News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Lots of people just don't know what freedom is speech actually means. Speech isn't a crime, but crimes can be committed by speaking.
If you kill someone with a hammer, you aren't charged with possession of hammer - you're charged with murder. If you hire a hitman to do the killing instead, you aren't charged with "using speech."
When that theoretical person is arrested for "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" they aren't actually being arrested for their speech or their words, but for a separate crime that uses speech as a mechanism.
Speech is a marvelous thing that should be protected, but freedom of speech is not freedom from the consequences of using speech to commit other crimes.
Can you explain to me then, what exactly is freedom of speech? Yelling fire in a crowded theater isn't using speech then, it's assault on other persons by threatening harm. Criticize the government? That's not freedom of speech, that's just unlicensed protest. Sing a song protesting a war? You go to jail for treason.
Freedom of speech absolutely means being free from the government imposing consequences for speech. Yelling fire in a crowded theater comes from Schenck v United States which found that speech must pose a clear and present danger to be able to be held criminally liable for it. And Brandenburg v Ohio narrowed the definition even further, that speech must be "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action".
Despite our views on JK's abhorrent rhetoric, you cannot say that mis-gendering trans people is inciting imminent lawlessness.
Your comment demonstrates a pretty fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of free speech.
You quoted cases that literally demonstrate my point.
It's not the word "fire" that is the crime. It's speech as a mechanism by which lawlessness or panic is incited.
Hate-speech is more nuanced, but can follow a similar pattern.
Take the sentance: "It's time to cut down the tall trees." The words themselves are fairly innocuous. But that was the trigger phrase for the Rwandan Genocide. Saying those words on the air was a call to murder all the Tutsi people. Speaking those words on the radio was not an act of free expression by the Interhamwe, but the start of a barbaric hate crime that killed nearly a million people.
Well, ironically your example here demonstrates just how difficult policing or regulating speech can be, and how it will likely never, ever work.
How, exactly, would you write a law that captures "it's time to cut down the tall trees" as an act of hate speech (or a crime in general) while not simultaneously massively infringing on any potential innocent uses of such a phrase?
If you've spent any time on social media, you'll likely have noticed that if admins simply ban certain words or phrases, the people who want to communicate these words will simply come up with some code using words so innocuous that you cannot ban them without frustrating everyone else and thus tipping them off to the conspiracy, and basically giving it even more exposure thanks to the Streisand effect.
It absolutely is the word fire that is the crime and you really need to go back to middle school and take some sort of US legal class. The state of American education system these days...
No. It isn't. There's nothing illegal about the word fire, or even saying it in a theater.
Go. Find that law and report back if I'm wrong. Give me a citation.
You know what - fuck it. I'll do the leg work here and go into the most specific law I can find on the subject. It's within the Municipal Code of Ordinances Ordinances of the city of Reading, Ohio.
It sounds promising for you at first because it specifically mentions:
But that line §648.07(A)(1) only applies as a subsection of §648.07(A), which is:
And to further clarify that the crime isn't the words, §648.07(C) specifically states:
Whoever violates this section is guilty of inducing panic.
Subsection B is about allowing fire drills as an exception.
So, according to the most-specific law I could find, the crime is inciting panic, not any specific word or phrase. And even if you did shout fire it isn't a crime unless it actually causes a real panic.
Also - I highly doubt you've taken more law classes than me. Just a hunch though: maybe you're just a bad lawyer.
I, for one, get angry at big gubment limiting my free spech to call people slurs at home depot just like how I get angry at big government for limiting my god given right to come and go as I please when I break into people's houses and watch them sleep.
Agreed. It just becomes problematic when speech itself is redefined as crime, that is what I'm arguing against. And the the line with the consequences is not that clear either. Someone could read a book and go an kill someone. I personally think it's a hard thing to really understand consequences of words.
This is peak Reddit, now peak lemmy
If speech has a price, it's not free
Speech used to commit a crime isn't illegal. The crime being facilitated through that speech is.
If I assault you with a hammer, it's not the hammer that's the issue. Arresting me for it has nothing to do with the legality of hammers.