World News

22057 readers

38 users here now

Breaking news from around the world.

News that is American but has an international facet may also be posted here.

Guidelines for submissions:

Where possible, post the original source of information.
- If there is a paywall, you can use alternative sources or provide an archive.today, 12ft.io, etc. link in the body.
Do not editorialize titles. Preserve the original title when possible; edits for clarity are fine.
Do not post ragebait or shock stories. These will be removed.
Do not post tabloid or blogspam stories. These will be removed.
Social media should be a source of last resort.

These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.

For US News, see the US News community.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

US Supreme Court sides with man who sent female musician barrage of unwanted messages (www.reuters.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

40 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Among Counterman's communications to Whalen were messages that read: "Was that you in the white Jeep?" and "You're not being good for human relations. Die. Don't need you." Others used expletives. . . .

. . . . Whalen has described the messages from Counterman, which came to her over a two-year span beginning in 2014, as life-threatening and life-altering. She never responded to Counterman during this time and blocked his Facebook account at least four times, prompting him to continue messaging her from other platforms or through new Facebook accounts he created. . . .

"In a world rife with misunderstandings and miscommunications, people would be chilled from speaking altogether if they could be jailed for failing to predict how their words would be received. The First Amendment provides essential breathing room for public debate by requiring the government to demonstrate that the defendant acted intentionally or recklessly," Hauss said.

Well, it's good that we have safeguards for those who sit on their phone wrong and thereby unintentionally create block-evading accounts on multiple platforms. Guy really went to jail and it was all two solid years of misunderstandings. /s

I'm hearing harassment officially can't be prosecuted, if we're turning a blind eye to that degree. A lot of people are going to be emboldened by this, like they already took the law seriously anyway.

Like, yeah, a friend of mine nearly or actually got run off the road several times because the perpetrator wanted to date his gf, but maybe the would-be murderer was just a really bad driver. It was a notoriously dangerous road for both of them to be on ¯\_ (ツ) _/¯

The saddest part of this is I'm more shocked the CO police did something about it. Over here, they refused even a restraining order until we could show them a physical crime, which...you know, would kinda be too late.