Facebook, Zuckerberg Sued For $1 Billion Over Intifada Page

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from ZDNet: "Larry Klayman, the founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, has filed a lawsuit against Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg for their role in furthering a 'radical' Facebook Page called 'Third Palestinian Intifada,' which openly advocated another uprising against the citizens of Israel. The complaint reserves the right to be amended into a class action suit and prays for compensatory and punitive damages in excess of $1 billion. ... As a quick refresher, Facebook originally said it would not remove the page but would monitor it instead. The company later pulled the page after discussions degraded into violence and hatred."

Comments

I also support free speech....

[calmofthestorm]

...except for people I disagree with.

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
-- H.L.Mencken

Re:I also support free speech....

[cpt kangarooski]

We don't tolerate people who scream fire in movie theaters

Man, I hate that example. It comes from the Schenck case (which held, basically, that it was illegal to distribute pamphlets opposing the draft), which is no longer good law, and which, in any event, is never properly used.

Back in the old days (the Schenck case is nearly a hundred years old) theaters were deathtraps should they catch on fire, which was not an infrequent occurrence. Not only would the fire and smoke be deadly, but the panic as people trampled one another to escape, or pushed those near the exits (assuming they could be opened) so hard that they couldn't breathe, were serious threats. (Recall the infamous Station nightclub fire some years back to get an idea) Of course, were there a fire, it would be heroic to shout that out and warn everyone, panic or no. Schenck was concerned with falsely shouting fire, and causing a panic maliciously.

The standard in Schenck, however, was whether the speech and the circumstances surrounding it were such that there was a clear and present danger of causing some harm which could constitutionally be rendered illegal.

The Schenck Court by its own words would not find anything wrong with even falsely shouting fire in a theater that wasn't crowded, since there'd be no real danger of a deadly panic as people fled.

In any event the standard nowadays is that speech regarding illegal actions is not itself illegal unless it is intended to result in imminent illegal activity and is actually likely to do so. This is a much higher standard, and pretty tough to achieve.

As an example, Tea Partiers can run around with signs implying that they advocate violence against politicians and government officials or even outright armed rebellion, but they're protected because no one really takes them seriously and they don't actually do anything but posture.

Advocating genocide is protected speech in the US so long as there's no imminent danger of it being acted upon. Protecting that lets us protect all sorts of protests and advocacy; as usual, the First Amendment protects speech you don't like as well as speech you do. And it's important to uphold it, lest you find yourself on the unpopular end of things. Who around here would want to do time for merely talking about how it's right to pirate music or something?

Besides, it's handy to have hateful people out themselves. It saves an awful lot of trouble in identifying them, gathering information about them, etc. What good does it do to have them go underground?