So what this says is basically you can say anything to anyone, as long as you don’t intend to see them physically? We have no right to tell someone to stop contacting us, everyone has a right to access people, no matter how abusive, if they don’t really mean to do it (based on self reporting of the stalker to their intentions, NOT off of any level of what they said).
I bet i would have officers at my door if everyone in the supreme court’s families got these sorts of messages from me repeatedly, from throw away accounts and bots, even if i had no intention of doing more than that.
Harassment just isn’t a thing anymore for normal people i guess. Everyone celebrating the other hand down the SC did today missed the horrifying one.
Like, i get where the majority opinion is coming from. It seems they’re worried about, for example, a kid in minecraft saying “I’m gonna get you” 50 times vs someone on Facebook messaging a person like that.
I’m curious what you think a solution would look like because I’m at a loss. We already don’t do enough for victims of stalking and this ruling won’t help anything. Maybe an overhaul on how we process and accept restraining orders?
But this isn’t a kid sending 50 messages.
“I’m currently unsupervised. I know, it freaks me out too, but the possibilities are endless,” read another.
Some of the messages suggested the target, a singer-songwriter who’s referred to as C.W. in court documents, was being watched. Others made vague, confusing references to phone lines being tapped. When C.W. blocked Counterman’s account, more messages would appear from new accounts in a pattern that persisted for two frightening years.
So if i called you or mailed you or did any of this in person i would be punished. The idea that we are able to say absolutely anything online is foolish.
In their dissent, they grapple with the potential consequences of this ruling and the impact it may have on victims of harassment and stalking, as well as efforts to impose restraining orders on other people who make violent threats.
“Imagine someone who threatens to bomb an airport. The speaker might well end up barred from the location in question—for good reason,” Justice Barrett writes. “Yet after today, such orders cannot be obtained without proof—not necessarily easy to secure—that the person who issued the threat anticipated that it would elicit fear.”
I want to know how saying you are going to do something isnt even “half credit” towards it.
What i think? I think if someone sends someone something threatening and they mean it or not, the person has a right to their lives to say stop. After that you should be charged for forcing yourself without consent into someone’s lives. I don’t know why that’s a crazy opinion?
Verbal threats of violence used to be punishable. I don’t see a difference in what this man did and harassing someone and we punish that.
There is zero part of me that is worried punishing death threats online is some how a societal ill. In fact i argue that not enough people are held to the social and civil contract we all make with each other online and they need to be reminded they are interacting with humans.
Also, if this man really cannot understand how what he said was harmful, i think he especially needs to be thrown away as a human being. What worth is someone who harasses a stranger for two years to our global community?
Man, I understand the reasoning here but we need to do more to protect victims. Some of these stalkers are beyond reason. In their minds they are trying to “rescue” the victim. I don’t know what the right answer is :/
This headline is clickbaity over exaggeration. It didn’t “gut protections”. The protections were already pretty terrible so this was more of a clarification. Prior, the court had sort of waffled on what “true threat” meant. This… didn’t really help a great deal but it did clarify that both the reasonable person test and the reckless disregard tests had to be applied. I recommend reading Ken White’s article https://popehat.substack.com/p/supreme-court-clarifies-true-threats. The big takeaway:
So. To the practitioner, or to the internet tough-talker, what does this mean? It means that the law of the land, at least 7-2, is that a threat is only outside the protection of the First Amendment if:
- A reasonable person, familiar with the context, would interpret the threat as a sincere statement of intent to do harm, and
- The speaker was reckless about whether the threat would be taken sincerely — that is, they “consciously disregarded a substantial risk” that it would be taken seriously.
Colorado’s law played pretty loose with the reckless disregard aspect.
All that said, we need a better test, or better criteria to sort between some kid on LoL forums who trash talks and gets some mother in Canada worried (this actually happened) and when a woman reasonably fears for her safety based on persistent stalking.
