Buried under the rest of the article is this, since some people only do headlines I'll copy it here for visibility:
>Shanbehzadeh was sentenced to five years for alleged pro-Israel propaganda activity, four years for insulting Islamic sanctities, two years for spreading lies online and an additional year for anti-regime propaganda.
>His lawyer, Amir Raisian, told Shargh Network, a reformist newspaper in Iran, that he would appeal the verdict, especially the accusation of pro-Israel activity. The prosecutor’s office in Ardabil alleged that Shanbehzadeh had been in contact with Israeli intelligence officers and was arrested when trying to leave the country, according to Voice of America.
Anyone opposition who gets arrested will get those allegations by default in Iran. It doesn't mean that those are the real reason. The real reason is exactly what's written there: twitting a dot at supreme leader and getting more likes than him (he previously did say that 'If I post a dot, I'll get more like than the supreme leader hahaha').
He was also posting satires about the religion of peace.... :)
Source: I'm Iranian.
I sometimes asked people on HN, what news sites they consider to be of decent quality. And npr.org was recommended several times.
Seeing this cheap manipulative article suggests they were mistaken.
PS.
Maybe his 12 years sentence is completely unjust, I don't know.
But titles like this... How about "A man is sentenced to death after having cofee for breakfast" for an article about Charles Manson? (I suppose he had cofee sometimes, so formally a true title).
Speaking out against a repressive regime is always okay, the problem is it’s a violent repressive regime who will throw you in prison for criticizing it. So his 12 years sentence is completely unjust like nearly all of Iran’s tossing people in prison for simply expressing free thought. He was not trying to inspire violence.
Yes, selective presentation of facts is one of the main methods of manipulations today.
The author of your link argues that the biased reporters are not necessarily evil. I think this is not the main concern for a reader. His main goal is to build a world view as adequate to reality as possible.
Of course, some reporters are genuinely mistaken despite trying to do best reporting. Others are intentionally manipulative - no doubt that happens often too. But even they can think it is for good. And I agree with your author we should not translate this into hostility in the society by declaring all biased reporters as evil. But we can note their quality.
Speaking of npr.org, I can not decide conclusively from this single example whether they stay in the "decent quality" category. But it suggests they are ready to compromise on quality. It's not only the title that is misguiding. The article body is not keen to make the things clear. I suppose many readers left with a firm belief the man was really sentenced for the dot posted alone.
I agree that NPR is regurgitating the narrative by "Iran International English", but to me the body of the article is crystal clear, this guy was an activist, and this particular "ratio-ing" was a likely trigger that led to him being included in this batch of people "to be made example of".
I think NPR is providing a disservice by reporting the actual "charges" he was found guilty of in 2020, because they don't matter. It's a brutal dictatorship, of course there are laws against criticizing the government ("anti-regime propaganda", and of course anyone can be charged with treason-lite (pro-Israel propaganda) and ... it's a theocracy, of course there are blasphemy laws, yeey!
We don't have high-certainty information about the proximate causes that landed this guy in prison, but it doesn't matter (it matters for scholars if they are doing some kind of deep dive on crackdowns, and of course it matters for actual people on the ground, who are trying to contest the charges, but even then the statistics is not kind to their efforts).
Similarly putting the photo of the ayatollah there is a disservice to Hossein.
And ... when it comes to what to do with this as a news consumer, the sad fact is that this is not news. There's zero new bit of actionable information in this. (NPR published this because "Iran International" published this on 31 Aug, the "trial" was apparently on 7th of August. He tweeted in June, and was released from prison sometime around April in 2023. Wikipedia says 2024, but it's likely wrong.)
> Similarly putting the photo of the ayatollah there is a disservice to Hossein.
The photo is irrelevant and could easily be left out, but why is it a disservice to Hossein Shanbehzadeh?
> I agree that NPR is regurgitating the narrative by "Iran International English", but to me the body of the article is crystal clear, this guy was an activist, and this particular "ratio-ing" was a likely trigger that led to him being included in this batch of people "to be made example of".
