Regarding AskLemmy, it was because you were (allegedly) openly calling for violence. I don’t necessarily agree with that either but I can understand the rationale much more easily.
There are some laws in the books where the instance could become open to legal liability if a Lemming actually did murder somebody and they traced back their activity on Lemmy and found similar comments. It seems ridiculous but that’s what admins sometimes worry about.
According to some cursory reading, Section 230 of the US legal code provides near total immunity to providers, hosts, and moderators of illegal content. However, the statute is still subject to changing interpretations. More importantly, this wide ranging protection of free speech does not apply for most other countries’ legal systems. I believe lemmy.world is hosted somewhere in Europe, and they may be concerned that not removing explicit calls to violence could leave them open to legal retribution.
It’s really not that hard to get your point across without crossing the line of actually calling for violence. You can express the most vitriolic opinions and hatred towards anyone you want and you’ll be legally protected, but once you cross that line towards direct threats on a specific individual, you’re exposing everyone on here to the threat of legal action. It’s not even like Lemmy instances can afford good lawyers, we would be fucked if anyone ever went after us for that.
Regarding AskLemmy, it was because you were (allegedly) openly calling for violence. I don’t necessarily agree with that either but I can understand the rationale much more easily.
There are some laws in the books where the instance could become open to legal liability if a Lemming actually did murder somebody and they traced back their activity on Lemmy and found similar comments. It seems ridiculous but that’s what admins sometimes worry about.
According to some cursory reading, Section 230 of the US legal code provides near total immunity to providers, hosts, and moderators of illegal content. However, the statute is still subject to changing interpretations. More importantly, this wide ranging protection of free speech does not apply for most other countries’ legal systems. I believe lemmy.world is hosted somewhere in Europe, and they may be concerned that not removing explicit calls to violence could leave them open to legal retribution.
It’s really not that hard to get your point across without crossing the line of actually calling for violence. You can express the most vitriolic opinions and hatred towards anyone you want and you’ll be legally protected, but once you cross that line towards direct threats on a specific individual, you’re exposing everyone on here to the threat of legal action. It’s not even like Lemmy instances can afford good lawyers, we would be fucked if anyone ever went after us for that.
It is. German hoster, Finnish server, Dutch admins.
Maybe we should put it on [email protected].
That is good to know, thank you for that. But maybe if they are worried about legal issues we should avoid posting that information widely 😅