Patterico's Pontifications

5/9/2022

Twitter: Calling for the Assassination of Supreme Court Justices Does Not Violate Our Terms of Service

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 8:29 am



I reported the following tweet to Twitter, because it explicitly called for Supreme Court justices to be assassinated:

The cartoon in question also called for the assassination of justices, albeit with a tiny fig leaf of deniability:

The response I got from Twitter regarding the explicit call for assassination: sorry, doesn’t violate our terms of service!

The email included a helpful list of material that would violate the terms of service. It includes a prohibition on, not just threats, celebrations of violence, and promoting terrorism or violent extremism, but also wishing harm on someone:

This is a total joke. I see a lot of people saying “Elon Musk will fix this!” but his proposed standard is to allow anything that passes First Amendment muster, and this probably would. That said, apparently the people doing the moderation are useless and the Elon Musk standard already prevails, unless you misgender someone. So Elon really wouldn’t hurt much.

Meanwhile, people are protesting outside the homes of Justices Kavanaugh and Roberts in an effort to influence their votes, which is illegal under a statute that is likely constitutional.

This is a dangerous environment and it is why the Court needs to get the abortion issue out of the courts and into the legislatures. Public influence campaigns are appropriate for legislators. Not for judges. They are supposed to interpret the law. Period.

I plan to have much more to say about this.


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