says a lot about the Anglosphere that you're decrying censorship of the Christchurch video but not the actual shooting itself as evidence of a "race to the bottom."

Your post says a lot more about the race to the bottom than OPs.

you just need one crazy individual for a shooting, but a whole system of state and private actors (that should've known better) to implement censorship.

This is too narrow a view. The guy wasn't (just) crazy, he was radicalized by an international online far right hate community.

I would venture to say that literally no mass shootings, anywhere, ever, has been the result of "one crazy individual". Certainly none of the ones that make the news. There's always a community, however loosely defined, that radicalized them into thinking that murdering people is a viable solution. That level of descent into madness requires support.

Nah that’s crap. I can give an easy counter-example. The Port-Arthur massacre in Australia. You know, when we got all the gun laws as a result.

One guy, with issues, two guns, 35 dead. Motivation was revenge and fame. No community required.

Your statement is just wrong.

[delayed]

He had a projected IQ of about 66. I don’t know if you’ve engaged with many people with intellectual impairment, but it doesn’t take much for “dumb idea” to gain traction.

He wasn’t radicalised, look it up. He was just an evil git that should never have been allowed near a gun.

There's a direct line between christchurch and jacksonville. They even put the same decorations on their killing implements. There's absolutely a community around these murders.

I'm sorry, but are you arguing that literally no individual ever decides to kill multiple people without being radicalized first?

This is an extremely narrow and naive view of the breadth of what humans can and will do.

> This is too narrow a view. The guy wasn't (just) crazy, he was radicalized by an international online far right hate community.

You say that, and maybe it’s true. But it’s impossible for any New Zealander to know that given it’s a crime for any of them to read his manifesto.

You are incorrect. If you have a good reason you can view restricted material: https://www.classificationoffice.govt.nz/resources/items/app...

For starters, I’m certainly right that it is a crime for New Zealanders to read the document, and if an exemption process that individuals could leverage to access it, that wouldn’t change that fact.

However, you’ve linked to a process that educators can use to screen restricted films to their students.

[delayed]

There’s no legal way for any New Zealander to know the content of his manifesto, and certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt. I haven’t read it, and I’m not especially interested in the topic all together. But all of the commentary I’ve read about it to me seems either massively reductive or highly politicized. I have no certainty at all about the particulars of his motive.

I have little interest in how New Zealand is run, but if I did this would be a massive concern for me. For the interested parties, the details of his motives are incredibly important. That was the basis of new liberty-revoking legislation in New Zealand, and you think that New Zealanders should have no reasonable doubt that their politicians and press (who may or may not have even read it themselves) weren’t portraying it in a way that simply suited their own agendas? Believing that the government should be the only party allowed to interpret crucially important information is very undemocratic.

There have been a number of mass shootings that predate the Internet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...

And even today a number of the shooters had specific targets in mind e.g. fellow students, teachers etc.

So driven more by individual rage and easy access to weapons.

I intentionally didn't mention the internet in my comment. That's the main modern source of radicalization, sure. But people found a way before it too. In person, through books and mailing lists, by phone, by tv, whatever.

We are not in a race with criminals. We are actively fighting them.

The government on the other hand…

You are decrying that comment but not Apartheid... so you must support Apartheid. ;)

Crime, including murder, has existed since ages. Human civilization has created the justice system to deal with that.

Crime existing is no reason to strip away our rights by dismantling due process and the rule of law.

But censorship of the Christchurch video is "due process and the rule of law"?

I can point you to the New Zealand Act of Parliament that allows this to happen? I can link you to the reporting on the court cases?

The fact you don't like it doesn't mean it's not "due process and the rule of law" as decided by the people of New Zealand over the last 70 years or so (a lot of our law seems to date from the 60s or so, I assume this sort of this was discussed a bit in the general zeitgeist before then).

The government making a list of contraband information is fundamentally incompatible with a free society. The fact that it was used to censor the Christchurch video, or any other evil, matters not.

