Mark Twain advised us to “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.” Good advice, perhaps, but not the end of the story. This kind of acquiescence in the face of injustice did not impress Martin Luther King, Jr., who said that “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” King also warned that “The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict” and “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
These are two great and wise Americans, and both were keen moral observers of our society. In Twain’s case, his quote wasn’t intended to be taken entirely seriously, although he was issuing an important warning. What’s changed since his day is that ordinary citizens don’t need to purchase ink by the barrel to reach the eyeball’s of millions of people. We have blogs and the Internet, now. Those who seek to combat injustice are no longer bringing spitballs to a tank fight.
That is, unless the Supreme Court has the tanks. I can get quite anguished about how far to go to protect free speech, and issuing threats on social media should not be legally protected in all circumstances. Certainly, making threats to kill that are perceived by the proposed victim as credible has to be crossing the line.
But I also have noticed that governments across the world like to censor (or attempt to censor) social media whenever they are facing popular unrest. And there is a temptation to try to draw distinctions between eyewitnesses on Facebook and Twitter and the “press,” which is sometimes defined in a way that excludes anyone who doesn’t work for a large corporate entity.
What I do for the Washington Monthly isn’t really materially different from what I’ve been doing for ten years at Booman Tribune, and the way I am treated legally shouldn’t be any different in the two cases.
It’s a very difficult subject. In the case of people making threats, I fear that we’ll use our legitimate desire to stop the next school shooting to aggressively go after dozens of teenagers who were just having a bad day and wrote some ill-advised and impulsively intemperate things. Maybe we even want to err on the side of caution, knowing that we’ll be ruining some people’s lives in the process.
But I get nervous whenever the Supreme Court starts to consider the limits of free speech. I don’t want to go back to the day when you had to buy ink by the barrel to get heard in this society.
There are some tests for this case, and none of them require a difference because of technology.
A quick use of these would indicate that that under the circumstances, the case here might be grounds for an assault charge.
It’s the invocation of current and very sketchy internet law that is the danger for free speech. It’s very hard to anticipate how the Fab Five will think about this one. That is worrisome.
I very much agree. Speech doesn’t gain special protection when it is transmitted online. If the accused made the same threats to his targets in person or while blustering to people sitting at a bar, there would be little room for argument.
My kid got arrested at age 11 for saying he wanted to “Stab the school with a butter knife” during the standardized test-a-palooza. Eventually charges were dropped, but I think the idea of everything being a threat, all the time has really warped our perception of what real threats are.
What happens if you write a song and put in someone else’s name who doesn’t exist (at least in regard to being a person who the song author knows)?
I think the problem with this case is the publication of the song with discernible “targets”.
Had the author changed the name of the victims to gobbledygook nonsense, would he have gone to prison for simply writing violent lyrics? I hope not, because otherwise we’d have to stick 95% of the entertainment industry into prison post haste.
In a lot of ways, this case shouldn’t focus on social media and what is and isn’t allowed to be on it, and whether it is protected, but whether publishing the song lyrics with clearly discernible names was a publicly-made threat.
And if the Supreme Court had any integrity, they’d limit their ruling to just that – was it a publicly-made threat of violence…never mind that it was made on Facebook or Twitter or some blog on the internets.