Arizona Looks to Outlaw Internet Trolling

http://techland.time.com/2012/04/03/arizona-looks-to-outlaw-internet-trolling/

by hornokplease • 14 years ago

30 35 14 years ago

techland.time.com

Good luck with that. Up to 25 years in jail for that? Absurd.

joejohnson• 14 years ago

Arizona and Florida are out of touch with effective legislation for modern issues. Laws like these (with broadly worded clauses) are either unenforceable, or only enforced through (illegal) targeting of potential suspects.

devs10102• 14 years ago

I am extremely glad to have gotten out of Arizona, I made the mistake of moving there for two years and literally put everything I had into being able to move out of there. The only way I can really describe the state is "assbackwards", I'm sorry to anyone who still lives there but there is just something off about the place as far as the way the police, other government officials and elected people there act, they are trying to make their own little fiefdom out in the desert and "to hell" with the rest of the U.S. and its laws, rights, etc

nextstep2• 14 years ago

...standard Internet practice of acting like a jerk in the comments section of a blog post

Haha, yes, that is standard practice for many people in anonymous fora.

Regardless, the philosophy behind bills like this is inane. Hate speech is already illegal, and speech which is deemed harmful to others (such as threats online) is considered hate speech. Legislation targeted at further outlawing behaviors which are already under existing laws will erode our civil liberties.

I doubt this will be written into law, but this is still scary.

Dylan168072• 14 years ago

Hate speech is not illegal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#United_States

As long as it's impersonal, you can say whatever horrible things you want about classes of people.

nextstep2• 14 years ago

Oh, I did not realize that. I guess it's only illegal when directed toward someone as a threat.

consultutah• 14 years ago

Finally, a state taking on the serious problem of internet trolling! Hopefully now we can move on to less important issues, like the economy, immigration, and healthcare.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

It's okay, Arizona has already illegalized illegals.

If they'd only thought to illegalize illegal behavior, they'd have solved all problems forever.

hhastings• 14 years ago

Last time I was in Arizona, I was pulled over for being a "potentially undocumented alien". I have red hair and pale skin. Next time I'm visiting my parents, I'll be pulled over and arrested because I made a bad joke online. Arizona, you're pathetic.

paulmooring• 14 years ago

I live in Arizona and I've been pulled over on immigration check before. I would guess you were stopped because of your pale skin and red hair, the more non-hispanic people they stop the easier it is to claim racial profiling is not part of the sweeps.

jack-r-abbit4• 14 years ago

It says: It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person.

People will focus on the "with intent to.. annoy or offend" part but over look the part about "use any obscene...language, or threaten". One could easily spin this into "AZ is going to outlaw being annoying on the internet" but I don't think that is the intent here. I don't think they are trying to ban "being annoying" but rather "the use of obscene language and threats with intent to be annoying". As I read that, you can be as annoying as you want as long as you keep your language clean and don't threaten anyone.

That being said, I'd agree that the bill is too broad and open for misuse. Any time you base things off of subjective terms like "annoy", "offend" or "obscene" it just makes it bad. People are offended by all sorts of stuff that others find humorous. The court has also had a hard time defining what is "obscene" so that makes it particularly problematic.

Edit: TL/DR - Perhaps I should be more clear... I do think this is a ridiculous bill.

Dylan168072• 14 years ago

Sure, you can be as annoying as you want as long as you don't use the word 'fuck'. What kind of ridiculous standard is that? This law is extremely poorly written.

jack-r-abbit4• 14 years ago

I think we agree here. I just believe their intent is not as ominous as others are making it out to be. But it is still a ridiculous bit of writing.

Edit: also I find your use of the "F" word to be offensive and annoying and it makes me feel threatened. I DO hope you don't live in AZ. LOL

billpatrianakos4• 14 years ago

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Yes, they have their hearts in the right place (or so they say, I have a hard time trusting these people) but the problems arise when the law is enforced. If its too broad then there are problems. For example, if I lived in Arizona and I said "fuck" like i just did there I just caught myself a class 1 misdemeanor if they really wanted to pick on someone.

