When Free Speech Isn't

[talon]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/17/BANA1CGRR9.DTL

Yanno, if the site was designed to collect outrageous insults - and the post is clearly marked as part of the competition, I can see letting such an egregiously violent insult slip by. But by the account of this article, the site was a promotional site for a budding young musician/actor, which means that it wasn't a collection site for insults of any sort. It's a far different thing to say verious versions of "your singing sucks" or "I think you're too full of yourself" than it is to say "pound your head in with an icepick". The first two unquestionably are free speech and protected as such. The last is a violent threat meriting police action.

To later come back and claim it was "a joke" doesn't eliminate the very real fear the target felt. That the poster posed as a parent makes it worse, in my opinion.

I'm glad the judges ruled the post as not protected free speech. People can't say just anything and expect to get away with it. Free speech has limits: threats, inciting to riot, libel or slander.

Of course, we don't get the full post, just excerpts from it, but what we get and what the judges decided shows that this post stepped over the bounds of insult and into the realm of threat. Insults are protected, threats aren't. It's pretty simple.

That the poster is 16 indicates he's old enough to know the difference.

I consider myself a reasonable person. If someone threatened to pound my "head in with an icepick" or that of my child's, I would take it as a threat, particularly if I was adivsed by the police to withdraw my child from school over the cyber-bullying and felt the need to move my family away.

Cyberbullying is bad enough, borderline protected speech as it may be, but violent threats cross the boundary and should never be protected.

The boy's defense, that he was joining in (ie ganging up on) on the bloodfest and was just joking, isn't good enough.

Know what I think?

Well, maybe you don't, but this is my blog and I'll say it anyway because what I'm going to say is protected free speech.

I think if parents don't know how to teach their child(ren) the difference between good fun, free speech, bullying, and unprotected speech, then someone has to. If it becomes the courts, that's kind of expensive. I know when I was younger (way back in another century), we were taught the difference between protected free speech and unprotected speech in Civics classes, and were taught the difference between hot-headed violent threats that were meaningless (the belligerent "I'm gonna kill you!" of two kids arguing over a toy or an adult's "I'd kill for a beer") and real threats (usually much more graphic and detailed, such as this boy's "pound your head in with an icepick" and "rip out your ...heart and feed it to you".)

They weren't teaching that by the time my kids were I school and taking Civics classes. They used the lame "fire in a crowded theater" example for my kids.

I think we need to go back to the more explicit teachings.

And while we're at it, let's teach the proper way to tender an apology and add some manners lessons, and I'm not talking about teaching them which fork is for the fish and which glass is for the white wine and who gets introduced to whom first.

I'd hate to see kids learn these lessons in court and accrue a criminal record over something so easily rectified and taught.