[pinneycolton]

If the speech in question was determined to be a true threat, blocking exposure to the speech could have serious unintended consequences. It could people unaware of specific threats and expose them to harm. Ignorance is bliss...until it gets you hurt.

If someone posted a credible threat of violence against people fitting my demographic profile, I'd want to be aware of it. I don't need to be protected from the words. I don't say that to diminish the negative effects of hate speech at all. I may be hurt and angry after reading them. It could trigger me in ways that I try to avoid. That being said, I think our courts need a reminder that the negative effects of exposure to hate-violence can be much more severe than exposure to hate speech. I'd rather fight myself, in my own head, than someone who wants to do me physical harm.

[csydas]

This is a misunderstanding of the actual complaint from the plaintiff, and it likely comes from the very misleading article title from Reason.com:

I posted this below, but:

The complaint is not that YikYak wasn't blocked -- it's that no action was taken by the University to investigate the threats properly and readily, even so much as just creating a strong stance on "hey, don't tell people you're going to kill them". Blocking YikYak was simply __an option__ which the University could have taken, but that wasn't the thrust of the plaintiffs' argument at all, nor the Court's Opinion. The point of blocking YikYak was more of a point that "well, you absolutely could have done something", rather than a prescribed course of action.

You're arguing a point that was not made by the plaintiffs and also is not related to the actual court Opinion either. The crux of the complaint is that in light of real, credible threats, the University took no action whatsoever. The Opinion is more about how the defenses of anonymity made it "impossible" for the University to act and that 1st Amendment protections prohibited [the university] from doing so were considered invalid in light of other case law.

[pinneycolton]

About 10-15% of the opinion addresses the issues of whether or not the university had "substantial control" over the vehicle for harassment and if it displayed "deliberate indifference" in not taking appropriate steps to end the harassment. It rejects the idea that the University can't control activity on its own network. It also notes that the University allowed the harassment to continue for months when it could have stopped it.

It seems like we're reading pages 14 - 24(ish) of the opinion - plus some later sections - differently. That's the nature of this sort of ruling. This does not constitute a misunderstanding of the complaint on my part, nor was I misled by the title on reason.com.

Personally, I agree with the vast majority of the opinion. The University could have - and should have - done more to pinpoint the harassers and punish them in accordance with university policy. It does not explicitly state that the University should have blocked the app, but it does spend considerable time demonstrating that not blocking the app constituted deliberate indifference to the harassment.

I also agree with the other poster who mentioned there are other ways for communicating threats. With hindsight being 20-20, though, we don't know if a threat is a serious threat until it is acted upon. By the time those systems are activated, there has generally already been violence and/or loss of life, unfortunately.

http://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/Opinions/172220.P.pdf

[anigbrowl]

blocking exposure to the speech could have serious unintended consequences. It could people unaware of specific threats and expose them to harm.

'ignoring the trolls' suffers from precisely the same problem - more so, as passive awareness of the threat may be construed as acceptance thereof by the threatening party. Basically you're placing the burden of assessing severity on the recipient and removing any leverage they have to mitigate it once they're aware of it.

Do not suggest 'report it to the police' or I will start linking cases in which people did that, were ignored, and were then murdered - at which point the free speech evangelists are nowhere to be found.

[travisoneill1]

> at which point the free speech evangelists are nowhere to be found

I'll let you skip that step. Since the vast majority of cases are false positives and police don't have the resources to follow up on all of them, it is inevitable that your example will happen. There is no such thing as a 0% failure rate. Your dismissal of the report to police option because it is not 100% effective is too ridiculous to be taken seriously.

[anigbrowl]

Sounds like we're quite some way from an 0% failure rate. 11% of a population of murder victims (n=231) had a restraining order in place against their killer at the time of the homicide. Although only a small number of all the restraining orders issued result in homicide, courts in one state found that domestic violence restraining orders were violated about 1/3 of the time, whilers self-reported a total closer to 60%.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18523113

http://extras.denverpost.com/news/violence/viol0912.htm

'too ridiculous to be taken seriously' - I'll put hard data up against epistemological hand-waving any day of the week. I fact-check my claims before I state them publicly.

[bilbo0s]

They do have university wide alert systems for use when the doodoo hits the fan. I'm not sure everyone needs to know about every threat though? I think you might be underestimating the number of threats that come in everyday to a large public university for instance.