Man, 19, jailed for racially abusing Marcus Rashford on Twitter

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/30/man-19-jailed-for-racially-abusing-marcus-rashford-on-twitter

by keewee7 • 4 years ago

26 53 4 years ago

trifit• 4 years ago

Finally some justice for the man but still I think the sentence was a little harsh.

Ridiculous. no one should be jailed for words. No matter how much we hate those words. Justice is in correcting the world so we never think like this. But that would be impossible with these kind of thoughts.

breakyerself2• 4 years ago

The UK has it's own standards for speech. They don't need to adhere to the free speech absolutism of the United States. This would be unacceptable in the United States, but many places do not protect racist speech. Theres good arguments on both sides. We'll see which works out better in the long run.

sokoloff2• 4 years ago

I’m a staunch advocate of free speech, but I think that a specific and credible threat of violence should be considered a crime (assault) and subject to prosecution, even though it’s “just words”.

conradludgate6• 4 years ago

Words can be extremely damaging. The US has libel and slander laws. What's so different about hate speech? It's harmful, almost as harmful as some forms of physical abuse.

Don't forget that most domestic abuse and physical abuse starts as verbal abuse, so criminalising that is not unreasonable

guilhas• 4 years ago

Especially words against willing public figures, living above average lives

cato_the_elder4• 4 years ago

This is dystopian. Apparently they are trying to send a teenager to jail because of a single tweet:

Price previously admitted one count of sending a grossly offensive message by a public communication network at a hearing at Worcester magistrates court on 17 March.

breakyerself2• 4 years ago

Its outside of what we would expect in the United States, but dystopian is hyperbolic. They don't want to tolerate racism there. Racism is bad so I can understand. The US is an outlier in how extreme our speech protections go. Even with this England tolerates far more transgressive speech than many other parts of the world. I can't even list the number of places where it's dangerous or illegal to criticize the political class. That's dystopian. This is just different from what you're used to.

cato_the_elder4• 4 years ago

I'm not from the US. I am originally from one of those places where it's more dangerous to offend the political class. I guess that's part of the reason I find this dystopian.

BeefWellington• 4 years ago

This is dystopian. Apparently they are trying to send a teenager to jail because of a single tweet:

In most (all?) places 19 year olds are viewed as adults.

Being jailed for a single tweet on its own is dystopian, there's no need to appeal to feelings about this being done to children.

cato_the_elder4• 4 years ago

In most (all?) places 19 year olds are viewed as adults.

Well, you are correct one sense. But the guy is quite young, and the article itself refers to him as a teenager.

system22• 4 years ago

I have a 19 year old nephew. He still acts like he is 10 in some cases. I can't see him as adult nor his decisions in life looks like an adult. 19 is so young and still mentally child in many cases.

bitwize• 4 years ago

Most of the world does not have a First Amendment.

There are freer countries than the USA — countries which provide access to health care and education that goes beyond "wage slavery" training — that criminalize hate speech. One incident of expressed racial hatred is enough to warrant criminal prosecution. These countries have not yet descended into dystopia. Some of them criminalized hate speech in response to dystopia in their recent past.

It's time to rethink whether an absolutist, "First Amendment-like"[0] approach to free speech is really the best approach.

[0] The absolutist interpretation of the First Amendment has only actually prevailed since 1967, when a conservative Supreme Court ruled that Klan marches were protected speech in Brandenburg v. Ohio.

version_five• 4 years ago

There are freer countries than the USA — countries which provide access to health care and education

So you just made up a different definition of freedom and them claimed there are freer countries? Free education and healthcare are not related to freedom. They can be present e.g. in the USSR or in a freer country like Canada (formerly). But they are not an essential ingredient nor do they imply anything about freedom in the usual constitutional sense. You're talking about the merits of a welfare state and calling it freedom

boeingUH60• 4 years ago

There are freer countries than the USA — countries which provide access to health care and education that goes beyond "wage slavery" training — that criminalize hate speech.

Free education and healthcare are definitely good, but that isn’t what constitutes a “free” state.

For example, Saudi Arabia has free education and healthcare but is an absolute monarchy that comes down hard on critics.

inkblotuniverse• 4 years ago

Even with a first amendment, free education is indoctrination. Without it, it's indoctrination you get jailed for disagreeing with.

vmception• 4 years ago

Most of the world does not have a First Amendment.