Also, individual laws and court cases can very much trample on due process and the rule of law. It doesn't matter how long standing they are.

Having parliaments and courts doesn't automatically result in a free society. It requires constant effort by the people to keep those institutions in check. When we fail to do that, then "the race to the bottom" ensues.

Ah! Now we are getting to the crux of the matter. You consider a set of values a necessity for a free society. That is (mostly) orthogonal to rule of law. Rule of law might be one of those values, but is not sufficient by itself.

As for the other values, you think absolute free speech is necessary for a free society. New Zealand disagrees with you.

Edit: the US government disagrees too, actually. So I guess you are not free either? (Assuming your location here.)

You seem to think that it's possible to have a free society that locks people up for possessing information that the government deems objectionable. Words mean things, and sometimes, those meanings aren't up for debate.

Whether governments think this is okay is irrelevant. Governments have labeled all sorts of things as consistent with due process and the rule of law. Censorship, mass surveillance, waterboarding, drone killing, you name it. It's supposedly justified because there's laws and institutions that "authorized" it. I don't buy that. That's rule by law, not rule of law.

Also this is kind of besides the point, but when governments police the possesion of information, that's not only a freedom of speech issue. It's also a freedom of thought issue.

Genuine question: where does CSAM and yelling fire in a theatre fit into your conception of a free society?

Bad example. Yelling fire in a crowded theater may be questionable, but there is no law prohibiting me from using the word "fire" in a discussion or on a protest sign.

Your response sums up my objection to these kinds of policy. You frame my arguments as some kind of attachment to the most heinous crime in spite of any clarifications I make. Governments operate the same way. Any questionable policies they enforce, it's always for the people. Opposition are terrorists and child abusers.

I made my arguments very clear. I don't support crime, ever. But that doesn't mean I support taking away individual rights essential to a free society.

I disagree that you argument is as clear as you say it is. This is what I'm trying to ask you: do you think that there is any speech, any expression, that can/should be a crime?

You believe in free speech, good, so do I. But in a reasonable society everything has limits the only question is where those limits are.

I'm not doing the "think of the children" thing, I'm trying to probe the edges of the argument you are putting forth.

There are some people that think that possession and distribution of CSAM should not be illegal on free speech ground. That's a position I don't share. Where do you stand?

Or, to remove you objections to that line of argument, what about revenge porn? Is that speech that shouldn't be punished? What rights does the subject of the revenge porn have and do they counter any free speech right the publisher has?

This is a subtle and complex subject, I don't believe there are simple answers.

Also,

>Words mean things, and sometimes, those meanings aren't up for debate.

Wittgenstein would like a word (heh).

I think it's impossible to have a good faith discussion with people whose response to an argument is that words can mean anything.

> New Zealand using CSAM laws to prosecute people who watched the Christchurch video

Can I get a source on that? I can't find what you described with a quick Google search (using "New Zealand CSAM Christchurch" as my search term). I do find some prosecution made against people who distribute the video (one of them with caption "target acquired"), but they were under terrorism-related law.

It seems absurd to go after mere viewer of the video, let alone using CSAM law of all laws as the basis of prosecution.

Here is the text of the law [0].

It defines "objectionable" content with CSAM as the first category, and then a number of other categories that would be First Amendment protected speech in the US. Possession alone carries a 10 year prison sentence, possession with intent to distribute is 14 years. The Christchurch shooting video and manifesto were both classified as objectionable by New Zealand's Chief Censor (I'm not joking, that's actually their job title) [1].

My point was that they are prosecuting people for political and journalistic speech under the same law they use for CSAM, with equally severe penalties. Hope that is a more clear explanation.

[0] - https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0094/latest/...

[1] - https://www.classificationoffice.govt.nz/news/news-items/res...

As my other reply states, this is a complete misunderstanding of the situation in NZ. Either you are ignorant of the NZ context, or wilfully ignoring it.

