The prosecution of people who made inflamatory posts during Britain's recent anti-immigrant riots has led to a lot of anger and angst over speech. Some people – notably Elon Musk, but he is far from alone – have accused the British government of setting up an oppressive police state for things like this:
Some people have also objected to a 15-month prison term for Julie Sweeney, 53, of Cheshire. After seeing a photo on Facebook of people helping repair a mosque that was attacked during a riot in Southport, Ms. Sweeney posted: “Don’t protect the mosques. Blow the mosque up with the adults in it.” She pleaded guilty to a charge of sending a communication threatening death or serious harm. Her lawyer argued for leniency, saying she was her husband’s primary caregiver. But the judge, Steven Everett, said, “Even people like you need to go to prison.”
As I see it, many people treat the internet as a sort of fantasy world where they can say anything because there are no consequences. They want Twitter/X to be just like sitting with their mates in the pub, with freedom to say whatever pops into their heads. And, indeed, the internet is where many, many people have most of their conversations.
On the other side, government spokesmen say things like:
I don’t see why the internet should be regarded as any different than when someone stands on a soap box and addresses a raging crowd.That is, a place and situation where words matter a lot.
The liberal establishment has a deep fear that bad things are happening on the internet, that dangerous ideas are circulating and getting into the heads of impressionable young men, and that this will somehow lead to a civil war or right-wing takeover. My sons, who spent a lot of time in online swamps as teenagers, are frankly baffled by this attitude. They think the whole business is a grand joke, just kids experimenting with their freedom to say shocking things. The notion that anyone would take it seriously is just weird to them, like thinking that Dungeons and Dragons is training kids to become sword-wielding assassins.
And then the riots broke out in Britain, fueled by false rumors that a knife-wileding killer was a Muslim asylum seeker, riots in which people were hurt and property destroyed. On the one hand it was a farce, a bunch of grouches larping at revolution, easily crushed by the government. On the other hand, a hotel full of asylum seekers was surrounded by an angry mob that threatened to burn them alive and beat up the cops who tried to stop them, and that doesn't strike me as something we ought to tolerate.
But I have to say that new PM Keith Starmer's comments make me nervous:
“We’re going to have to look more broadly at social media after this disorder.” He also applauded the courts for sentencing people for their online behavior, not just for taking part in the riots. “That’s a reminder to everyone that whether you’re directly involved or whether you’re remotely involved, you’re culpable, and you will be put before the courts if you’ve broken the law.”What does "remotely involved" mean? You can just glance at Russia or China to see how far certain governments have stretched the definition of "remotely involved" in lawbreaking.
The case that has drawn the most attention is that of the woman accused of starting the furor, Bernadette Spofforth, 55, described by the NY Times as "an online influencer and mother of three." She was arrested and released on bail but has not been charged. The Times:
Disinformation researchers say she appears to have been the first to falsely claim on X that the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker, in a post suggesting that his name was Ali-Al-Shakati. By the time she deleted the post later that day, it had been viewed almost 1.5 million times and reposted by prominent conspiracy theorists. Ms. Spofforth, who has previously spread misinformation about Covid-19 and climate change, told The Sun, a London newspaper, that she had copied and pasted the post, and “fell into the trap of sharing misinformation.”
Love that little gloss about Covid-19, because so far as I can tell spreading false information about the pandemic is a charge that could be leveled against almost everyone on the planet, starting with the CDC and all the people who said we had to close the schools.
I'm not posting about this because I think I know the answer. In a situation like the British riots, the line between free speech and incitement to riot is both hard to draw and important. But I want to put myself down as being very suspicious of any plan to arrest people for "remote involvement" in violent acts they had nothing to do with planning or committing.
8 comments:
I'm quite pleased by these prosecutions. I suppose there's some room for slippery-slope caution about phrases like "remotely involved." But I would also say that that sort of caution is something we in the US and Britain can afford. In places like India, rumors, internet-spread or not, can lead to riots with dozens, hundreds, or thousands dead. Of course, part of the problem there is that the Modi government is perfectly happy with a certain sort of rumor, and doesn't even much mind certain sort of massacre. But in any case, glib, Musk-style "who, me?" techbro complacency about the real harm internet speech can do strikes me as simple denial of reality..