I have never heard of "Iran International". And in general I know very little about Iran. Some caricature mentions (https://youtu.be/g2KsZHRrFpU?t=88, https://youtu.be/9EDkTAaUMDU?t=1055), a brief approach to the wikipedia article sometime long ago, islamic revolution, head scarfs... The link got me curious about the level of opposing actions suficient to be prosecuted in Iran. I tried to search for Hossein Shanbehzadeh's original social media posts made after his release from the previous sentence - that's the biggest missing part for me. Failed to find them - the twitter account was deactivated, other social media didn't show up in the search results for "Hossein Shanbehzadeh". But there are several pages in google search results of other news sites posting the same story. So may be the media not repeating "Iran International" directly, but simply racing to repeat each other and publish this sensational message, withouth giving too much dilligence and thinking?
BTW, Uzbek branch of Radio Libery reports that:
"According to the lawyer, the prosecution did not prove to the guilt of Shanbehzade under the most difficult article. As evidence of guilt under other articles, the court cited his posts in support of political prisoners and the abolition of the mandatory wearing of the hijab, the use of the hashtag #NoToExecutions, criticism of the Iranian elections and the expression of joy about the death of former President Ebrahim Raisi.
[..]
As Iran International notes, critics of the Iranian regime often use the point and other single symbols to express disagreement with the authorities."
> We don't have high-certainty information about the proximate causes that landed this guy in prison, but it doesn't matter (it matters for scholars if they are doing some kind of deep dive on crackdowns, and of course it matters for actual people on the ground, who are trying to contest the charges, but even then the statistics is not kind to their efforts).
Why the real reasons do not matter for usual readers? They very much matter, I think.
> I think NPR is providing a disservice by reporting the actual "charges" he was found guilty of in 2020, because they don't matter.
You mean 2024. The info about the formal official charges makes the picture more complete.
Wait... Do you value the quality of the article not by its informativeness for the reader, but by level of "service" it makes to Hossein Shanbehzadeh?
Wow! I don't know if that's really your position, but that's a mind blowing possibility!
> It's a brutal dictatorship, of course there are laws against criticizing the government ("anti-regime propaganda", and of course anyone can be charged with treason-lite (pro-Israel propaganda) and ... it's a theocracy, of course there are blasphemy laws, yeey!
Do you mean the Iranian regime is a-priori evil, so everyone prosecuted by it is a-priori good and suffers undeservedly. Therefore decent media just need to mobilize public support for them, even if falsifying / concealing the reality from the readers? (Even if the premises was true, such reasoning conclusion is wrong).
> And ... when it comes to what to do with this as a news consumer, the sad fact is that this is not news. There's zero new bit of actionable information in this. (NPR published this because "Iran International" published this on 31 Aug, the "trial" was apparently on 7th of August. He tweeted in June, and was released from prison sometime around April in 2023. Wikipedia says 2024, but it's likely wrong.)
The information may be not immediately actionable, but as a news consumer I want to build adequate worldview, which may form the ground for decisions and actions in the future.
Because the newsworthy thing is about this guy, not about the autocrat. If NPR feels it's important enough to publish, then it should be either without a header or a relevant one. Just slapping on a random stock photo is bad journalism.
> Why the real reasons do not matter for usual readers? They very much matter, I think.
Of course the real reason matters, but the reason is not the "charges". (And as I said, the whole process might be of interest to some people, so correctly reporting can be a valuable service.)
> Do you mean the Iranian regime is a-priori evil
Dictatorships can do good things too, so no. For example providing healthcare, education, etc. Even shitty public services are better than nothing in many cases. And that includes policing too. (Despite all the rage about abolition of police we know that power vacuums likely lead to bad things.)
That said when it comes to crackdowns on protest activity my prior for "dictatorship doing bad thing" is pretty fucking high.
> Do you value the quality of the article not by its informativeness for the reader, but by level of "service" it makes to Hossein Shanbehzadeh?
I value both. As a reader I don't want to read a hack job, and as readers' attention and time are very scarce I don't like the presence and proliferation of these low-quality pieces. (I am aware that it was likely even worse before. When people had fewer opportunities to check what the fuck the newspapers printed.) And if a piece is about someone then that someone deserves that the text does not selectively misrepresent facts, and handles topics with the care they deserve. I don't like that this guy's plight has become basically a tick in a checkbox for "make content", and particularly that it became clickbait.
