| I disagree on both counts. > Personally I feel this is law is a great step forward to stop hate speech and other forms of severe harassment I can't speak to Japan, but harassment is already a crime in all US states. Using a telecommunications device to harass often carries even stiffer penalties than just harassment. All US states also have laws specifically about cyberbullying [1]. Although there have been successful challenges (e.g., in Colorado) most of these laws are almost certainly constitutional. It's hard to form an opinion on this particular law without more details (about both the law and Japan's legal system), but the way it's described in the article is worrying. Publicly insulting someone can be a component of harassment, but on its own is clearly not harassment. There is a distinct difference between insulting someone in the course of a conversation and a sustained campaign against that person. > but the thought that if you happen to “rage” on someone mid game and receive jail time for that scares me. "Trolling" in gaming is like "tagging" in certain tagging-adjacent communities. In both cases the crimes (vandalism, criminal harassment) have become so normalized that membes of the community reframe plainly criminal behavior as positives -- "free speech" and "art" respectively. Criminal behavior has become completely normalized among certain pockets of heavy internet users, most of which are heavily adjacent to gaming. I'm not talking about being rude or divisive on a forum. I'm talking about things like death threats, doxxing, brigading non-public-figures, messaging people on all social media channels from dozens of obvious sock puppet accounts and continuing for months after being asked to stop (happened to a local teacher after appearing on a 3 minute news segment), etc. A lot of what passes for "just trolling" among heavily online individuals -- gaming-adjacent communities in particular -- is in fact textbook criminal behavior. A lot of the behavior during Gamergate, for example, should've resulted in restraining orders, fines, and jail time. [1] https://www.stopbullying.gov/resources/laws |