"Love that little gloss about Covid-19, because so far as I can tell spreading false information about the pandemic is a charge that could be leveled against almost everyone on the planet, starting with the CDC and all the people who said we had to close the schools."
Baloney. There's a massive difference between trained experts being wrong and ignorant troublemakers sharing rubbish for the sake of making a political point.
The CDC, and other health agencies around the world, had to react quickly to an emerging situation, often in difficult political environments. On reflection, and with the benefit of deeper understanding and better modelling, more optimal strategies might be devised that save more lives while causing less social and economic harm. But that something for epidemiologists and others trained in the field to look into.
That's very different to some idiot spouting some nonsense about injecting bleach or whatever because they've been fed the line by conspiracy theory nutcases or worse. On the Internet, and especially social media, readers rarely ask to see the poster's medical or scientific credentials.
I'm reminded of Pauli's comment about some paper being 'not even wrong'. The CDC, and others working in the field, might well have been wrong. Their motives were good, though, and they can be defended as making the best out of what data and theory they had available at that moment in time. They weren't chatting over a pint of beer, but working as committees with the leading experts in the field.
But some random YouTuber comes under the heading of 'not even wrong' because their thought process had no scientific background and their opinion was not based on their years of experience in the field. If they decide to say something stupid that causes harm: they should absolutely be treated just as if they'd been published in a newspaper or book.
In a situation like the British riots, the line between free speech and incitement to riot is both hard to draw and important.
"Free speech" is an American legal construct, not a British one. There is no general right to free speech in Britain, and there never has been.
The closest you get is Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights - which specifically notes while everyone has the right to freedom of expression, "exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
But I want to put myself down as being very suspicious of any plan to arrest people for "remote involvement" in violent acts they had nothing to do with planning or committing.
If someone shouts fire in a crowded theater, are you going to insist we only arrest the people who actually trampled others in their rush for the exits?
How about if there's a distraught and suicidal person on a window ledge, and someone keeps shouting "Jump!" at them? Do you think that's none of the authorities' business to interfere with or respond to?
What if someone falsely claims that the parents of children massacred at Sandy Hook are crisis actors, and then encourages their audience to attack and harass those bereaved victims? Do you think Alex Jones was unjustly persecuted by our justice system, because he didn't personally show up to throw bricks through windows and threaten innocent people at gunpoint?
America's willingness to tolerate flatly inflammatory speech which incites people to criminality and violence is deeply unusual, and frankly bizarre. It ranks right up there with America's willingness to tolerate weekly mass shootings; or to tolerate the exploitation of labor; or to tolerate life without affordable medicine and healthcare. Virtually all other affluent modern countries look on such American oddities with bafflement and disgust.
You don't get to publicly call for murder in front of the entire world, and then claim you had nothing to do with it when someone answers your call and attempts to murder the people you said need to be murdered.
@G- If you've ever been on a site like 4-Chan, you probably know that calls for war, murder, and genocide happen thousands of times every day. How many of those teenagers are you going to prosecute?
@Neale- Welcome. I am not nearly as forgiving as you about the behavior of governments during the pandemic. I think they mishandled it horribly and I am still mad about it. They adopted mask mandates despite reams of evidence that they go no good. In fact the CDC's initial position was that they wouldn't ask for a mandate because we know they do no good, but then they reversed themselves. I think for an official government agency to reverse itself in that way is a thousand or maybe a million times worse than some ignorant person passing on Ivermectin stories. Closing the schools was an educational catastrophe, and for that I blame both the government and the legions of teachers and parents who panicked and demanded it. I think the performance of governments in this crisis is a major reason that nobody in the world wants to trust experts in anything.
@G- and how about all the liberals who said they wished Trump's wouldn-be assassin hadn't missed. Isn't that calling for assassination? Should they all be prosecuted?
@John
"How many of those teenagers are you going to prosecute?"
However many would be commensurate with people making the exact same threats or calls for violence via other forms of public broadcast.
If a teenager took out an ad in a newspaper and used it to call for the extermination of the Jews, both they and the newspaper would be in hot water. Ditto if they rented a billboard, or purchased advertisement time on a radio broadcast, or on a television broadcast, etc.
