[fsckboy]

>In general, users never face fines in the US even for visiting "banned" pages.

You might be oversimplifying. Yes, the US does have particularly free speech, and especially for listening to it. But using kiddie porn sites, president threatening sites, ISIS recruiting sites, US govt leaked secrets sharing sites, perhaps ghost gun or bomb making sites, stalking ex girlfriends... I think a good bit of that has legal consequences for people under many circumstances. Evidence used to convict you is not much different than... evidence.

[Hizonner]

The only one of those that's illegal just to visit in the US as far as I know is the child porn one, and even that only if you receive or attempt to receive actual child porn, as opposed to some other random content that might be on the site.

Some of the things you list are actual criminal acts, not Web sites. Yes, if you stalk your ex, that's criminal, but simply visiting some Web site is not in itself illegal.

If there is some US law that might purport to forbid just visiting a Web site, I've never heard of any attempt to enforce it.

What the hell is a "president threatening site"? Threats to public officials as a service?

[fsckboy]

if you internet searched "how do you dispose of a body" and then a body is discoved having been disposed of, and you are suspected in the killing, that evidence is introduced at your trial, and a jury will be influenced by it, even though all you did was visit and read the site. That evidence will be even more damning if the page you visited described a particular method that was seen in the case in question. This would be very strong evidence in favor of your guilt. Same for all the other ones I mentioned.

[Hizonner]

... and yet it is not illegal to do that search. You will not be fined, imprisoned, or whatever, for doing the search.

The fact that something can, in some circumstances, be evidence doesn't mean it's a crime, and the distinction is absolutely critical in the context we're dealing with here.

[fsckboy]

all of the evidence taken together is what convicts you of a crime. People have been convicted of murder where no body was ever found. You can't point to any piece of the evidence that was used to convict and say "well that was not a crime, so leave it out". My explanation here of how evidence is used in court in gaining convictions is more accurate and realistic than the distinction you are are trying to make.

[Hizonner]

This started with somebody snarkily asking what the US fine was for just visiting a "forbidden" Web site, in the context of a Brazilian court order applying a large fine for just visiting Xitter. Not visiting Xitter in the course of planning a murder, not visiting Xitter in the context of sedition or whatever, just visiting any content on Xitter for any reason whatsoever.

It's pretty clear that this person thought there were such penalties, but in fact the US has absolutely nothing analogous. No order remotely like that would be issued in the US, because it's so obviously unconstitutional. If some third-tier hick judge did issue such an order, it would be overturned on appeal. If it were issued by the Supreme Court (and, no, not even the current Supreme Court would do that), all hell would break loose throughout the political system. It'd be a constitutional crisis. There are no such fines in the US. The US does lots of things wrong, but this is one of the areas the US tends to get right.

You're dredging up unrelated scenarios involving not-even-hypothetically-existent crimes that nobody was talking about. This is not about trying to use Web site visits to set somebody up for some crime they didn't commit, or even for some crime they did commit. Your weird scenario about, I don't know, being wrongfully charged with something else because your Web history somehow made somebody think you'd done it, is completely out of left field. The issue is entirely whether there's a penalty for visiting a Web site, and what you're talking about is totally irrelevant. And the hypothetical you seem to be trying to spin sounds less like being convicted of murder when there's no body, and more like being convicted of murder when the victim is known to be alive.