alt Hacker News> Either way, I think because of all of these reasons, its a systemetic problem but the result of it is that the society has become too polarized and so weirdly incentivized that you can get thrown into jail for memes. I imagine these things might continue to happen but atleast a legal precedent might've been set now (not sure about how American law works).
It would've been pretty clear to anybody that there was no real case here, but the way these rural areas work is that they never expect any attention or pushback. They're used to their little corrupt fiefdoms slipping under the radar. These people in rural TN also live in a bubble of others with the same politics, and they surely overestimated the power of their ideology to win the day.
So it's not really that any precedent was needed, because speech like this is not a crime - full stop.
The scary thing however is that for every case you see like this that goes viral, gets national attention, and has a victim who is aware of his rights and wins... how many small town sheriffs are out there getting away with it?
It's easy to just lock up people for similar trumped up charges and expect that nobody with resources will ever notice or care.
> So it's not really that any precedent was needed, because speech like this is not a crime - full stop.
I was still trying to look at it from a positive way but alas, the situation might be too bleak but yes, nothing meaningful might have came out of this judgement because well, we all know that memes or speech like this isn't crime but oh well, alas.
> The scary thing however is that for every case you see like this that goes viral, gets national attention, and has a victim who is aware of his rights and wins... how many small town sheriffs are out there getting away with it?
Yes that was exactly my point too. I was trying to point the same thing that there might be so many more people whom we don't even know! who might be going through something similar, whose voices are hidden within the swathes of internet and things.
A sad reality but one which is true. I don't know how one fights against it and certainly this question is way above my pay-grade indeed but something should morally be done to prevent an abuse of people and their rights and freedom by the system which is getting corrupted.