Laws are used beyond their intended purpose all the time. Does the Patriot Act protect us from terrorists? Debatable. But it certainly does allow for unconstitutional invasion of privacy. It's all about who's interpreting and enforcing the laws and the benevolent rulers with their good intentions today are likely to become our malevolent overlords of tomorrow.

jack-r-abbit4• 14 years ago

Yes. we agree on the bill being too broad and open for misuse. I just don't think it is fair to focus on only one aspect (and perhaps misinterpret it) and then rail against it for the wrong reasons. Even if your desired outcome is noble, if your argument is misguided your message is lost.

silentscope• 14 years ago

I thought april fools was over...

sheraz2• 14 years ago

Well, it is about time that someone took a stand against those who would turn the internet into a cesspool of humanity. With the help of Mr. Lamar Smith from Texas and his SOPA legislation we can finally clean up the internet.

sheraz2• 14 years ago

And here come the down votes. Neither sarcasm nor dissenting opinions nor thinly veiled attempts at humor (trolling) are welcome on HN.

billpatrianakos4• 14 years ago

Let's just legislate everything! When you have a group of people whose job it is to legislate and they work a good portion of the year, eventually those people will create a law to govern everything including which finger you're allowed to pick your nose with.

I'm not sure how many days the Arizona house is in session but they should take a page from the US House and take a major portion of the year off. If this is what they choose to spend their time on do we really need them to show up for work? Hell, I'd be happy to have my taxes to toward their vacations if it kept them from coming up with these ludicrous bills.

mindslight2• 14 years ago

This phenomenon applied to the Internet is especially egregious. The Internet has happily existed for decades with very little fiat law. Facebook hires a good PR firm to spin Eternal September as a good thing, the self-entitled masses show up with no concern for how this world might be different, and every sad-sack politician is suddenly looking to solve non-problems to appear hip and relevant.

Number One rule of the Internet: If what's being said affects you in a negative way, stop listening (this applies from OSI L2 on up). If you cannot handle this responsibility, please leave.

DanBC2• 14 years ago

> Number One rule of the Internet: If you don't like what's being said, stop listening

That's fine. I agree.

What happens if AA says to BB "I know where you live, and I'm going to fucking kill you"?

And if AA puts BB in a filter, and stops listening, and so BB morphs to BC and keeps writing. And then socks to BD, BE, BF and BG, and finds all relevant social media that AA is on, and posts anti-$MINORITY screeds, with credible threats of violence?

billpatrianakos4• 14 years ago

I'm all for that but not so such an extreme. I have to admit that cyber bullying is a real phenomenon that really does hurt kids. That said, it's not the Internet that needs to be legislated. Harassment laws are already on the books. We simply have to make sure they apply to the web instead of creating totally new laws for Internet specific harassment. When you legislate online harassment separately from other forms of harassment you create two separate worlds with potentially two different sets of rules. Harassment is harassment no matter the medium and separating it like that opens the door to terrible things like censorship. Laws governing harassment offline generally aren't so broad that they restrict free speech but somehow when it comes to the web people have this weird cognitive disconnect like somehow your rights online are different than those offline. Maybe it's the anonymity of the web that allows legislators to think of Internet users as somehow not human. I don't know.

jonnathanson2• 14 years ago

The use of vague words like "offend" or "annoy" isn't the only thing that's disconcerting here. The focus on "intent" should also give us pause.

The thing is, it's pretty damned hard to prove intent in many, if not most, use cases on the internet. And I fear that this law, as written, gives the offended the power to define the "intent" of the alleged offender.

Sure, it's pretty easy to deduce intent if you can find an obvious pattern of repeated attempts to bully or harass someone. But rarely are circumstances so cut-and-dried. And for areas like message boards, comments sections, blog posts, and other open fora, who's to say what someone's intent was? I might write a blog post that's critical of a person or an organization, and that person or organization may get "annoyed" with the post. Does their annoyance, therefore, retroactively define my intent as malicious? Or was I simply exercising my 1st Amendment right to criticize? What a dangerous path we wander when we allow the delicacy of people's sensibilities to define the intent of our words.

