1y ago

The Irish government wants to pass a law that could see you or your loved ones jailed for possession of memes, cartoons or any content that could be deemed "hateful".

The Bill includes no definition of hate and is wide open to abuse by bad actors. Defend free speech – say no to this legislation, and any legislation of is kind... Anywhere!

https://x.com/FreeSpeechIre/status/1746854766032846910?t=g8nSn9maY3dX0v76oHa9Cg&s=09[https://x.com/FreeSpeechIre/status/1746854766032846910?t=g8nSn9maY3dX0v76oHa9Cg&s=09](url)

44 comments

Not clicking on a Shitter link mate
- Cleaned and redirected link
  https://nitter.net/FreeSpeechIre/status/1746854766032846910
  Still, the news link below is probably a better source. I don't know what 'FreeSpeechIre' is

It's too bad you couldn't find a link to somewhere other than x.com. Just going by the headline though, this could lead to great new career opportunities for Irish black market contraband meme dealers.
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nj2xzrz83o
  
  Freedom of expression is a protected right under both the Irish constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights.
  So not at all what the post title claims?

It's fucking hilarious how x.com still redirects to twitter.com
- honestly the lamest and funniest bit.
  Perfectly ties the whole thing up in a bow: can't even technically manage a domain name change.
  
  Willing to bet some motherfucker has hardcoded twitter domain on the backend in one (or many) link generation process(es) on the basis "it's not like they're going to change the name" and now it borks occasionally if they use x.com

How does one possess a meme?
- Possession is nine-tenths of the meme.
  
  That doesn't clear up anything!
- Receive it in an ad and keep it on your disk as a cache?
- And you all thought NFTs were dumb.
- Post it on social media.

Free Speech Ireland on twitter
You need to take a crash course in media literacy. This is little more than a propaganda account and you're posting it uncritically wholesale.

again, literally 1984.

https://nitter.net/FreeSpeechIre/status/1746854766032846910#m

It's an Unpopular opinion but free speech as it gets translated in modern society can suck a dick.
Shit only applies to the left anyway, the right can call for violence against their enemies and be fine but if you say you'll defend yourself it's a ban on Le socials

Also I've always felt that distribution is the problem, if you can call it that.

I'm.irish and this is the first I'm hearing about this.
I'm doubtful such a thing would be a priority for this government since they are very unpopular given the housing crisis and cost of living increase. They will do everything to scrape votes ahead of the next election.

you'd have a point if you didn't link to a right wing bad faith argument mischaracterizing the law.

Does the bill need some amendments to clear up some ambiguity? Maybe, idk, I'm not Irish nor am I a legal expert; I know virtually nothing about the Irish legal system.
But based on the BBC article, it sounds like the intention of the bill is to get some hate crime laws on the books for Ireland, which they apparently have none so far.
I am very much in favor of punishing hate crimes/hate speech. Free Speech absolutism is braindead, and those who preach it are often hypocrites. Take Musk for example, self proclaimed free speech absolutist. Sure he allows people to hurl a variety of slurs on his platform but then goes and bans a bunch of left-wing accounts. Advocating for white supremacy is covered by free speech but advocating for socialism is not? That really ought to make you question if free speech is really Musk's goal.
- I declare the use of the word "punish" to be hate speech.
  Sorry, the moment you say you agree with this idea, you're starting down a road that goes nowhere good.
  Call me names. Call my family names. Use any language you want. I don't care.
  The line is when you're calling for a crime to be committed.
  "Hate speech" is a convenient tool to target whoever is in power wants to at the moment.
  
  Is calling Epstein island visitors pedos hate speech?
  Seriously, these NPCs give absolutely 0 thought to the negative things brain dead laws like this enable
  …is calling trump supporters Nazis hate speech? That law is gonna have quite a lot of targets if so
  
  Watch yourself, don't want to fall down that slippery slope.
- This is more of an argument against EM than free speech absolutism, since your point is that he doesn't actually believe in it. But anyway it seems like there should be some possible middle ground between a truly absolutist position on free speech, and the overt disdain for free speech implied by a vague prohibition like the OP law. Isn't it valuable for people to generally be able to speak their minds? That can be the case even if the loudest people hiding behind the idea are disingenuous, or if the furthest interpretations of it go too far.
- Law system here is basically common law. Legislation directs it but ultimately the judiciary are the final arbiters. Laws may be referred before signing for constitutionality but that's quite rare.
  I'm skipping a lot but that's my "not a lawyer" ten second summary.
  
  Sounds not unlike America. We've had hate crime laws since 1968, I don't know why everyone's acting like it's the end of the world.

44 comments