Almost most of the world lives under a constitution that guarantees freedom of speech, they just also live under a constitution that contradicts in another way

and I'm not talking about an ambiguous place like the UK where they is no one specific document outlining rights, clear modern constitutions

I'm thinking 3.5 billion out of 7.9 billion live in a place governed by a document that contains the same text as the First Amendment

I'm sure we can get it to over half. I just added the populations of China and India to the US, as I'm only familiar with their constitutions.

So just helping you strengthen your argument in the future, by maybe saying it differently.

clarge1120• 4 years ago

This is definitely dystopian, in the US and elsewhere. It's not just that it was a single tweet, but that the police arrested someone for a racial slur (an insult). It advances equally dystopian ideas such as "silence is violence" into real-world consequences, and establishes the dual justice system that dystopian books have warned us about for two generations.

car_analogy2• 4 years ago

abusing

It starts with language. Insults become 'abuse', and of course 'abuse' should be illegal, right?

strathmeyer• 4 years ago

You think insults used to not be abuse?

psyc• 4 years ago

Insults are abuse. Skittles are food. Flipping off a horse in a national park is a crime. Two drunk people screwing are mutually raping each other. You can do all kinds of magic with words and categories. Some would call this magic "equivocation."

car_analogy2• 4 years ago

Even if I thought that insults over Twitter counted as abuse (I don't), 'insult' is the obviously more accurate and descriptive term, and one would only use 'abuse' if the aim was to blur the line between insults and other kinds of abuse.

blub• 4 years ago

When I read about such insane sentences in the UK, I remember that the UK tolerated child rape by so-called grooming gangs for years or even decades *.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotherham_child_sexual_explo...

coldtea2• 4 years ago

Or, you know, that Saville guy and his friends for decades... He even got knighted iirc.

stuckinhell2• 4 years ago

Soon this will be used to put people critical of corrupt politicians in jail. We've seen time and time again the corrupt oligarchs and politicians bend well meaning rules to hold onto power.

throwaway0a5e• 4 years ago

Objections like yours have been raised from the start. How well meaning can these rules and the people implementing them really be if they implemented anyway them despite warnings of this outcome?

stuckinhell2• 4 years ago

You have a very good point. I want to believe many humans essentially want to be nice, but cannot go from first principles (abstract) to results in the real world very well.

Though I wouldn't be surprised if politicians and oligarchs are absolutely aware that a being "nice" law, is a weapon that they can use. Ever since Epstein, I've been wondering, how many "being nice" laws are really just a tool for the elite to punish dissidents.

coldtea2• 4 years ago

How well meaning can these rules and the people implementing them really be if they implemented anyway them despite warnings of this outcome?

Well, who said the people who implemented them and the rules they implemented were "well meaning" to begin with?

Legislators and politicians are mostly scum, and have been so for most of history.

Not to mention that it's trivial (and has been done time and again) for things being implemented by well meaning people to be abused by not well meaning people.

dannyphantom• 4 years ago

Just looked up whatever the follow-up of guy who made remarks about Captain Sir Tom Moore ended up being and the man avoided prison time for his tweets [1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-60930670

system22• 4 years ago

Freedom of speech? Racist or not, putting someone in jail for saying something is ridiculous. If the article didn't mention England, I'd assume this is Iran, Russia, or some other anti-freedom country.

This is some bizarre thing to do to a 19 year old kid who clearly wasn't educated well enough to understand what he is saying. 19 is young, instead of throwing him in the locker, they should've given him maybe some community work.

How is this different than Turkey's president Erdogan throwing people in jail for tweeting stuff about him? This is nuts.

Barrin92• 4 years ago

I'd assume this is Iran, Russia, or some other anti-freedom country.

Hate speech, in particular targeting ethnic or religious groups is an offense in virtually every democratic country, so that's a weird leap to make.

How is this different than Turkey's president Erdogan throwing people in jail

For starters we're not talking about arbitrary exercise of authority here but straight forward application of the rule of law.

heurisko• 4 years ago

I read some of the abusive tweets after the match. One of them was apparently an estate agent https://bhplaw.co.uk/blog/the-three-lions-the-tweet-and-the-...

He said his account had been hacked, which I actually believe, as I remember seeing some weird accounts pop up. But the trial-by-public opinion already resulted in the estate agent losing his job.

