Comment by nixgeek
4 years ago
GP was likely aware of this but didn’t explicitly state why imminence was important.
Where does it specifically say in the US Constitution that you’re allowed to incite violence? :-)
Usually the answer here is going to be someone cites the 1st Amendment, and a persons right to free speech. From that we have Brandenburg vs. Ohio, and also then Hess vs. Indiana, and subsequent cases which use those precedents from the Supreme Court, these hold that 1A protection does disappear where someone is calling for “imminent violence”.
Many of the internet hellholes hiding behind Cloudflare have significant quantities of unmoderated and extreme discourse where participants do call for imminent violence against another party and that is not 1A protected behavior.
The term this discussion is searching for is "true threat" [1][2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_threat
[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/20-1459/198236/202...
Technically, true threats and "incitement to imminent lawless action" are separate doctrines.
https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1025/true-threa...
https://mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/970/incitement-to-i...
> true threats and "incitement to imminent lawless action" are separate doctrines
Wasn't aware, thank you. That said, this message [1] sounds an awful lot like "the speaker mean[t] to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual" [2].
Aside: And with that tweet read, I'm out. Happy Labor Day weekend folks.
[1] https://twitter.com/keffals/status/1566153033586810885
[2] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/538/343/case.pdf
> Where does it specifically say in the US Constitution that you’re allowed to incite violence? :-)
You mean lawless violence. :-)
I would bet calls for killing some private citizen (e.g. agitating, “kill Rodney Dangerfield”) would not survive as protected speech in the courts anymore.
>Many of the internet hellholes hiding behind Cloudflare have significant quantities of unmoderated and extreme discourse where participants do call for imminent violence against another party and that is not 1A protected behavior.
Which websites are you referring to, in what numbers are you talking about, and how are you determining that those calls for violence are imminent? Wouldn't that suggest that a lot of violence has already occurred stemming from those websites? (presumably not stopped by a slow legal system like Cloudflare implies would have happened in this case)