And of course he could think otherwise. Perhaps he thinks any press is good press. Maybe it helps his situation. But that's the question that I want to get information on, not about which branch of the kangaroo court he was dragged to.
> ... as a news consumer I want to build adequate worldview, ...
Me too, but as mentioned, time and attention are the bottleneck. And maybe my expectations for news is unrealistically high.
Their source is Iran International and that outfit is propaganda and agitprop oriented. It is as unbiased as their opposite number PressTV (run by IRI) or RT (Russian) or an ideologically committed red/blue outfit in US.
These days Reuters is the closest thing to relatively unbiased reporting in the West. imo.
Nonsense. Not even by US standards and absolutely not by global standards.
Overall, we rate NPR (National Public Radio) Left-Center Biased (a slight to moderate liberal bias) based on story selection that leans slightly left and High for factual reporting due to thorough sourcing and accurate news reporting.
Overall, we rate Ground News Least Biased based on publishing news stories from both sides of the political spectrum and appropriately labeling their bias. We also rate them mostly factual rather than High due to the use of poor sources that can publish false or misleading information; however, these news stories are typically reported by other credible media outlets meaning they most likely are factual.
Where do Americans get this notion that their Overton window is to the right of the rest of the world? To the right of Canada and Western Europe, OK sure, but that's a tiny fraction of planet earth.
Go check our Indian politics, which is more numerically represented of planet earth, and tell me the US is to the right of hindu nationalism.
Nonsense? Show me 3 stories from NPR in the last month (among hundreds they've reported in that time frame) with a right-wing flavor. You know, things like articles against abortion, critical of Kamala, supporting mass-deportation of illegal immigrants, etc.
I am reminded of an article from our (state) news agency, on the Biden->Harris transition, one sentence of which said (roughly translated) "Trump is already trying to tar Harris as an extreme-leftist candidate, but then again, over there his point might be valid, for according to Wikipedia, there they believe being against the death penalty to be an extreme-left position."
NPR is not “very very far left”. It is left leaning, but their articles are notbased on pure opinion and conjecture like much of what I see in the right leaning news like Fox, and flat out lies in OAN/Newsmax/Breitbart/Twitter
Show me 3 stories from NPR in the last month (among hundreds they've reported in that time frame) with a right-wing flavor. You know, things like articles against abortion, critical of Kamala, supporting mass-deportation of illegal immigrants, etc.
I never claimed they had right leaning stories, they have many neutral articles which you are more than welcome to check out on your on time, but not on mine.
I asked people primarily not because I want good news sites for myself. For my news reading method polarized, manipulative and biased sources are sometimes more informative. But I am interested to know what people read and who they believe.
Although, having a high quality source maybe useful to me. Also interesting to see novel approaches and experiments, like the bias measurement the ground.news seems to have.
I've been thinking a lot recently about where I would personally draw the line on what sorts of speech should be criminal.
If someone publicly called for specific violence (ex: "let's all meet at Joe's house to burn it down—I'll bring the lighter") that feels to me like the sort of thing that would be useful to do something about instead of waiting for the actual crime to be committed.
But publicly stating that you support a violent act that somebody else did? Criticizing widely accepted beliefs? Expressing that you don't like a particular sort of person? I don't see how we could possibly criminalize anything like that without neutering the ability for a society to come up with new ideas.
Tim Urban's "What's Our Problem" has a great framing of this question: the sort of discourse needed for a high-rung "idea lab" requires that people are about to speak publicly in ways that appear to be "spreading lies online" (one of the crimes Shanbehzadeh, the Iranian writer, was apparently charged with). Without that freedom we all descend into tribal barbarism that leaves us stuck in the current set of ideas we happen to have right now.
A liberal prohibition on violent speech is an aspirational privilege of a people who have solved all their social problems to such a degree that the credible threat of violence is never necessary for justice or progress. Or an aspirational privilege of an aristocracy who have solved all of their material problems at the expense of everybody else, and demand militant proactive protection of their hoard and their personal safety.
In our history, the credible threat of social violence has been absolutely necessary for justice & progress on numerous occasions. It's why we have everything from civil rights for racial minorities to voting rights for women to labor rights for workers to generous benefits for veterans.
The establishment response to somebody like a Martin Luther King is mockery and condemnation, and only when fear of a Malcolm X led uprising becomes salient does the political capital to sue for peace, form.
