back

by carimura·2y ago·view on hn ↗
There's a big difference between advocating a crime, and perpetrating a crime. Do you really want to live in a world where something you say on your favorite social platform can be used as reasonable grounds for your imprisonment?
1 comments
I don't know how to feel about that. Social media is like a gigantic public square. If you do that in the real world and advocate for genocide, talk about hanging the PM, talk about killing migrants or gender diverse people etc, what would happen in that case?

I'm actually not sure at all about the law but I would expect to get a visit from law enforcement eventually.

We have a good standard in the US: is a statement a “true threat?” Violent rhetoric that doesn’t rise to the level of a true threat is a part of political expression. For example, the folks bringing guillotines to Jeff’s Bezos’s house are making a political point. So are Islamic imams advocating violence (in the abstract) against infidels.
> Violent rhetoric that doesn’t rise to the level of a true threat is a part of political expression.

In the risk-benefit analysis, let's be sure we consider another factor: Unknown, unpredictable, armed, nut-job third parties who are triggered to act — sometimes in concert — when dog-whistle rhetoric goes viral.

Depending on the circumstances, a prudent analysis might limit 1A protection for certain types of rhetoric because of its unacceptable risk to others. That might be the case even for facially non-violent speech, e.g., so-called dog whistles.

It's been said that the Constitution is not a suicide pact [0] — neither is it a license to kill.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Constitution_is_not_a_suic...

I disagree, I think the Constitution is a suicide pact. And I wouldn't trust anyone to define what's a "dog whistle."
> I wouldn't trust anyone to define what's a "dog whistle."

Courts are up to the task — it's Con Law 101.