I'm no lawyer, but I would imagine that the letter of this law is pretty indefensible on Constitutional grounds.

sp332• 14 years ago

Intent is a well-established legal idea. E.g. "mens rea" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea And it strongly favors the defendant, because in US criminal court, the burden of proof is always on the prosecution. There must be evidence presented in court to convince a jury "beyond reasonable doubt" that intent existed.

jonnathanson2• 14 years ago

I understand that much, but my point is that in so many internet cases, intent seems pretty much impossible even to establish, let alone sufficiently prove.

So maybe that places an insurmountable burden on would-be prosecutors, then, and we're actually left with a law that's almost impossible to practice in many cases? I'm not sure. Like I said, not a lawyer.

acuity12• 14 years ago

Do our politicians really have so little to do that they feel the need to restrict our first amendment instead of dealing with more pertinent issues?

Also, I think most of the people I know are contradictions to the statement "No one likes a troll".

DanBC2• 14 years ago

> It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend, to use ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person.

Most of these are standard clauses in many ISP TOS.

> It is unlawful for any person, with intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass,

That bit seems okay.

> annoy or offend,

That bit is too vague.

> to use ANY ELECTRONIC OR DIGITAL DEVICE and use any obscene, lewd or profane language*

This, in combination with the 'intent' section above is okay.

> or suggest any lewd or lascivious act, or threaten to inflict physical harm to the person or property of any person.

I'm gently surprised that this last bit isn't already covered by existing law.

dustinupdyke• 14 years ago

Legislating should be like coding in that being able to delete lines of code is huge win.

briandoll• 14 years ago

This might be awesome. Arizona's discrimination laws are offensive and annoying. Their own government are essentially trolls to society.

Governments don't operate by the third law of robotics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics) so perhaps it's possible for this law to take effect and for it to instantly outlaw themselves. Sweet!

stcredzero2• 14 years ago

(tldr; not being f(cked with is a fundamental human right)

I've been on this planet for a bit over four decades. Much of that time, I've spent in backwaters in the unusual position of being what one might term as an ultra-minority of one type or another. (In ratios of 1 to 1000 or more.)

One thing my unusual perspective has brought me to is this idea: That not being f(cked with is a fundamental human right. Sex between consensual adults can be a great and wonderful thing. Make that less than consensual, and it's not so wonderful any more. Likewise kidding around can be good, innocent fun. Make it non-consensual, and it becomes something negatively sadistic. In other words, the fundamental factor of cruelty in rape is the coercive and non-consensual nature of it, not the involvement of genitalia.

One might respond to this by saying: well, if you don't like it, don't go on the Internet. Unfortunately, the Internet has become something of a public space, in the same way that the sidewalk or a cafe or restaurant is a public space, private ownership notwithstanding.

So the question you have to ask yourself is this: are you >imposing< yourself on people in a way incompatible with their expectations? Are you misrepresenting yourself to accomplish this? Do you convince yourself that your targets somehow deserve this treatment? (Even more so if you have an ideology to help justify this.) Do you think the genuine hurt feelings of people who did not consent to your treatment is somehow wonderful and fun?

I'm not against anyone's fun. I'm only against non-consensual activity. If you're not smart enough to find a crowd with compatible expectations, then I posit that you're not smart enough to gamble with social norms through trolling in a way which has any value. If successfully misrepresenting yourself and hurting the feelings of others outside of their expectations is required for your brand of "fun" then you've been fooling yourself about what you're doing.

devs10102• 14 years ago

Also, just want to point out, in Arizona, for most misdemeanors, you have no right to a jury trial, I didn't read up enough on this to know whether it would be a felony / misdemeanor, etc (or if it could be either), but its something to also be aware of, I have lived in Arizona and seen their legal system firsthand and its a pathetic joke, it has to be one of the worst in the U.S., certainly for a state that has a major metro area.. if you get charged with a misdemeanor, your options are 1) bench trial in front of some corrupt judge (about 80% chance of conviction) 2) plea deal. Someone needs to stop the nutjobs out there, I am all for the federal government stepping in, in cases like this, where they are essentially trying to massively violate people's civil rights.

The state truly does have a "prison complex", it has a huge law enforcement culture and they are looking for bodies to put in prison as it makes the state money and this may just be another one of their sick attempts to have another way to put people in jail. Seeing something like this is getting me all worked up, I truly hate that place with a passion

Arizona Looks to Outlaw Internet Trolling

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