I don't remember the effective social movements and resulting changes in society you describe coming from threats of violence (in the US). Whether it was suffrage or labor rights, the greatest power for violence was always with the status quo and not with those protesting. Often violence has brought about change in perception opposite to its intent. This was true in civil rights, gay rights, antiwar, and labor movements.
So I disagree that prohibition of violent public speech is an aspirational privilege otherwise necessary for justice and progress. A terrorist Ghandi wouldn't have been as effective against the British Raj (who could and did kill indiscriminately).
If you were talking about private speech (not threats), I would have some more understanding.
The only reason you have a 40 hour workday are due to constant rioting and unrest. these strikes weren't just unhappy people with picket signs, they literally "called in the Pinkertons" to beat them into submission, and most of the strikes going back to the 1800s had some component of violence.
Apropos of the date, the Pullman Strikes are the reason we have Labor Day as a national holiday. 70 people died during that strike and around 60 more were seriously wounded. Violence was common during strikes in the 1800s, but Pullman was especially chaotic -- but par for the course as global labor struggles went.
> I don't remember the effective social movements and resulting changes in society you describe coming from threats of violence (in the US)
I can think of 2.
The end of the reconstruction period (slash-start-of-Jim-Crow) was brought about by violence (and threats of violence). The newly-formed KKK and fellow travellers successfully used lynchings to deter the formerly enslaved from participating in the political process (as candidates and voters), which was the status quo.
The Stonewall riots were were a another one - I'm certain there are more examples in between those 2.
To be fair civil rights and relative racial equality was imposed by an (effectively) foreign army of occupation.
That army leaving is what led to Jim Crow, there was hardly any meaningful bottom-top societal change since the local Republican governments could have never survived without significant external support anyway.
KKK/etc. were effectively an unofficial enforcement branch / citizen militia of the local elites and state governments.
IMHO the situation was a bit like the war in Afghanistan (just with a slightly narrower cultural gap). Women rights could only survive as long as the US/NATO force were there to impose them and they reverted to the status quo as soon as the foreign militaries left.
Agreed, but the US Civil war wasn't started over mean tweets or nasty letters. There were armies and battlefields. The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States wasn't threatening individual lives, but simply said that some states need not respect the federal union.
Also, that threat of violence didn't lead to the success of the Confederacy, but to its destruction.
>In our history, the credible threat of social violence has been absolutely necessary for justice & progress
Even in very similar Anglosphere cultures like Britain, a liberal constitutional monarchy, all of that had been achieved, even earlier in many cases, without the overt glorification of violence as a normal part of the political process.
In fact liberal monarchies, even before they were democratic had done a pretty good job of delivering steady progress without being dogmatic on speech or even justifying violent revolution. Just assuming for a second we agree on a broad notion of progress if you draw the US on a graph next to her a little bit less rebellious peers I don't think it's that clear that the violence was necessary.
You seem unfamiliar with the vast bulk of history of the "Four Lions" region (now called the United Kingdom).
Just one snippet:
The Peterloo Massacre took place at St Peter's Field, Manchester, Lancashire, England, on Monday 16 August 1819. Eighteen people died and 400–700 were injured when cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation.
As a peer comment points out there were many civil and uncivil wars.
The fact that you're using an incident that resulted in only 18 deaths to prove your point is evidence that, yes, England since the English Civil War has been an unusually peaceful and law-abiding part of the world.
This one incident in English political history appears more violent than, say, the US Kent State massacre:
The Kent State shootings were the killing of four and wounding of nine unarmed college students by the Ohio National Guard
Is it your position that the US state has been more violent toward citizens than the "liberal constitutional monarchy" in the UK, less violent, or about the same.
Modern English monarchy history easily traces back to 1066 and the political history to the issue of the Magna Carta in 1215.
It's selective to limit political violence to last Civil War (of many wars | rebellions of the last 800 years) and blinkered to claim that the modern UK doesn't put the boot in (eg: Thatcher during the miners strikes .. instigated by the Thatcher government in a deliberate ploy to break trade unions across all industries).
My position is that both the UK since the end of the English Civil War (1646) and the US since the end of the American Civil War (1865) have been unusually free of internal political violence.
