Twitter hides Donald Trump tweet for “glorifying violence”

We have laws in the UK that curtail speech like that, "Inciting violence" is a crime.

Which I agree with to some extent, you're not innocent of a crime because you convinced a person to harm another, just because you were too cowardly to get your hands dirty yourself.

But the US is rather famously not British, so I'm not sure if it's a relevant thing to add to the discussion.

People in the US will say the First allows him say such things. They'd be wrong.

I'm also on the other* side of the Atlantic from this circus, but a little googling over lunch led me to the "Brandenburg Test" for when "Inciting violence" is no longer protected by the 1A. (NB: 1A is an entirely different subject than Twitter's TOS, which I addressed in the original thread)

Briefly: speech which both incites imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action fails to be protected as US "free speech".

In this case, my IANAL analysis would be that the tweet had imminent application, but would be unlikely to produce action, for reasons given in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347453 (tl;dr lethal force is the last resort of a well-regulated militia when restoring public order)

* and am therefore fond of "On the fact..." https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd06xx/EWD611.PDF

There's plenty of "speech" criminalized in the US: many crimes are just matters of conspiring to X, or fradulently X... which may have been conducted entirely in speech.

The relevant kind of speech for "free expression" is that which seeks to express an idea/opinion/belief of the speaker.

That isn't criminalised in the UK as far as I'm aware, and would fall under the EHCR protections in any case which are in UK law as the human rights act.

You could even argue that Copyright law itself, and particularly the DMCA provisions, are a violation of free speech.

Obviously practically this wouldn't be possible, but if I were to write down all binary digits that my blu-ray of John Wick has, give it to a friend, and they wrote those digits down in their computer to watch the movie, that would be illegal for copyright violation.

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't have copyright in any capacity (though I do think that US's model is especially draconian), just giving an example of a curtailment of free speech that isn't really controversial.

Part of the issue is if you're hostile to the speaker, you can interpret a call for peace to mean a call for violence. Try to imagine for a moment, that this comment was not made by an evil racist orange man, but someone you like... maybe Ghandi. If Ghandi said: "Looting leads to shooting." Which interpretation would you more likely choose?

1. Please don't loot, it escalates violence and people will get killed

2. Let's kill all the looters

Whether it's Trump or Ghandi, we're imagining we know something about the internal state of the speaker's mind that we don't know.

If you want to go all absolutist reductio ad absurdum, you would argue that even treason (in the form of divulging state secrets) is protected by free speech.

This seems like attempting to weasel-word. If Ghandi said "We have a lot of guns, and looting leads to shooting", it's a lot more clear that the meaning is (2). Trumps tweet didn't just say that one sentence, it said, in order:

* "the Military is with [the governor]"

* "any difficulty and we will assume control"

* "when the looting starts, the shooting starts"

There's a clear causal relationship between these three statements, this is not a plea for peace, it is a threat of violence.

A threat of violence and a call for peace are not mutually exclusive.

Regardless, all that's in evidence is the federal government is going to back the state and if this keeps going people are going to die. Anything else is something you've imagined/projected into someone else's mind.