[poszlem]

The flaw in your argument is that it assumes a clear and workable distinction between "a joke" and "obvious hate speech." Yet one of the strongest objections to the very concept of "hate speech" is precisely that we lack a reliable way to stop the term from expanding indefinitely.

The case of Count Dankula is a textbook example: it is plainly a joke, and interpreting it as Nazi promotion or hate speech requires an extraordinary degree of bad faith. And yet, that is exactly how it was treated. https://www.vice.com/en/article/youtube-count-dankula-mark-m...

[esperent]

This is what I mean by everywhere having an agenda. Because if you just read that Vice article you'll come away thinking he's a "Scottish comedian" who was just joking around to annoy his girlfriend. And after all, they're well known to like off color jokes, the Scottish. This is clearly unfair.

But if you dig a bit deeper, you'll find out that he soon after became a member of the far right UKIP party and was considering running for MEP. Also, his YouTube channel had over a million subscribers, of which his girlfriend was not one. So the reality is not that he's just a Scottish comedian, but rather he's also a far right political wannabe using his platform to spread anti-Semitic hate speech in the form of "jokes".

So perhaps "making anti-Semitic jokes for your girlfriend" should be treated differently than "making anti-Semitic jokes for your million YouTube followers"? At the very least, that is what happened here.

It's also important to note the context that there is a massive and growing online hate speech problem and has been for several decades now.

The arrest does seem to have radicalized this guy. But he's just one person, and he was popular enough to get support from a ton of famous people, and no doubt his million YouTube followers. I would need to see more data before I can form an well founded opinion on whether these arrests work or not. Perhaps they do work as a deterrent for the kinds of people that don't get Ricky Gervais publicly standing up for them.

[Ray20]

So we come to the conclusion that this is not just a violation of freedom of speech, but also persecution of political opponents? The situation didn't look any better.

[poszlem]

This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the state arrests someone for a joke, and that person, feeling persecuted, joins an anti-establishment or far-right group, the state cannot then say, "See? We were right to arrest him because he's now a member of that group."

You are using Meechan’s political actions in 2018 and 2019 to justify a legal conviction for a video made in 2016 (which you said happened "soon after").

[esperent]

This one person did appear to get radicalized, yes. Although I'm willing to bet the radicalizers found fertile ground.

But we'd need to see statistical analysis across the whole population of arrests to see whether it's generally a deterrent or not.

[lukan]

"The flaw in your argument is that it assumes a clear and workable distinction between "a joke" and "obvious hate speech"

That is usually easy derived from the context and the cases I know of "missunderstanding a joke" was rather deliberate misinterpretation of the law to get someone out of line.

Your example seems like this as well.

[phatfish]

Ah yes, that famous "joke" which evolves a Nazi salute after antisemitic phrases are said. I think Israel is undermining the Jewish cause with their current label-everything-we-dont-like-as-antisemitic rhetoric. But this "joke" is probably where the line should be drawn for actual antisemitic behaviour.

Whether the person was an antisemite or not, just don't go there. There is no reason to. As a joke between you and your girlfriend, maybe. But not broadcasting it to the whole world on Youtube.

[darubedarob]

Israel is surrounded by a ocean of minority genociding imperialist islamo supremacists using proxies and petrodollars to subvert the umbilical keeping it alive. Up to and including pushing narratives about a genocide that never happened.

It has ever right to be worried and frankly seeing how much activist media and the west republished terrorist propaganda.. they are right.