In contrast, the Chinese Civil War (ending in 1949) was bloodier than any conflict in the 20th Century except the 2 world wars, and Rwanda had a little internal conflict in 1994 that resulted in the death of 491,000–800,000 citizens (of the Tutsi ethnic group). Also since the 1980s, 350,000–1,000,000+ have been killed and 2,000,000–3,800,000 displaced by internal conflicts in Somalia. Also, Libya and Syria more recently.
>Modern English monarchy history easily traces back to 1066 . . . It's selective to limit political violence to last Civil War.
It is the recent centuries of the history of a country that is the most informative for predicting what will happen in the future.
> both the UK since the end of the English Civil War (1646)
Only if we exclude Ireland and the Scottish Highlands which were both part of the UK.
Being on an island and mostly free from foreign threats (compared to countries continental Europe) helped though. Scandinavia for instance has also been similarly peaceful (if not more so) in the same period.
> The BPU had made its reputation amid the spontaneous rioting that had accompanied the fall of the First Reform Bill in 1831, assembling 150,000 protesters at Newhall Hill in the largest political assembly the country had ever seen.[15] Its threat to reorganise itself along semi-military lines in November 1831 had led to suggestions that it was trying to usurp the civil authority, and made a deliberate, if implicit, threat of the possibility of armed revolt in the event of the formation of an anti-reform government.
The French Revolution, and the almost total destruction of an aristocratic/noble/royal system, was the subtext of every bottom-up political movement in Europe in this era.
Only if we restrict it to England/Lowland-Scotland specifically and not the occupied territories in Ireland and the Scottish highlands.
But even there it was in large part only the case because the Hanoverian regime was highly effective at suppressing any type of dissent in pretty brutal ways.
> law-abiding part of the world.
The existence of the ‘Bloody Code’ would imply otherwise.
The English civil war wasn't violent to you? even the glorious revolution was very violent by modern standards. not to mention the following jacobite "rebellions".
The deposition of James II and VII (same person, different kingdoms) in November 1688 was a singular event that followed the wider 1639 to 1653 Wars of the Three Kingdoms, which included The English Civil War (a series of civil wars and political machinations from 1642 to 1651)
A singular action with no bloodshed that followed a period in which bodies were stacked high, including over a hundred thousand non combat civilians.
A singular action with no bloodshed that sparked a long series of bloody revolts that began in March 1689, with major outbreaks in 1715 and 1719, and culminated in the Jacobite rising of 1745.
Yes - he did mention the day James was deposed, you ignored the rest of century that surrounded that day.
My point is the having already mentioned the English Civil War (which I concede was quite bloody) the comment I replied to goes on to mention the Glorious Revolution, which (even if we adopt your definition) is double counting.
It was bloodless for the time but was still a foreign expeditionary force marching on London in the middle of the 9 years war. Considering us moderns clutch our Pearl's at an obese person getting a heart attack during an "insurrection" it's fair to say it was violent by today's standards.
The Parliament gradually setting the King straight on whose support he needs to enact foreign policy, and the King's failures strengthening opposition in Parliament over the course of
An apocalyptic and thereafter omnipresent fear of the aristocracy losing their heads after the French Revolution, leading to cycles of tyrannical repression of the working class alternating with massive working class actions.
You could go on, but I'm no expert on UK history. Social change in UK democracy seems to mostly demand angry disenfranchised masses, a very few sympathetic ears in the House of Lords, and a larger body of Parliament & middle class people who want to strike some kind of nonviolent compromise and maintain order even if giving up some power offends.
The US is very similar in that this is the stuff we don't like to talk about. The fact that our military fought a brief, bloody war or two against mining unions before any labor rights were recognized was a single decontextualized paragraph in my history textbook at age 15, and was never mentioned again.
Oh that was fascinating! Thank you for bringing those standards up—it seems like the US legal system landed in a similar place as my intuition. “Imminent Lawless Action” is where I’d also draw the line.
> without neutering the ability for a society to come up with new ideas.
The goal isn't always this instrumental one. There is also freedom of conscience, which (like the US freedom of religion) isn't about generating new ideas.
But wrt to the goal of generating new ideas you also need to consider all ways of making it too expensive to access information. There's the 1984 approach of violently preventing the spread of information. Then there's the more Brave New World aligned approach of flooding all communication platforms with distracting nonsense and lies.
