[boole1854]

>That same year, members of Stanford’s chapter of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal organization, filed a complaint against a law student who had mocked the group with a satirical flier.

There's more to the story. The flyer presented itself as a Federalist Society flyer including using their logo and template, and there was indeed some confusion about whether or not it had been put out by the Society:

https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/stanford-federalist-s...

[ceejayoz]

This is common in parody.

People not being sure if “violent insurrection can be an effective approach to upholding the principle of limited government” was genuinely espoused by the Society makes the parody even more meaningful.

[stale2002]

The point is here, that even if someone intent is to parody, this can transition into actual defamation depending on the context.

For example, if someone put up a poster, with your name and photo on it, and the poster said "I, the person in the photo, support Killing a bunch of people, on this date, at this time, at this location", this would be defamation.

When you start getting into actual death threats, this can cross the line into illegal defamation.

And no, defamation is not protected by the 1st amendment, nor are many types of death threats.

[CodeWriter23]

Guess we better abundantly optimize for those corner cases until all speech is illegal.

[stale2002]

No, actually. There is no slippery slope that inevitably leads to all speech being illegal.

Instead, the court system in the USA mostly does a pretty good job determining what is or is not speech, and ways of having very limited restricts on speech that only prevent the extremely harmful stuff, while maintaining people's rights.

Addressing these "corner cases" is exactly what the court system does, and it has resulted in a society where the vast vast majority of speech is protected, and only very extreme and damaging edge cases are banned.

[CodeWriter23]

The example posted above fails the "reasonable person" test, which was my point.

[revelio]

It's not actually. If you parody a corporation this way they're going to come after you and nobody will be surprised. If you want to parody Google or Apple or whomever then you need to make a company name that's different but clearly the one you mean. Hence The Circle.

[ceejayoz]

They can try. They'll generally fail. Trademark law has specific parody exceptions, which permits things like https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/adam-mckay-fake-chevro..., https://www.huffpost.com/entry/shell-arctic-ready-hoax-green..., and https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/spoof-apple-site-touts-bend... to exist. No changing the company name was necessary in any of these.

"The Circle" isn't a parody. Social commentary, perhaps, and its commercial nature as a film would make reaching the threshold for parodic fair use harder. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/parody

[Georgelemental]

"People not being sure if she genuinely made a deal with the Devil, is just more proof that she is a witch."

[lolinder]

Only if you're drawing meaning from the fact that people believe their own stereotypes. "Left-wing students fell for parody written by other left-wing students" does not constitute evidence of the truth of the stereotypes contained in the parody.

[lazyeye]

Exactly. Ascribing the worse possible motives to the people you disagree with is the only form of hate that is still acceptable.

You just ascribe "hateful" motives to anyone disagrees with you, then suddenly your own common, mediocre, garden variety hate is elevated to a higher moral purpose. You're not a hater (you are), you're fighting hate! (not really).

There are a ton of people that operate under this delusion.