That's not exactly true. "Speech is not protected by the First Amendment if the speaker intends to incite a violation of the law that is both imminent and likely."

Someone randomly spouting off that people of a race or ideology should be wiped out doesn't always/exactly pass this legal test.

Great point. Visit any US neo-Nazi website and you’ll see language that one could argue is “threatening to a specific group”. But unless it’s “hey, everyone gather at 5 pm on Main St so we can start shooting people”, it’s still protected language.

That's actually a point that I don't think has been decided yet, specifically "imminent". It's been ruled that "at some unspecified point in the future" doesn't count, but I can't find a case (with an admittedly short search) about where the exact boundaries are.

I don't know what the exact legal definition of imminent is, but the layman's definition involves the thing happening soon.

It may well depend on how close to 5 it is (but what timezone?).

The same sentence with the words "right now" would almost certainly meet the test though (assuming the action was actually likely to occur).

The First Amendment does protect that though. As long as the speech isn't intended to incite imminent lawless action, calling for murders is absolutely protected.

E.g. "We should go harm X" is arguably illegal, since it's an immediate call to action.

However, "It'd be great if X died" or "All Y should die" are certainly protected.

In the same vein, this is why "Punch a Nazi" is totally legal: assault is illegal, but you're not immediately inciting a lawless action. "Let's go punch that Nazi", less so.

The essential thing missing from all of these discussions (unless I am misunderstanding people) is the immediacy of the incitement. The context in which the speech matters. That is where the imminent and likely parts properly arise from.

If you write a book advocating for violence against x or y group or individuals that is permissible, but if you were in a crowded square and advocated the same thing when those targets were also in the square and it is likely that your incitement will lead to violence then it is not. That's incitement, it's imminent, and it is for a lawless act. But again, if you did it at home on your blog in some nebulous sense that isn't likely to cause some specific event then it is protected speech.

An important distinction here is that "true threats" are a separate category from what we are talking about. A true threat doesn't have a "likely" or "imminent" component and so is even broader in scope than violent speech in general. That is, true threats are not protected.

https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1025/true-threa...

It's not a matter of what kind of speech 1A governs, but what kind of entities.

The government is the entity that is not allowed to restrict legal free speech. Private corporations are not bound by the same rule; they can restrict all they want.

So if I sent a note with the content you just described to everyone I know via UPS and you define this content as a crime, then UPS should be held liable in facilitating this crime? So therefore UPS needs to inspect the content of every package that it delivers to avoid culpability in crimes like this?

Or somehow UPS is different from a social media entity. Then what legally is a social media entity?

These are interesting times. The rules will certainly change; it remains to be seen if they will ultimately change for the better.

If the UPS was already opening the mail of everyone to add its own pamphlets when you discuss x or y, yes they should be responsible for facilitating crime that they know of then.

Interesting, so the implication is that web companies are generating advertising from user-submitted content, therefore it's been read by the company, so therefore any cross-user communication needs to be reviewed by a person or a sufficiently accurate AI for endorsement through publication.

So in your framework, transmission of user content + advertising based on that content = culpability. I wonder if social media companies would figure out a way to legally prove transmission of a message without viewing its contents as a way to avoid culpability and maintain some level of profitability.

This is like suggesting that if you build a spam filter, you need to build a filter that scans content and catches and reports every type of crime possible to commit ever.

how is that not protected under the first amendment?

also private speech is more free-er than public speech

I'm not here to educate you.

Could you please not post in the flamewar style to Hacker News? We're trying for something different here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm aware.