The second strategy scales a lot better. A lot of people are stuck in a mindset where you can shut down a few printing presses and kill an idea. That's the old war. The new war is much harder and we mostly haven't even begun to be honest with ourselves about it, let alone found any good answers for what to do about it.
The new war makes it so you can post anything you want but the algorithm will make sure nobody ever sees it. They give you a megaphone but they also put you in digital Antarctica without a soul around.
I think just as there is freedom of speech- there is freedom to hear. If I want to listen to someone's words I should not be prevented from hearing them. Why do we need platforms? We have the internet already but then we are still at the whims of a search engine. We want our cake and to eat it too.
I'm currently of the opinion that hierarchies are partially an informational thing. Nodes that summarize or aggregate information from other nodes are higher in some abstract hierarchy (e.g. perhaps they have higher in-degree). Those abstractions tend to become more concrete and those nodes become points of centralization or what you might call platforms.
The platforms don't have to look like they do now (in fact I hope they don't), but I am currently skeptical of any perfectly flat communication system just on informational grounds.
Real change - grassroots change - largely comes from a large number of small-scale interactions. Much of it is face-to-face. If you want to actually change things (rather than just broadcast a message to the world and expect things to change), you have to do the long, slow, patient work of talking to people.
Aren't there plenty of examples of the kind of speech you talk about in your second paragraph already on Twitter? There are plenty of hot takes to pick from, with some being censored more or less based on the current owner.
I'd also be interested to have some examples of the current set of ideas that you believe we are stuck with. It's an interesting phrase, and it begs to be enumerated.
In my personal experience on X it seems like the platform has become way more tolerant of more types of speech from more diverse perspectives. I feel this change has been an improvement. I’m curious about accounts you’ve noticed get censored more.
What I mean by the current set of ideas we’re stuck with is the total set of every mainstream idea we have about everything. There have been a few recent examples of ideas that used to be considered misinformation worthy of censorship that have since gotten unstuck and are now part of the new accepted set (ex: the idea that COVID might be a lab leak, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Ivermectin). Without free speech that lets extremists explore “unacceptable” fringe ideas our society gets to the actual truth much slower.
> I don't see how we could possibly criminalize anything like that without neutering the ability for a society to come up with new ideas.
But isn't that exactly the point of policies like this? They're intended to dissuade new ideas, such as ideas about who should be in charge of society.
With fairly rare exceptions, most folks are just quibbling over where to draw the lines. Some things - death threats, defrauding people - are clearly both speech and over the line, and letting them go unchecked also "dissuades new ideas".
Like the folks who think the Second Amendment means you can own nukes, or the Libertarian Party folks who don't like drivers' licenses, they're pretty fringe.
What do you think of a domineering bully who demeans, berates, and manipulates a vulnerable partner? It's not hard to find examples of relationships where over years a person preys on someone else's insecurities and tells them every day that they are worthless, that no-one else will take them, and responds with anger to every minor irritation, often unpredictably. Or they may gaslight them and leave someone with a less sure sense of reality, doubting and undermining themselves.
To me, these kinds of injuries are worse than many kinds of physical violence. People who have been extracted from, and recover from, situations like this (as much as anyone can) often say they would have preferred to be beaten. And they don't mean this lightly.
This is all "just" speech; the perpetuators and victims often agree that they "never laid a finger on them". But it hardly about beginning or preventing new ideas. In some countries, this kind of speech and pattern of abuse is criminal. But it's not universally so. Should it be? The way these countries frame it is that rights - like freedom of speech - are not absolutely, but must be balanced with the harm they may cause, and to assess things almost case by case with balancing tests. This seems to me a very workable system of law with good outcomes.
I think verbal abuse is terrible and should be prevented by the state, just not under the umbrella of limiting free speech.
For me verbal abuse is in the same sort of category as rigging up a bomb to detonate when I've tweeted a keyword. The crime isn't really about the ideas being expressed (which I believe should be protected), the crimes just happen to involve speech.
Where abusive speech gets tricky for me is when people feel that ideas being publicly expressed are harming them (ex: a twitter discussion perpetuating hateful stereotyoes of people like me). In my current position that sort of speech is some of the most important to protect because I don't like it.
