November 2, 2021 - 4:39pm
Social media affords us untold opportunities to communicate with strangers. But it also opens us up to abuse.
Take Twitter. As the number of people who read your tweet increases, the probability that at least one of them says something hurtful, threatening or offensive tends to one. It doesn’t matter how innocuous the message; there’s always someone who responds in an unsavoury manner. “Cats are cute are they? So I guess you hate dogs!”
And of course, Twitter abuse can be a lot worse than a single nasty comment hidden below the “Show additional replies” button. There are the infamous “pile-ons”. Scrolling through dozens of nasty comments — in the aftermath of a well-targeted pile-on — can be distinctly unnerving.
What, if anything, should be done about this? The Government’s answer, in the form of the new Online Safety Bill, appears to be: criminalising unpleasant behaviour. “Trolls could face two years in prison for sending messages or posting content that causes psychological harm,” The Times reported on Monday.
How this will work in practice is not yet clear. But it sounds like a recipe for disaster. The classic exceptions to free speech — such as fraud, libel and incitement to violence — are all relatively well-defined. “Psychological harm” is not. In fact, unless the government plans to start measuring stress hormones in our blood, it’s entirely subjective.
“Your honour, my client suffered significant psychological harm when the defendant called her a ‘ninnyhammer’ on Facebook.” And even if we could measure psychological harm objectively, it would still be wrong to criminalise the sending of “psychologically harmful” messages.
After all, such messages could be “psychologically beneficial” to others; for example, they might find them funny. As it stands, the Online Safety Bill poses an existential threat to the greatly-diminished British comedy sector. The problem with jokes, you see, is they often come at someone else’s expense.
We already have libel law to protect individuals from false claims that might damage their reputations. The notion that we need a law to protect them from false claims that might hurt their feelings borders on the absurd.
What’s more, there actually is an effective way to neutralise malicious accounts on Twitter: it’s called the “Block” button. Other tried and tested methods for avoiding online abuse include looking away from the screen, and not joining Twitter in the first place.
None of this is to say that I approve of nasty behaviour online. I just don’t want to see it criminalised. The new Online Safety Bill can be summed up as follows: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words… well, they could get you sent to prison for two years.”
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Subscribe‘Psychological harm’: basically selective outrage toward anyone who questions the current political consensus and ideological orthodoxy.
No, it is WEF, NWO, it is to destroy the Western culture, to break us up into antagonistic groups so to dis-empower the middle classes and working people so they lose their voting majority, and to criminalize dissent, that the Great Reset, the Build Back Better, (bbb=666) can make us all into subjects of the Global Elite’s Neo-Feudalism plan.
I have read only the first paragraph.
The solution? Stop reading twitter. Stop replying. Stop accessing the platform. If you persist and you get offended, you can’t complain.
“Online Safety Bill, appears to be: criminalising unpleasant behaviour. “Trolls could face two years in prison for sending messages or posting content that causes psychological harm,””
Thought Crime and Political Prisoners….now here in the West.
In USA the huge DOJ has decided to use the FBI to persecute parents who question the school’s indoctrination of their children in the new pathology of self hate, nation hate, gender hate, history hate, culture hate, and race hate.
“Attorney General Merrick Garland through the Department of Justice (DOJ), ordered the FBI Monday to investigate in what he called a “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators,””
USA has the most terrifyingly vast security apparatus, since 9/11 and the ‘Patriot Act’ exploded their budget, numbers, and most of all – removed most legal constraints on what they could do – they employ millions of agents and employees who – for lack of anything useful to do as the Islamic Terror was a paper tiger – they have turned to monitoring the citizens.
At least they did this in a sort of bored way of passing the time and justifying the expense – but when Biden came to office the Left is in thrall to the hard left – and everyone knows their ways with secret police – and thus the massive DOJ is turned to criminalizing the Law abiding citizens.
This completely wrong, untrue, and insane statement is Biden kicking off the war against all Americans tainted by what the hard left thinks is wrong thinking – it is a terrifying trend.
“White supremacist terrorism is the deadliest threat to the United States, President Joe Biden told lawmakers Wednesday”
Titter trolls are emotionally damaged morons. Imprisoning them is an act of idiocy so profound that it beggars belief.
Spot on, if you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen.
With the advent of literary ‘memes’ like ‘Let’s Go Brandon’, one imagines people will just resort to a similar approach of using other ‘substitute’ words on social media.
Try prosecuting the whole English language!
“And when memory failed and written records were falsified-when that happened,
the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted,
because there did not exist any standard against which it could be tested.”
–George Orwell “1984”