Comment by slg
9 years ago
For all the people who are warning of a slippery slope or a chilling effect, where do we draw a line? This site along with others like it likely helped spur a person on to murder a few days ago. This site along with other like it celebrated that murder. This site along with other like are organizing protests at that murder victim's funeral. How in good conscience can you be an accomplice in spreading that message?
I mean, the networking infrastructure carried that message. The people who manufactured the murder weapon assisted the murder goals.
The point is that we have a legal process to deal with murder. If we wanted to suppress the message glorifying it and encouraging it, we should do that directly, and take down the site through legal due process. Going after infrastructure is the wrong solution when you should be confronting problems directly. And if you don't want to confront it directly (ie, maybe the site is protected by free speech laws that we don't want to revoke)... whats the point of those free speech protecting laws if they just end up being subverted through a different avenue, and one that does not have to follow the process and regulation of the law at that?
>If we wanted to suppress the message glorifying it and encouraging it, we should do that directly, and take down the site through legal due process.
That sounds like a much bigger conflict with the 1st amendment than society simply deciding to shun messages we want to suppress.
If it were taken down, yes.
What he's arguing, though, is to use courts because he knows courts would never do that in the US.
I agree. There's probably a line somewhere but let's get a little closer to it than literal Nazis celebrating a murder before the hand-wringing starts.