Er I meant this kind.
The hijack regarding “extra-territorial” efforts has now ended. Take it to a new thread if anyone actually has an interest in it.
Simple Linctus, from now on, stick to the topic of a thread and stop throwing out comments that are pretty clearly intended to hijack the discussion.
[ /Moderating ]
In the US, there wouldn’t be any legal reaction. Depending on how much he pissed off people, there might be an effort by the internet community to ruin his life. Recently, a woman tweeted offensive jokes about a Baltimore football player whose brother had just died. People quickly found out her real identity and raised enough of a stink that her employer had to issue a statement and the woman eventually apologized.
There certainly wouldn’t be any kind of official action taken beyond maybe a politician making noise.
Do we know where on FB he posted the jokes? If he posted them to the “Find April” group, I can see that being judged as “likely to cause fear and distress”.
But if he posted them to his own timeline, then surely they’d only have showed up in his own friends newsfeeds?
He posted the comments on his own wall. It looks like someone else took screenshots and posted those to a “Find April” type page. It’s a terribly bad legal decision in several ways.
I would seriously pissed that such a complete shit of a human being was going to become very rich because some judge or prosecutor didn’t have even the most basic understanding of the constitution.
Glad I’m not the only UK-er who thinks the sentence is a complete travesty. Today another man has been sentenced after a Facebook post saying “all soldiers should die and go to hell”. Bizarrely he was fined £300 (about $480) and sentenced to 240 hours community service, whereas the man who posted sick jokes is spending time in prison. Seems completely arbitrary to me.
Is this sort of thing frequent in the UK or are these two incidents rare? The idea of someone facing a fine or jail time just for publicly posting their opinions (hateful, bigoted, or unpopular as those opinions may be) is, pardon the expression, foreign to me.
It happens on occasion, perhaps once a year or every 6 months. IIRC the last occasion was a teenager I think.
This is my response to the OP as well. The greatest sanctions someone in the US would face for this behavior would be social ostracism and a lifetime ban from Facebook, possibly extending to other social media. The idea of jailing someone for offensive social media postings like this wouldn’t even cross most Americans’ minds.
Now, if he’d posted pictures of naked children or classified government secrets, he’d be in deep shit criminally. If he posted trade secrets or libellous statements, he’d be in deep shit civilly. I’m not sure that disgusting humor like this even rises to the level of a tort in the US, though.
These prosecutions are mostly brought under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, a provision intended to deal with malicious communications. It appears to be being read much more widely than intended, leading to judgements that some online comments are illegal, where they would not be if made offline. It’s a farce, and needs fixed quickly.
Here’s a very good overview of the problem:
As I’ve argued on many threads before, freedom of speech isn’t that different in practice in the US to most of the first world. You have many of the same exceptions that other countries have: libel, national secrets, “fire in a theatre”, obscenity, copyright infringement, incitement and so on.
The one key difference seems to be hate speech. Here in the UK you are free to express the opinion that, say, soldiers killed in action should not be idolized. But you have no protected “right” to picket funerals with deliberately offensive language. And TBH I do think that is the right balance.
That analysis implies that I should support the possibility of conviction for electronic communication, and I do. But in this specific case it’s pretty clear the punishment fit the wave of public outrage, rather than the crime.
Regarding Ramblers, and I assume tom won’t consider this a hijack because it’s just an interesting link rather than a new discussion, if you want to see where UK law gets REALLY crazy check out the story of the naked rambler, Stephen Gough. Many years behind bars simply because he sticks to his principles and refuses to put on clothes.
It’s just Scots law, not UK law (there are three separate legal systems in the UK). Gough doesn’t seem to have had much bother in England. In Scotland however, he seems to be trapped in a cycle of breach of the peace and contempt of court.
If we’re being pedantic, Scots law is still UK law, it just applies to a part of it 
Let’s face it a lot of this is to do with the more puritain Scottish establishment rather than significant legal differences.
It’s not UK law, because it doesn’t apply across the whole UK. But, yeah, pedantry.
The more puritanical bit is probably true. What’s the offence in England and Wales equivalent to breach of the peace though? There’s bound to be something, or a combination of somethings.
This is what Guantanamo should be used for. We’ll trade you a couple militants for this guy.
It covers an awful lot of ground. Blasphemy, some forms of honest dissent, some legitimate questions of historical fact. We know the Holocaust happened, but it should not be classified as “hate speech” for a (damn fool!) revisionist to question it. Such a ruling imperils legitimate historical research. The ban on possession of Nazi memorabilia also imperils legitimate research.
The very loose libel laws are also troublesome. Regard the case of the fellow who denigrated Chiropractic. He won in the end, and is a hero to many of us, but he suffered long and paid much to defend his rights.
Here in the U.S., the laws against workplace harassment (a word I can never spell correctly) are disturbing, as “offense” is defined subjectively. If I think the term “slave” in a “master/slave brake cylinder” is offensive, I can make my boss stop using it. There is (thank goodness!) a “common sense” exception, but that, by its nature, is undefined. What the hell is “common sense” regarding a disputed term or phrase?
We really may be very close to an overall agreement in principle. But the niggling little details (see what I did there?) are very troublesome in practice.
Criminal ramifications for such actions (the fb post mentioned in the OP) would be unconstitutional, and many Americans, including myself, would be outraged about a law attempting to ban speech merely because it is insensitive, insulting, or offensive.
There could be civil penalties for such language however. For example, the victim of said speech might be able to sue the speaker for intentional infliction of emotional distress.
I don’t really have anything to add that hasn’t already been said. What the guy said was, at best, in poor taste, but arresting a guy for saying that just wouldn’t happen. If by some chance it did, the ACLU and a whole bunch of other lawyers wanting to get their names out there would be fighting the case. Hell, this is the country where it becomes national news every time a kid wears what they think is a clever shirt to school and get sent home.
I would imagine that if what he said got national attention, somebody would do something to make his life miserable. But, really, I don’t even really see what he said as the sort of thing that would get that kind of attention here, so I’m not even sure he’d get much ostracization other than his immediate friends and family that saw the posts.