TheMadMonk
If this guy had been harping on about terrorism on Facebook I doubt so many people would be pontificating about freedom of speech and how awesome they think the US is.
Let's keep this civil and on topic shall we? Thanks.TheMadMonk said:If this guy had been harping on about terrorism on Facebook I doubt so many people would be pontificating about freedom of speech and how awesome they think the US is.
Ryan_m_b said:Personally I think that if the comments were on their own Facebook page and did not involve tagging anyone related to the incident in them then it should not be against the law. However this doesn't necessarily apply if they have set their page for public viewing.
In the UK as I understand it something posted on the Internet where it can be publicly viewed is under the same libel, hate speech, harrassment etc laws as if it was printed in a newspaper.
Again being public is not a free liscence to say whatever you want to whoever you want.
Ryan_m_b said:Similarly making a joke about someone who has just died (sick as it may be) in a public space shouldn't be a crime. Directing it at the grieving family for no other reason than fun or an exercise in your freedom of speech should be (and is) a crime.
Depending on the exact situation you never did have it under UK law. Freedoms are balanced by law, your freedom to swings your arm ends at someone else's personal space for example. Are you seriously surprised that emotionally and psychologically damaging behaviour is subject to regulation like physical behaviour? A good example of recent regulation to this effect is the inclusion of psycholgical and emotional abuse.WannabeNewton said:Why is that a crime? I can't make fun of a family because of a death in that family? I don't even have that freedom anymore?
Ryan_m_b said:I don't see that current legislation is good enough to deal with social media and 2003 is closer to 1993 in terms of social media than today. Reason being that Facebook didn't take off til the middle of the decade and it now has over 1 billion accounts regularly used. The manner in which it is used is very different to anything before and that also goes for more modern creations such as twitter.
Ryan_m_b said:Social media creates grey areas such as whether or not ones own Facebook page counts as a public space or a private space and whether or not that changes on the basis of your privacy settings. Pertinent to this is whether or not posting on someone else's page would constitute harrassment vs posting on your own page.
Ryan_m_b said:Depending on the exact situation you never did have it under UK law. Freedoms are balanced by law, your freedom to swings your arm ends at someone else's personal space for example. Are you seriously surprised that emotionally and psychologically damaging behaviour is subject to regulation like physical behaviour? A good example of recent regulation to this effect is the inclusion of psycholgical and emotional abuse.
Ryan_m_b said:I disagree, I don't think that people are necessarily uninformed but that they disagree with the desicion of the courts. For example: disagreeing that social networking should count as publishing bearing in mind how it is used in today's society.
Ryan_m_b said:Successful convictions are hardly a measure of success when what you disagree with is the purpose of the law rather than a practice.
Ryan_m_b said:Similarly making a joke about someone who has just died (sick as it may be) in a public space shouldn't be a crime. Directing it at the grieving family for no other reason than fun or an exercise in your freedom of speech should be (and is) a crime.
WannabeNewton said:Why is that a crime? I can't make fun of a family because of a death in that family? I don't even have that freedom anymore?
IMO any legal profession suffers from the same problem as science; a general disregard for public communication by writing it off as not their consideration.TheMadMonk said:Honestly, most people haven't got a clue what goes on inside the courts. I think you overestimate the legal knowledge of the average Brit. Most British people don't even realize there are three distinct legal systems within the UK, let alone complicated points of law.
Be careful of overstating your opinion as fact. I've attended debates on this subject before and generally the reason that people believe they should be distinct in some way is the manner in which it is used. When your primary form of non-face-to-face contact with someone is via social media you don't treat it as equivalent to publishing a book or a blog post for that matter. It becomes a form of semi-public correspondence. The central issue here is that whilst social media might bear similarity in practice to print publishing they are being used and viewed in entirely different ways in society.TheMadMonk said:I'm also struggling to see why it would be decided that something being put online shouldn't be considered as publishing because it absolutely is and rightly so.
So if a law successfully convicts people for what the consensus agree shouldn't be a crime you would still take it as fit for purpose? Regardless of if it deals with the problem also the false positives need to be taken into account too when judging the fitness.TheMadMonk said:But if the law isn't fit for purpose (which is how I interpreted the first point) then successful convictions are a perfectly good measure. As I said previously I don't agree with arresting and jailing people in circumstances like that of the OP but the law itself is actually, for once, fairly well written and hardly irrelevant.
Ryan_m_b said:IMO any legal profession suffers from the same problem as science; a general disregard for public communication by writing it off as not their consideration.
Ryan_m_b said:Be careful of overstating your opinion as fact. I've attended debates on this subject before and generally the reason that people believe they should be distinct in some way is the manner in which it is used. When your primary form of non-face-to-face contact with someone is via social media you don't treat it as equivalent to publishing a book or a blog post for that matter. It becomes a form of semi-public correspondence. The central issue here is that whilst social media might bear similarity in practice to print publishing they are being used and viewed in entirely different ways in society.
If nothing else that's going to cause problems.
Ryan_m_b said:So if a law successfully convicts people for what the consensus agree shouldn't be a crime you would still take it as fit for purpose? Regardless of if it deals with the problem also the false positives need to be taken into account too when judging the fitness.
