I step away from the forums for a bit and as expected I come back to MASSIVE RETARDATION.
I'm happy to explain why I think Sanctioned Suicide isn't protected under the First Amendment and how Lamarcus Small should be criminally charged for 40 counts of involuntary manslaughter.
Unfortunately for you, the law gives zero fucks what you think.
Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA)
Enacted in 2000, CIPA requires schools and libraries receiving federal funding to use technology protection measures to block or filter internet access to visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors. The law applies to all internet access during use by minors and can be disabled for adults for lawful purposes, such as bona fide research.
Kids' Online Safety Act
This act creates an obligation for online platforms and apps to provide safeguards and tools for parents and children.
That took all of two minutes.
The Children's Internet Protection Act only requires libraries and public schools to install filtering software. It says nothing about liability for hosting content that is harmful to minors. The Kids' Online Safety Act isn't even law. You do realise a bill has to pass both houses of Congress to become law, right?
You're going to need to do better than ChatGPT for legal research.
There's legal precedent where people went to prison, for manslaughter, for providing suicidal people with suicide instructions or encouragement; see, Commonwealth v. Carter, the "texting-suicide" case, and State vs. Melchert-Dinkel, both of which you should be familiar with. (You can google them if not.) Both of those people went to prison for merely providing encouragement to CTB (Carter) or explicit instructions (Melchert-Dinkel.) They didn't have to hold the proverbial pillow to be held criminally responsible.
Both
Carter and
Melchert-Dinkel are pretty easily distinguishable from SaSu.
- Carter did not involve "merely providing encouragement." Did you even bother reading the case? The defendant in Carter walked her boyfriend through the steps, on a phone call, and listened to him choke to death in progress.
- Both Carter and Melchert-Dinkel involved the prosecution of Person A for telling Person B to CTB. There is no precedent whatsoever for holding Person C liable for Person A's speech to Person B, even if Person C owns the platform where the speech occurs.
Try again.
Consider this: there exists speech that isn't protected and shouldn't be, i.e. criminal speech. Threatening someone, blackmailing someone isn't protected speech, it's considered criminal speech. Yelling "fire" in a crowded theater is also not protected speech. Posting bomb-making instructions online: not protected speech. Repeatedly texting your BF to kill himself, and so he does: Apparently, also not protected speech, per Carter. Telling anons on the internet how to hang themselves with step-by-step instructions: per State v. Melchert-Dinkel, not protected speech.
This is one of those arguments that wannabe lawyers from Google Law School regurgitate from time to time. "
This speech is unprotected, so
that speech (that
I think is similarly morally abhorrent) should be unprotected too!" Yeah, that's not how it works. The First Amendment's boundaries are not defined by whether the speech in question can pass a moral balancing test. They're defined by already-established categorical tests.
"Yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater" is dicta from
United States v. Schenck (1917)
, which was overturned by
Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969). The retards who hate the First Amendment love trotting out this phrase because their tiny brains consider it as a catch-all argument to suggest that any instance of "bad speech" is cosntitutionally proscribable, but the phrase originated from a case that was overturned 56 years ago.
Posting bomb-making instructions online is generally protected speech. Most uses of an explosive device is perfectly legitimate (e.g. research, mining, construction). It's only illegal to post bomb-making instructions if you specifically intend that the information is used to further a crime. Posting bomb-making instructions in furtherance of a crime is distinguishable from posting suicide instructions because suicide is, in and of itself, not a crime.
If you actually bothered to read one of the cases you cited,
State v. Melchert-Dinkel, you'll realise that the Minnesota Supreme Court held (at
844 N.W.2d 13)
inter alia that:
- Speech that merely advises or encourages suicide does not fall within the "speech integral to criminal conduct" nor the "incitement" categories of unprotected speech.
- Speech that merely advises or encourages suicide is protected by the First Amendment, and consequently the terms "advises" and "encourages" are severed (i.e. struck out) from the Minnesota statute that criminalised Melchert-Dinkel's actions.
Melchert-Dinkel makes it pretty clear that speech has to cross into actual assistance to be unprotected, and only then it is the speaker, not the third-party operator, that is punished.
Sanctioned Suicide pretty much declares their purpose right on the tin...So all those material facts about SS adds up to a forum with a very explicit purpose, which is inciting people to commit suicide. So, SS is pro-suicide, full stop.
But what you have, in lieu of proof that
@afounder actually assisted anyone's suicide, is wholly irrelevant whining about age verification and bitching about how you don't like the way he moderates his forum. Apparently, it is too "pro-suicide" for your tastes. Boo fucking hoo. Content moderation is the exact activity that Section 230 was designed to protect.
When people manage get it through your thick skull that Section 230 shields
@afounder from liability, you bitch and moan about how he is "hiding" behind or "abusing" Section 230. This is a pretty ridiculous understanding of what it means to "abuse" a legal provision. There is no requirement that
any website owner has to curate his community for your tastes or do so in a way that you consider to be in the public good. It is not an "abuse" of the law to organize your affairs based on the law as it is.
Section 230 was enacted precisely to stop retards like you from ruining the internet, because if site providers were not shielded from liability, they would be forced to censor virtually everything even remotely disagreeable until the internet was so thoroughly sanitized and bubble-wrapped that no one could
feel harmed. Our discourse would be held hostage by an assortment of weak-minded troons and Karens.
Long live the First Amendment. Long live Section 230.
You know, personally I think it's interesting how the concept of American free speech so glommed onto by certain "actors" floating around, which is not at all a concept or concern in other countries outside America, is never used for actually important things like political change but always for punching down, posting private things people don't want leaked, and here putting people in places where healthcare is a limited expensive commodity into toxic online environments, etc. Almost like it would be bleak and anti-human if constitutional speech laws actually mattered. Almost like people who care about it most aren't out if any genuine principle but because it's a vehicle to cheaply and safely express yourself as a sociopath in a cowardly fashion.
Iirc you went to china for a bit, was anyone there doing some clandestine grumbling about their inability to go online and instruct a teen how to make the worst most faulty exit bag possible? Just curious.
There is a fuck ton of case law about "important things like political change." Didn't someone mention the NYTimes earlier in the thread? Both
New York Times v. Sullivan and
New York Times v. United States are core readings for 1Ls now.
But to address your question more directly: The First Amendment seems as if it is always invoked to protect "bleak and anti-human" speech, because the Constitution was designed to protect unpopular speech. Speech that is popular needs no defending by the courts because very few will challenge a speaker's right to express a popular view. As the Supreme Court pointed out, “the point of all speech protection...is to shield just those choices of content that in someone’s eyes are misguided, or even hurtful.”
Hurley v. Irish-American,
515 U. S. 557, 574 (1995).
In fact, the entire American system of government is built partly on this premise. Federal judges have life tenure precisely so they are sufficiently independent, and therefore empowered, to make unpopular decisions protecting unpopular speech. As Hamilton wrote in
Federalist No. 78:
This independence of the judges is equally requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals from the effects of those ill humors, which the arts of designing men, or the influence of particular conjunctures, sometimes disseminate among the people themselves, and which, though they speedily give place to better information, and more deliberate reflection, have a tendency, in the meantime, to occasion dangerous innovations in the government, and serious oppressions of the minor party in the community.
Why would you give a fuck what China does?