Those are all actions with serious potential repercussions (based on the exact nature of the content), both for the individual responsible and for the companies which enable them. Which is precisely why most media companies do not allow you to use their platforms to broadcast such messages.
If you try to rent a billboard so you can use it to call for A New Kristallnacht, you're going to be refused by every sane person offering such rentals who has any sense of self preservation.
And if you do manage to find someone unhinged enough to accept your proposal, they are going to quickly discover that in doing so, they've run afoul of a whole slew of relevant laws and regulations which forbid such usages, and then they get to choose between removing the offending content and likely paying a fine on top of that, or going to court and being prosecuted.
Now, the reason why internet posts get treated somewhat differently in our legal system is that there were laws passed to exempt internet providers from liability for the misdeeds of their users, based on the argument that it's impossible to police the system without also effectively destroying it's usefulness.
Which is fine! I have no problem with exempting internet providers. (In principle, anyway. And to a limited extent.)
But no such exemptions have ever existed for users themselves. If you threaten to kill someone on the internet, that's just as actionable as if you threaten to kill them via more traditional means, and it always has been.
The ultimate issue with places like 4-Chan is one of lack of enforcement, not lack of legal grounds to persecute. One could argue such lack of enforcement is a form of the legal doctrine of "De Minimis" - the idea that not every infraction or crime is worth taking action against, because we have limited resources to spread between different issues, and thus we should prioritize enforcing the most important matters, and we can let minor things slide a lot of the time.
...except that idea doesn't really mesh with the fact that "SWATing" exists, and if someone (say a teenager on 4-Chan) places an anonymous phone call to a police department and makes unsubstantiated claims about a given individual they wish to victimize, the police will immediately respond with the highest level of force possible, at considerable taxpayer expense, and frequently resulting in the injury or death of innocent victims.
Of course, once again, we note that society responds differently to online communications than it does to traditional ones, for some reason. Can you imagine the police deploying a SWAT team to raid someone's home based on nothing more than an anonymous e-mail making unfounded claims? The very idea seems almost farcically absurd, no?
@John
"and how about all the liberals who said they wished Trump's would-be assassin hadn't missed. Isn't that calling for assassination? Should they all be prosecuted?"
Again, to whatever degree would be commensurate with people making the same comments via other forms of public broadcast, absolutely.
That said, there's a very real (and more importantly -legal-) difference between saying "I wish that he had died" and "Someone should kill him" / "He should be killed". Comments which resemble the former aren't nearly as likely to be prosecuted successfully.
We already have laws about this stuff, John! Incitement to riot is a thing, which you can and will get into very deep trouble over if a court weighs on the exact wording of your speech and determines it qualifies as incitement! If you publicly broadcast a message calling for people to murder Trump, you're probably going to have the police knocking on your door! (Unless you do it on 4-Chan, apparently...)
It's the exact same reason that people make sure to say "allegedly" when talking about the potential crimes of accused suspects, even when everyone knows for an undeniable fact that the accused is flatly guilty. If you are careless enough to go around describing someone as a murderer before they're actually convicted of murder, then you run the very real risk of being prosecuted for libel / slander. And if your comments can be demonstrated to have caused harm to person in question, you can be held liable for damages.
Do people still take that risk regularly? Yes. Yes they do. Largely because they often can get away with it - mostly because libel / slander /defamation are civil charges rather than criminal ones.
But that doesn't change the fact that speech of that kind is not legal - anymore than the reality that not every speeding car can be reasonably ticketed changes the fact that speeding is not legal.
Moreover, if your speech is not merely defamatory, but could reasonably be interpreted as incitement, that's no longer a mere civil matter - the severity of your statements can elevate the situation to a criminal matter, particularly if your words lead to someone being killed.
Of course, even then, "De Minimis" does still come into play - the authorities don't respond to every single threat people make (online or elsewhere), because that's just not feasible, and most such threats are empty.
But when a threat later turns out NOT to be empty? If your call for violence isn't just empty words, but actually leads to violence or attempts at such? You can be damned sure that "De Minimis" is no longer going to apply, and you're going to face prosecution - as you damn well should!
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