I'm not defending Iran over this, I fully expect his imprisonment to be for a reason I would consider bullshit, but this article doesn't present much evidence that the two events in the title have any connection. He tweeted a dot, at some point after was arrested.
Technically the article never says the dot is related to the arrest, but it's certainly implied.
> Technically the article never says the dot is related to the arrest, but it's certainly implied.
Given the last sentence of the article is "The prosecutor’s office in Ardabil alleged that Shanbehzadeh had been in contact with Israeli intelligence officers and was arrested when trying to leave the country, according to Voice of America." it's not even implied.
It seems implied. Anybody only reading the headline or not giving it a thorough enough reading would probably think the dot is relevant to the sentencing.
Even carefully reading it, the dot takes up significantly more of the article than what Iran claim the charges were.
Sorry I misread, I meant that the article itself points to the fact that theres more to the charge than the "dot", the just, oddly, happen to mention it on the last line.
In 2010 there was an international campaign of clemency for an Iranian woman who was going to get the death penalty. The campaign said she was imprisoned for adultery. She was in prison for adultery - and also murdering her husband, with her lover's help. This part was always left out of the news reports on this, at least initially.
I don't think their willingness to trumpet Voice of America is anything new, and I more wonder why Voice of America want to make this story about a dot tweet.
Any opposition who gets arrested will get those allegations by default in Iran. It doesn't mean that those are the real reason. The real reason is exactly what's written there: twitting a dot at supreme leader and getting more likes than him (he previously did say 'If I post a dot, I'll get more like than the supreme leader hahaha').
He was also posting satires about the religion of peace.... :) Source: I'm Iranian.
Could you point to something happening in the UK you think is similar to this?
Edit: I guess there's this [1] which free-speach maximalists would probably disagree with. Personally I think there's a line between free speech and calls to violence at which point its reasonable to prosecute people. She tweeted calling for people to set fire to buildings where migrants were being housed.
In these riots we have charged a 12 year old orphan, sentenced 13 year old girl, jailed a guy for being “a curious observer”, and some woman for throwing water.
Previously, we have sentenced a teenager for reposting a rap song, some guy for filming his pug doing nazi salute, and charged two guys for possession of a book ‘Anarchist cookbook’
Also we have charged a woman for silent prayer.
So now I understand why a book about ‘thoughtcrime’ was written in Britain, it’s a local idea that was in the air for some time
More specifically they're jailing people who were at the riots but who claim they were only passive observers.
This is standard pre-trial detention because pretty serious crimes were committed. Obviously if its found at their trial that they didn't commit any crime then they won't be going to prison.
I don't know the details of the other cases but the UK didn't jail anyone for being a "curious observer". They jailed him in advance of his trial where it is alleged he took part in criminal acts (setting fire to shops and other standard riot stuff).
He claims he was a curious observer, but frankly he can claim whatever he likes. Like everyone in pre-trial detention he is innocent until proven guilty so his claim doesn't really change anything.
You both are actively lying. I'm not talking about Tyler Kay, I'm talking about Wayne O’Rourke, whose tweets did not advocate for murder at all, let alone “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards”. Not once did I mention Tyler. That's something you fabricated to deceive and mislead.
It's people like you that enable authoritarianism around the world by gaslighting others and justifying suppression of speech.
1. The original meaning is that people must be killed.
2. The more common meaning these days is that people must be punished in some less dramatic way (usually fired).
It is typical of racists to use phrases with double meanings like this. The idea ia that when their words are quoted back at them they can attempt to avoid consequences by claiming they intended the other meaning.
>> It is typical of racists to use phrases with double meanings like this.
Using phrases with double meaning (euphemisms) is a sign of people who read a book or two and have the intelligence to understand the play on words. Some people unfortunately don't have this ability and they take everything as literal.
You actively lied about the person that was jailed to further a political agenda of suppressing free speech, protest, and democracy. That's not a mistake, that's malice. Your bad indeed.
I didn't lie, I got the wrong guy because you weren't specific. In the context of his tweet I think it was clearly a call to violence. Almost always is not the same as always.
> I got the wrong guy because you weren't specific
That doesn't make it any less of a lie - you said something factually false about the person I was referring to. You also made an assumption that you knew could be false in order to push a political agenda and deceive others.