It struck me that this would (appallingly) be an effective way to destroy someone else's life: steal one of their profile photos, then create an account to tweet abuse after a prominent event, and let the mob do the rest.

The day after the final there was a wall-to-wall media narrative that portrayed the UK as a racist country. Not until later did they report that the vast majority of abuse came from abroad. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58094408

conradludgate6• 4 years ago

I put this in a thread, but I think it'll get buried so I'll put it top level.

If you're from the US, you might believe you have free speech, but you don't. You already have libel and slander laws. That is, you cannot lie about someone in public written or spoken media. These forms of speech are of course harmful to the recipients of these falsehoods because they put a false representation of a public figure or a company.

Hate speech is equally as harmful. One might argue that it's not illegal yet because it only harms a minority group and not corporations.

Hate speech often grows into physical abuse too. If you can reduce hate speech at the source, it might reduce the amount of people exposed to that way of speaking, and hopefully reduce overall abusive nature of people. This is probably wishful thinking however

dolni4• 4 years ago

The bar for limiting freedom of expression should be very high. The US has the 1st amendment for a reason.

Hurting someone's feelings does not meet that bar. Inciting violence does. So does financial injury.

conradludgate6• 4 years ago

It's not just "hurting someone's feelings". It's dehumanising and demoralising to a culture. It benefits groups to use terms like the n-word to have power over minorities.

If you've ever lived with depression or anxiety, you'll know that these things can lead to financial ruin and suicide. The "hurting someone's feelings" idea is so harmful and belittling to this idea. And is another way that these abusers get away with it.

"Just man up! It's just a joke! It's your fault you got offended". If that person is now afraid to leave their home, who's fault is that really?

robbedpeter• 4 years ago

Will Smith injects heroin into his extra pinky toe to get high.

Hate speech is subjective. The pragmatic notion of free speech forbids arbitrary or subjective limitations because error in favor of opinion is more readily abused than error in favor of freedom. Recovering an acceptable ground truth from the former is far more difficult than the latter, especially in the arena of public perception and opinion.

Freedom of speech is a society level principle. As law, it works in that context - there are always individuals who can be trotted out as fundamentally inimical and dangerous, whether qanon, far left radicals, or Abolitionists. Freedom of speech is a principle that says even Hitler should be allowed to speak, because in public, ideas can be addressed and countered through the process of free discussion. Drive the ideas underground and a society might fester with bad ideas without a functional public discussion. And in the cases where good ideas overcome bad, you get the end of slavery and women's right to vote and gay marriage and so forth. Free speech requires the good with the bad or or doesn't work at scale.

Life isn't fair and awful people exist. At a cultural level It's better to deal with that openly and honestly, because you can lift such awful people out of the morass of bad thinking.

There are vulnerabilities with conspiracy thinking, qanon, flat earth, and their ilk, but the issue is this: it is never appropriate to use violence to counter words. Chris Rock getting smacked was wrong for the same reason jailing someone for a tweet is wrong - violence is not the answer.

In this case, the state as leviathan exercised the threat of violence and forced a citizen into jail. The violence is itself a symptom of a problem with the individual or collective that initiated it.

Speech is not violence. Sticks and stones will break your bones, but words don't actually hurt you. Hurt feelings suck, but... get over it.

Also, Chris Rock has three nipples.

I'm pretty sure things like context, intent, malice, and other factors play into the legality of potential libel and slander.

finiteseries• 4 years ago

You can lie about whichever public figure you want in the US provided they can’t prove you acted with actual malice in a court of law.

Hate speech isn’t equally as harmful, but does apply equally to non minority groups.

“Often”, “might”, “hopefully”, “wishful” is a bit too academic for free speech discussions in the US, I’m afraid.

hknapp• 4 years ago

Here is what he said:

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/03/30/13/56003579-10668157...

orf• 4 years ago

Different countries value different things. I see a lot of comments here saying this is dystopian or the first step to hitler 2.0 or something equally as bad.

These are equally as vacuous and empty as people from other countries asking “why can’t you just get rid of all the guns” or making other comments about school shootings.

It’s more complex than that, as a society we’ve said we’re comfortable with not allowing people to say some stuff, just as other countries are OK with high numbers of gun deaths.

I find one pretty natural and the other pretty abhorrent, and i expect a fair few commenters here may have the exact opposite view.

Man, 19, jailed for racially abusing Marcus Rashford on Twitter

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