I agree that more education would be a good thing but other than that what you've written here does not address what I said about public communication. I mentioned nothing about bowing to public pressure just because.TheMadMonk said:If the legal system were to constantly pander to public pressure it would be an utter mess. I'd like to see more law taught in schools to at least give pupils a basic overview of the legal systems in the UK but I suspect there isn't really much appetite for it unfortunately.
I agree that it is regarded as publishing by UK law, what I warned about was when you said that this was absolutely right.TheMadMonk said:You conceed that it is publishing in the UK so I'm not sure how you can possibly accuse me of stating opinion as fact when you acknowledge as much yourself.
I already gave you an example with regards to how people utilise social media in their lives as correspondence. Do you actually not understand or do you just disagree? It's not necessarily arbitrary but it is awkward.TheMadMonk said:I can't understand why blogging would be considered publishing and using social media (such as Twitter rather ironically) not when in a lot of cases the platforms are being used for a very similar purpose, it seems rather arbitrary to say one is publishing and the other is not.
I'm not erecting a straw man argument at all. I'm simply following through in what you said with regards to conviction rates being an indicator of a successful law by pointing out that if a law doesn't address what it was meant to or has strong negative consequences it can be considered as not fit for purpose even with lots of convictions.TheMadMonk said:That's not really what I'm getting at though and I think you know that, you're erecting a strawman argument here. I've already said I don't agree with the law as it stands right now and I'd even suggest we agree to an extent. We don't need to change the law to facilitate what you advocate, the courts are perfectly capable of doing that themselves.
Ryan_m_b said:I agree that more education would be a good thing but other than that what you've written here does not address what I said about public communication. I mentioned nothing about bowing to public pressure just because.
Ryan_m_b said:I agree that it is regarded as publishing by UK law, what I warned about was when you said that this was absolutely right.
Ryan_m_b said:I already gave you an example with regards to how people utilise social media in their lives as correspondence. Do you actually not understand or do you just disagree? It's not necessarily arbitrary but it is awkward.
Ryan_m_b said:I'm not erecting a straw man argument at all. I'm simply following through in what you said with regards to conviction rates being an indicator of a successful law by pointing out that if a law doesn't address what it was meant to or has strong negative consequences it can be considered as not fit for purpose even with lots of convictions.
Also please note that I never said that we need to change any laws, simply highlighted the possibility of it and have been discussing that.
Ryan_m_b said:Be careful of overstating your opinion as fact. I've attended debates on this subject before and generally the reason that people believe they should be distinct in some way is the manner in which it is used. When your primary form of non-face-to-face contact with someone is via social media you don't treat it as equivalent to publishing a book or a blog post for that matter. It becomes a form of semi-public correspondence. The central issue here is that whilst social media might bear similarity in practice to print publishing they are being used and viewed in entirely different ways in society.
If nothing else that's going to cause problems.
The problem hasn't changed though: such laws are by nature arbitrary and capricious. Because:Ryan_m_b said:Similarly making a joke about someone who has just died (sick as it may be) in a public space shouldn't be a crime. Directing it at the grieving family for no other reason than fun or an exercise in your freedom of speech should be (and is) a crime...
[separate post]Freedoms are balanced by law, your freedom to swings your arm ends at someone else's personal space for example. Are you seriously surprised that emotionally and psychologically damaging behaviour is subject to regulation like physical behaviour? A good example of recent regulation to this effect is the inclusion of psycholgical and emotional abuse.
The problem here is that the person being offended gets to decide based on emotion alone how offended they feel and the government gets to decide if it cares enough about the offense and the person being offended to act on it. Physical harm, on the other hand, is non-arbitrary.Jimmy said:Does it help if the dead person is widely hated?
russ_watters said:Making hate speech illegal requires the government to decide what is hateful and how you should feel about it.
In the terminology, I'm used to, the courts are a part of the government: they are part of the judicial branch, which is separate from the legislative branch and the executive branch.AlephZero said:Hmm ... I'm no expert on the US constitution, but in the UK the government doesn't interpret the law in every individual case. That's what the courts are for.
In U.S. courts this is true as well (for the verdict, at least), but the juries are advised of the relevant law by the court.Ror serious criminal offences, that means untrained members of the public serving on juries making the decisions, not full-time (and possibly cynical) paid adnimistrators.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...probe-into-amanda-todds-death/article4609443/Bullying itself is not considered an offence under the Criminal Code of Canada; however, many elements of it are, including assault, uttering threats and criminal harassment.
While Sgt. Thiessen said it is too soon to comment specifically on Amanda’s case, he noted bullying is the RCMP’s second-biggest youth issue, behind substance abuse.
unfortunately, the imposed sentence is not mentioned in this article.In a landmark case in March, 2002, a 16-year-old girl was found guilty of criminal harassment for uttering a series of threats to Dawn-Marie Wesley, a 14-year-old Mission girl who killed herself shortly after.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2002/03/25/wesley020325.htmlThe 16-year-old who was found guilty of both charges Monday will undergo four to six weeks of assessments before a judge imposes a sentence.