Please stop.

Your response below did not address the substance of my argument. I linked to primary sources, people interested in this discussion can go read them and come to their own conclusions.

the substance of your argument is that you don't understand that different countries/societies/cultures/jurisdictions have different historical experiences/legal traditions/ founding principals/values/politics that make words like censorship very contextual.

Gotcha, censorship of stuff you don't like isn't censorship

I don't think anyone in this whole discussion claimed that?

Just people disagreeing about where to draw the line on what censorship is acceptable and what is not. The US and NZ draw that line in different places.

It seems to me that Americans in this discussion are trying to win some kind of moral argument, where as I'm just explaining how the world is, not how it ought to be.

NZ didn't prosecute anyone for only watching the video. Some were prosecuted for sharing it though.

Charges were laid in 35 cases [0], and a 16 year old pleaded guilty to possession of the video [1]. I'm not sure if the disposition of the other 33 cases has been determined or reported on by news outlets.

[0] - https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/397953/charges-laid-in-3...

[1] - https://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/news/crime/16-year-old-admits-p...

Thanks, I've updated my comment to say "sharing or possessing". Although I doubt anyone got prosecuted for possessing without ever sharing - how would you get caught?

They were attempting to subpoena tech companies and websites where the video was reuploaded, demanding user information and IP logs for anyone who accessed the video. I'm unsure of how many video hosts actually complied, given how many companies don't have a presence in NZ. Apparently at least a few, given how they were able to charge at least 35 people.

From there, it's a basic request to the ISP for subscriber information, and a day or two later the police are seizing the poor schmuck's electronics. If they find christchurch.mp4 or manifesto.pdf, that's a 10 year prison sentence.

Given that "white identity extremism" is one of the biggest domestic threats, that seems fair enough.

It's not even a rounding error in our national murder rate. We are currently at over 20,000 murders per year in the US, and it's rare for more than a handful to be linked to white identity extremism in a given year. The real "threat" was that a bunch of IC employees would end up redundant after ISIS imploded. There are an awful lot of highly paid IC employees and consultants who hopped on the new counterterrorism bandwagon after their old cash cow dried up.

Besides that, even if it were a real threat, censoring speech is not the solution. I'm not sure if you have read the Christchurch manifesto, but it's garbage. Seriously NZ is doing the author a favor by censoring it. That way he gets to play the political persecution card and people are less likely to actually read it.

>It's not even a rounding error in our national murder rate. We are currently at over 20,000 murders per year in the US

But... we aren't talking about the US?

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/NZL/new-zealand/murder...

See that big spike at the end there? That's white identity extremism. The deadliest crime in NZ history, the one event that more than doubled NZs murder rate that year, was white identity extremism. It might be a bit of a problem.

That tends to happen when you have a small population and an outlier event occurs in a given year... Your entire country is the size of a large US city. If you calculated NYC's murder rate and included 9/11, it would also be pretty abysmal in 2001.

An the US reacted to 9/11 with a bunch of law changes among other things. A large event had an impact.

Honestly, I don't see what you are trying to point out?

9/11 got us the Patriot Act, the TSA, an invasion of a completely unrelated country that killed around 600,000 people, and a few trillion dollars in unnecessary military spending. Knee-jerk responses generally don't end well, speaking from experience.

You won't get a source because it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of New Zealand law and attitudes towards censorship.

In NZ we have the Classification Office. This is the government organisation that classifies publications (books, movies, games, even technically websites IIRC?). The Classification Office issues a rating (PG, M, R16, R18, etc.) and it is a crime to provide restricted publications to people that are under the restricted age.

It takes quite a lot to get a publication outright banned. In some cases the Chief Censor will issue it a "only at film festivals and academic settings" rating.

Note: only egregious distribution tends to get any attention, let alone prosecution. People importing objectionable material for sale, that sort of thing. Back in the day when video stores were still a thing, 15 year olds would rent R18 porn and no one went to jail.

