination of shifting social mores, eternally-recorded online remarks, and vindicitive power create.

Implicitly you seem to be suggesting that it's okay if some 'racists' have their lives ruined, since the cause is so just and important. Looking at the stories of these kids above dying - do those stories make you think anything different?

Are they acceptable losses, or did they deserve it? Or is there a problem here to fix?

You probably think of yourself as an empathetic person. So try expanding your empathy to more people.

Perhaps you've had the privilege of always believing only things that align 100% with the views of the powerful. You seem to be a wealthy San Francisco leftist, so I can see how you would live under the basic belief that "if power is suppressing it, it must be bad".

Perhaps you think there is a clean simple line between Good People and Those Evil Nazis Who Deserve What They Get. There is not. Humans are complex.

However, try to conceive that someone could be both dissident and not-evil at the same time. If you need to, you can imagine living in another society where the power actually disagrees with you. What then?

And please recognize that your orthodoxy may change. Maybe you'll change your views, or society will. Then you'll be the "racist", or "Nazi", or "communist", or "kaffir", or "heretic", or "reactionary", or whatever label they're using in 30 years.

I am not the one who set the "expelled from society" standard. My point was that it was dramatic. If you are truly interested in a healthy "larger discussion" you'll hopefully agree that turning down the rhetorical temperature makes it easy to have a good discussion that gets at the truth.

Of course, given that you've decided to spend multiple paragraphs in a personal fantasy building a very poor straw man of me and my views, I think that a good discussion is not really your goal here.

>I am not the one who set the "expelled from society" standard.

Yes you are. I said "serious" and you yourself specifically pulled it back to the literal interpretation of "expelled from society". Another poster used those words casually; you're the one who decided that their literal intepretation was the "standard".

On the rest, this just feels like you're pointing at my tone as an excuse to avoid acknowledging or engaging any of the questions I brought up.

I said "Perhaps you believe X". This isn't building a strawman, it's trying to get to the heart of the beliefs underlying the issue. If you believe something totally different than X it'd be great if you would explain it.

A good discussion is my goal. Is it yours? You smugly tried to shut me down with a demand for news stories that you thought couldn't be satisfied. And now you're refusing to talk - with the excuse that you don't think I want to talk.

In any case, I'd welcome a meaningful response that actually addresses my points and the larger discussion.

Bottom line: You seem to think that it's only very rarely that a few terrible racists get socially punished this way, implying you think the situation is okay. I showed you that it's not, it's kids and normal people, and people are dying. What's your reponse to this new information?

One thing I'd really like HN readers to understand is that UK newspapers, even supposedly respectable ones like the Telegraph, are FUCKING GARBAGE.

Please stop posting links to them because they're often inaccurate, sometimes deliberately so.

Phoebe Connop, the girl who died, was British so I think it's kind of reasonable to post British papers about it. But here are some non-British ones if you really want.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/uk-teenager-phoebe-connop-hanged-h...

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/school...

While this is technically correct from legal standpoint, the kernel of truth is in there. (Il)legality doesn't matter much compared to consequences. Consequences matter a lot, and in that case his advice is perfectly sound.

That one "joke" you made when you were sixteen might render you unemployable by 2040. People evolve, and their earlier marks on earth vanish. Before social media even the worst could re-make themselves into something better, now even the best have their worst moments permanently recorded.

The hope would be that, as more and more people are caught up in this sort of thing, we'd become more accepting of personal growth, as a society. This hasn't happened yet. Hopefully this is just a growing pain. But I can definitely see why people wouldn't want to take a chance, given the stakes!

Just because you're protected from the government doesn't mean that the mob won't get you. Take for example, the founder of Mozilla. Apparently a number of years ago he donated a thousand dollars to a political organization that lobbied for some anti-LGBT laws. The public outrage forced him to resign.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich#Appointment_to_CE...

I think gp may be going for "persecution" rather than "prosecution", i.e. jury of public opinion rather than jury in a courtroom.

Legally yes, but call it retroactive cancelation then... Something that is legal today but might be shameful or even ilegal in 30 years.

An example: a young person paints his face in black before going to a party. Decades later, black face is a thing and people find out about that party and it's now a shit show for the guy that is a prime minister of a country. There's no legal prosecution, but cancelation is even harder to deal with.

you can never predict how old laws would work with modern systems - for example, in Russia you also have this rule, but after the mass persecution and censorship started the judges ruled that a post on social media, even one made before the new laws were written, is still perfect ground for conviction because it is still accessible at the time of arrest. So, how many tweets do people have? Are you going to closely follow new laws and comb through all of your post history on the entire internet every time a new law is passed?

Different perspective. It's not legal advice. It's read history advice...when governments change people generally go to prison or worse for things that were legal under the previous government. Since data is mobile and global there is good chance that if a government goes away the data won't.

I'm thinking McCarthyism as an example makes it good advice either way.

Also for Americans, parallel investigation is a thing.

> Also for Americans, parallel investigation is a thing.

Usually called parallel construction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

there is no guarantee that the constitution will be the same in 30 years.