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esperenttoday at 3:03 PM2 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

Ray20today at 3:30 PM

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.

poszlemtoday at 3:17 PM

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").