Yes, CSAM is the sort of thing that would be rated objectionable (I.e. banned) but the NZ censorship regime is not "CSAM laws", it is much broader and more comprehensive than that.

In this case the Chief Censor banned the Christchurch shooting video because of the harm that its distribution would do to the community [1]. This sort of decision is normal and expected in NZ.

The rest of the world does not look like the US. We don't need to bend laws past their original intention when we already have a functional system for dealing with these kind of issues.

(I'm sure someone will pipe up to tell me I'm a slave in Stalinist Russia because I can't watch snuff films.)

[1]: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/397953/charges-laid-in-3...

>it is a crime to provide restricted publications to people that are under the restricted age.

Does this imply that parents, or those delegated by them, would be commiting a crime by showing their children material out of the government's chosen age range? That strikes me as absurd.

Furthermore, how does this work with broadcast TV or Radio? Do the receiving devices need to implement a control?

Actually, this also makes me wonder, will a public library check ID for books that teens check out?

> Does this imply that parents, or those delegated by them, would be commiting a crime by showing their children material out of the government's chosen age range? That strikes me as absurd.

Technically, yeah. And on the face of it, that doesn't sounds great does it? But again, that ignores the reality of the NZ justice system. I wouldn't think any parent has ever been prosecuted for that sort of thing. There are many safety valves like police discretion, prosecutor discretion, judicial discretion. If it got to court my assumption is that the offender would be discharged without conviction [1]. Basically given a telling off by the judge.

Any cases of a parent, or anyone just guilty of showing restricted stuff to a child, that resulted in fines or jail time would include large scale offending (distribution for profit probably), or some other abuse. I could certainly see a parent that was showing porn to their kid, as part of the sexual assault of that kid, getting a conviction for this, but only as part of a larger case involving a bunch of yuck stuff I don't want to think about.

Without doing a bunch of research, the other circumstance I could picture a parent being convicted would be in the dark times of the past. It wouldn't surprise me much to read that Mrs. Poorlady of Mangakino was convicted of supplying a minor restricted material in 1962 and fined £100. But all countries have weird pasts, McCarthyism was a thing.

TV and Radio aren't "publications" for the purposes of the Act. That is up to the Broadcasting Standards Authority. See: https://www.classificationoffice.govt.nz/classification-info... and https://www.bsa.govt.nz/

And lastly: yes a library would check your id. Libraries do stock DVDs and will absolutely not hand R16 movies to 15 year olds. But it is rare for books to get ratings.

Books are assumed to be ok, and most go unclassified. But books might be submitted for classification if the publisher thinks it is borderline. Or if a member of the public submitted it.

So yeah, if a book was submitted for classification, and that book got a restricted label, and the library thought the book wasn't trash and was worth stocking, then yes, they would check id if you look like you could be under the restricted age.

[1]: https://www.willislegal.co.nz/discharge-without-conviction/

"I wouldn't think any parent has ever been prosecuted for that sort of thing."

It's worse to have an unenforced law on the books than no law at all.

You have a chief censor and you seem proud of this.

Did Orwell know about you?

This is a very harsh response. You can disagree and still have a civil discussion. Many cultures are represented on Hacker News and we can all learn something from each other.

Edit: Okay, not quite as bad now after you edited out the last line. Thanks.

Not proud, just describing facts.

<<I'm sure someone will pipe up to tell me I'm a slave in Stalinist Russia because I can't watch snuff films

Honestly, I am more concerned that you think it is kosher to have others not see/read it. You can choose to see/not see what you will. NZ is a lot of things, but I would not call it normal.

Oh, while we are at it. Have you ever wondered about why it was restricted? Because the manifesto from that guy actually predicted NZ gov response quite well.

This guy was successful terrorist ( as in, he achieved his stated political goal with violence ).