Absolutely not – not even in USA.
If it is someone you know and there is credibility to the threat, then no.
If it is someone you have never met and is clearly being expressed as a political statement, then yes.
In other words, a nuanced respect for free speech versus pissy-pants oversensitive pussies crying to Big Brother 'cause someone said a meanie to them.
Don’t neuter discourse for your own softness.
Technically, a threat could be a long series of plausible albeit difficult to execute steps, such as, hypothetically,
(1) I’m going to hire a team of hackers from a dark forum to hack the SDMB
(2) I’ll have the hackers discover the IP address of the user “Stringbean”
(3) I’ll hire more hackers to infiltrate the ISP that “Stringbean” uses, and discover his home address
(4) I’ll send me and my buddy Cletus to “Stringbean’s” house to have him assaulted by pigs
Possible? Yes. Plausible? Unlikely, the problem is that hackers aren’t like the movies, and there simply may not be any known security holes in the software that the message board or the ISP uses. If there aren’t any known security holes, and a research project to find some fails, then that’s it. It is actually possible to write digital software that is perfect and does not allow hackers in at all, just unlikely.
Also, this is an awful lot of effort to go to. I doubt “Stringbean” feels all that threatened, the odds of it happening are far less than the chances he gets killed by a lightning strike.
That’s not nuance. That’s just trying rewrite what political discourse is.
A threat is not a political statement. It is not a form of discourse. It is an attempt to use the fear of death or bodily harm to control someone else. The whole point of a threat is to try and chill freedom of speech by making the other person too afraid to speak.
They are illegal for a reason–even if they are hard to prosecute thanks to the anonymity of the Internet. You allow these fake threats, then the real ones can’t be distinguished. And then you can’t stop the people who were going to do it.
People use threats because there is a chance they could be real, and that scares people. Hell, I’m pretty sure you’ve condemned threats against those who depict Mohamed.
A threat is not free speech.
I am confused. In this thread…post 2…you say that you are not an American.
I lived here over three decades. I have US citizenship. But I was not born here.
Agree 100%.
Threats are not free speech, but there is a long-standing doctrine in the United States that only “true threats” count as threats. Back in 1969, in Watts v. United States, the Supreme Court overturned a man’s conviction for threatening to harm the President of the United States, after he said “*f they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.” The Supremes found this utterance to be “political hyperbole” which “in context, and regarding the expressly conditional nature of the statement and the reaction of the listeners” could not be taken as an actual threat against anyone, but rather was a Constitutionally protected expression of a political opinion about President Johnson (albeit a “very crude offensive” such expression).
The jurisprudence surrounding what is and is not a “true threat” seems to be a bit of a mess these days. However, the fundamental point–that half the threads in the Pit right here on the SDMB don’t constitute “terroristic threats”–remains.
As noted in the post above, it often is when it plainly acts as a political statement.
Also, this is not a threat though it quite literally represents bodily harm to someone. Rational people realize it as something other than “I’m going to kill the president.” I should hope you see that as well and will temper your asinine (and dangerous) absolutism.
Great point. Clearly you’re worked up about this because of how much you’ve thought about it.
Now, then. What’s the political message in
?
There must be one, right, because otherwise what you’re saying would have very little to do with the subject at hand, and it would be really weird that you were calling anybody’s posts asinine!
The trolls make disgusting remarks about the way my family looks, the way we talk. Some have even suggested we are incestuous. I’ve been called ‘fat’ and ‘disgusting’. I’ve been told that I look ‘deformed’ and like ‘half man, half-horse’.
All the trolls use male names, and many of the remarks are misogynistic. Yet I instinctively feel, thanks to the language they use and their comments about my appearance – such as catty remarks about my weight and clothes – that they are, in fact, female. I will probably never know the truth, thanks to the cloak of anonymity that Twitter lovingly wraps around them.
The daughter herself acknowledges that these are statements made to attack their physical appearance. There is a political movement taking place online to attack the character and physical appearance of these people. The “cloak of anonymity” is precisely why she doesn’t take these “threats” seriously. She knows they are just being assholes and insulting he way she and her mother look.
Classic over-reaction to speech that (while vulgar) should not result in jail-time. Shame on the authorities for prosecuting it. Shame on you for supporting criminal prosecution for a non-credible “threat” that is merely a drop in the bucket of political commentary being made online against these people.
Am I supposed to guess which five words in my post that was a response to, or what?
I believe it was an answer to the (only) question in your post that used your own cite as the evidentiary foundation.
Wait, no. I don’t believe any such thing. I know it to be so.
So how about the following statement (and, mods and Stringbean, I mean this only to test the theory, not as a real threat):
Stringbean, I am going to come to your house and rape and kill your entire family.
Now, I don’t know you personally, so it fails the first sentence, but there is no political value to it, so it fails the second sentence.
Of course, there is latent fear that the person making such a statement might be a hacker who could find some identifying information for the username “Stringbean” and come to your house. Or, more likely, it could be a drunken rambling.
Should that one statement be protected speech (i.e. not illegal)?
ETA: Let’s assume that statement was made after we argued in a long Pit Thread
Please provide a cite for the Supreme Court of Canada sending someone to jail for a rude post.
You don’t understand the 1st amendment. Go exercise free speech in Walmart and get a free lesson on what it actually bans.
Freedom of speech (the 1st Amendment) only applies to discourse between the government and it’s citizens, not discourse between citizens or citizens to private enterprise. IOW, there is no “free speech” in Wal-Mart. They can kick you out for saying “Boo” and you have to leave. Same applies in my house, I determine what is acceptable speech within my house/car/property.
Stop being a bully.
I believe that the context matters, as well as the level of anonymity involved. If you refer to me as Stringbean, that leans heavily toward speech that should be protected because there is no evidence that you actually even know who I am.
Also, if it is in the context of a political debate such as a Pit thread, then there is an established political environment/debate occurring, which similarly lends protection as political speech.
Even if it wasn’t in the context of an online debate and you used my real name but we have never met, if you couch it in political language (“I’m going to rape you because you’re stupid,” “I’m going to rape you because your nose is ugly,” “I’m going to rape you because you’re a dumbass conservative”) then it should be treated as political speech and not a true threat.
In other words, a threat must be credible for you to actually prove first-hand knowledge of the person and for it not to be couched in a political expression. Using a broad interpretation of “political expression.”
Most would disagree with me, but I take a strong stance in the defense of free speech. I see use in restricting it in limited circumstances, but saying mean things on the internet falls short, imho.
I wasn’t being a bully, I mean I meant they would ask him to leave not kill him unless those door greeters are armed now. Same as the first amendment doesn’t apply to private web forums, your first amendment rights have nothing to do with whether sick comments are a bannable offense.