"The normal claim is that police are killing black individuals unnecessarily. The claim you have offered is just that claim dressed in dramatic clothing."

This is plainly false.

Claims that police arbitrarily kill people, or are 'killers' etc. are all over the web..

That you would blind yourself to the radical populism in some corners because maybe you don't want it to exist is not helpful.

Here's a completely random example:

"cops are serial killers. paid, protected serial killers who believe their jobs entitle them to take human life. over and over. they lie. they kill. they lie again. repeat. "

This is one of literally millions of such Tweets.

How could you possibly suggest that such language does not exist when it's rampant?

If that example isn't specific enough for you, then just Google a bit and you'll have your examples.

"a harmful lie like Sandy Hook and mass promotion of same in the fashion you have. Both should be illegal in the same way that starting a house on fire isn't any more legal "

Again, utterly false.

So plainly wrong, that I'm sure you can't have actually thought it through.

Do realize this Orwellian implications of governing speech to the point wherein saying something that is 'non factual' is tantamount to a crime?

It's not even a 'slippery slope' it's already ultra authoritarian.

Again: hop on to Twitter, right now, by your logic, millions of people would be charged with crimes, daily.

"If you don't know that dead children aren't crisis actors or forest fires aren't caused by jewish space lasers and you can't be educated you should probably be fined or imprisoned into silence so that the rest of society can move on."

You seem to have a wilful lack of understanding of what is happening in pop culture and in the commons, and yet want to enact vicious authoritarian violence on people for arbitrary words?

I wonder if you realize that you're a fascist authoritarian?

You are exactly what we are afraid of.

People can believe what they want to believe and say what they want to say, unless it really starts to damage others, and that's a high bar.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/sheerohero666/status/127598615903...

I don't think you grasp the implications of what you are suggesting.

Basically, you're suggesting that 'being wrong' about something, is effectively a crime.

That's one hell of a slippery slope.

Alex Jones has an audience of 400M people.

You and I do not.

You and I absolutely should be able to say 'Sandy Hook children were actors'.

Maybe one of us is a total idiot and actually believes that. Is that a crime?

Proportionality etc. matter.

Also - you are hugely downplaying how much censorship Twitter enacts (I'm not saying this is good or bad, but they do it).

Just like the regular police keep a lid on crime, as in, if they were to disappear all hell would instantly break lose (in Montreal the cops went on strike and immediately there were mass bank robbing etc) - Twitter keeps the total insane hate speech and death threat people off the platform.

In 2020 - the 'Protocols of the Elder's of Zion' - should be hugely and widely disseminated if it were powerful. But it's not. Why? Because we have controls. Google, Twitter etc. tamp that stuff down.

We probably need 'some' laws, but we ought to be very, very careful about it and I suggest it probably be limited to inciting violence and medical misinformation.

So if someone says 'transgenders are sacrificing children' should be illegal, does that mean 'police are arbitrarily killing unarmed blacks' - should that be illegal? Because I think the material reality could be demonstrated that the later is false as well.

I think your argument demonstrates a slippery slope.

I think probably claims should have to be more specific and inciteful to be considered illegal.

Also - I think proportionality matters as well. Saying 'the kids who died at Sandy Hook were not real people but actors' - on a personal level should be legal. But if you have an audience of 400M people and scream that nonsense, I think this might be a problem. Right now it's handled in civic courts, but we could think a bit about what that means.

It's very hard, and there are a lot of slippery slopes. Risky.

'Who deems what a lie is'?

Are you saying we can't agree on what reality is?

If you provide bullshit medical advice to people you should go to jail frankly, for example.

But misinformation, when it's applied broadly, does have consequences and that will have an effect.

Right now we actually do contend with it i.e voting machine lies, lies about Sandy Hook children - but we handle that in civil cases where people sue each other for 'damages' in which case we have to arrive at some truth. Point being - we legally identify 'damages' there.

But the government is responsible for protecting people from 'damage' as well, in which case we could feasibly have the DoJ take people to court for civil-ish kinds of things, or, find some way forward.

I don't know what the answer is, but it doesn't have to be entirely strict or all encompassing and may have thresholds for proportionality etc. or even depend on the integrity of institutions.

We already draw a lot of boundaries around medical information and could do the same. For example, there could be a requirement to indicate lack of authority / seek a doctor's opinion when discussing health matters. Like I like Joe Rogan, but absolutely detest when he starts yapping about vaccines etc. as his position de facto amounts to misinformation which actually can cause harm. If he were required to consistently remind people "I am not a doctor. This is entertainment. Please consult your doctor for advice concerning COVID." (He should have done this without being asked), then I think those kinds of things can help.

And probably we should err on the side of freedom of expression.

But there is a huge risk in getting into an authoritarian situation as people want to regulate others opinions, and yes, as you say, declaring that there are 'only two genders' is considered 'hate speech' by some and they will push hard to stop others from saying this, which is scary.

I'm wary that our governments have the ability to split hairs on these hard issues.

Yeah, no this is authoritarianism in action.

People are not burning down Children's hospitals, moreover, the kinds of 'misinformation' you're alluding to generally fall way, way within the boundaries of 'hate speech'.

Twitter is a private company they can mostly do what they want.

Some companies rise to the point of 'kind of public service' and therefore we might need basic regs (i.e. at least guaranteeing that Twitter act consistently within their own stated rules).

The bar for hate speech out to be very, very high.

Calls for direct violence have always been illegal.

'Disinformation' is absolutely another issue altogether. Lying about moon landing conspiracy theories is irrelevant, but lying about school shooting victims being 'actors' is something a bit different, as is lying about the effect of vaccines during a pandemic, as is lying / providing medical advice without any kind of appropriate designation. Free speeches probably don't like it but those things do have an effect, and proportionality matters: if you want to say something to your neighbour, fine, but if you're going to go in front of 400M people and broadcast it, and it causes serious harm due to direct minsinfo ... most us don't want that. I don't suggest we have the answer there but I bet if we think about it we can find a reasonable way for the insane idiots to be among each other and for them to not scream non-factual things.