> Almost always is not the same as always.
This is grasping for straws, and has the tyrannical premise of "guilty until proven innocent" behind it. I really hope that you're not in a position of power in my country, or any one for that matter.
> and has the tyrannical premise of "guilty until proven innocent" behind it
No it doesn't, for three reasons.
1. This is an internet forum not a court of law
2. He already plead guilty to his crime and been convicted, hes no longer in the "innocent until proven guilty" phase
3. Calling for violence wasn't even the crime he was convicted of. That was "publishing written material to stir up racial hate" [1].
Now you can reasonably say (and I expect you would) that you don't think that publishing written material to stir up racial hate should be a crime. Personally I think it should, because stirring up racial hatred is pretty damaging.
This doesn't matter. "Guilty until proven innocent" is not exclusively a legal concept. Furthermore, you're making this opinion about a legal case, so even if it was exclusively a legal concept, you'd still be making an opinion about what should happen in a court of law.
> 2. He already plead guilty to his crime and been convicted, hes no longer in the "innocent until proven guilty" phase
This demonstrates a lack of experience with the real world, as it's very common for innocent people to plead guilty. This is trivially verifiable with quick internet searches[1]. Ergo, this claim is false - guilty plea status is irrelevant, especially if we're discussing the merits of the case or verdict.
> 3. Calling for violence wasn't even the crime he was convicted of. That was "publishing written material to stir up racial hate" [1].
That's even worse. If you read the definition of the law:
> A person who uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting, is guilty of an offence if—
> (a)he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or
> (b)having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.
...you'd see that it's far less clear and more subjective than calling for violence.
> Personally I think it should, because stirring up racial hatred is pretty damaging.
This is a non-argument because "Stirring up racial hatred" doesn't mean anything. The law is written so broadly that it can be interpreted to mean almost anything. It's also a concept almost exclusively used by the UK government that is used to prosecute political opponents with zero clear harm identified. And, the concept is exclusively legal, not moral/ethical - if you ask a random person on the street of any country what "stirring up racial hatred" means, you'll get wildly different answers, and more than a few confused looks. This also means that "stirring up racial hatred is pretty damaging" doesn't mean anything, because you can't even quantify the meaning of the phrase, which makes assessing effects/damage completely impossible.
Even if you're acting in genuinely good faith (which is not the case in the UK) and only personally intend to use this law to prosecute people who are calling for violence (which is already illegal), it's extremely clear that the law is so broadly-written that it can be used against your political opponents (or, you, in case the party in power changes).
Not-so-ironically, you can see the exact same situation in the HN submission article - "Shanbehzadeh was sentenced to five years for alleged pro-Israel propaganda activity, four years for insulting Islamic sanctities, two years for spreading lies online and an additional year for anti-regime propaganda."
Like "stirring up racial hate", none of those terms mean anything (except what the state wants them to mean when it wants them to mean it in a legal context to persecute opponents), all of them are extremely broadly applicable, and all of them are actively being used by the state to suppress speech it doesn't like. You can take your statement "Personally I think [publishing written material to stir up racial hate] should [be illegal], because stirring up racial hatred is pretty damaging." and swap out the nouns and get "Personally I think spreading lies online should be illegal, because lies are pretty damaging" and you've just justified what the state of Iran did with exactly the same logic.
You're right, I should be better about assuming good faith - I'd say that at this point there's at least some evidence that the user is not acting in good faith, but it's still pretty tenuous, and I wasn't acting that way to begin with. Thank you for calling that out.
Ok, there's some stuff that you seem confused about here.
Firstly she wasn't sentenced for insulting him, she was sentenced for threats of violence against him, specifically she wrote something like "you won't be able to go anywhere without having your face kicked in" and leaked his personal information.
Secondly she was in jail for 2 days, this was Freizeitarrest which is legally distinct from an actual prison sentence, with the aim of showing someone how unpleasant prison can be. You're not in a normal cell, don't have contact with regular prisoners, it doesn't leave a police record, doesn't have the same probation or anything.
Finally he wasn't sentenced to jail because he was a minor. He did get sentenced to 60 hours of labor with the proceeds going to her. I don't know whether 60 hours of unpaid (presumably) unpleasant labor is harsher than the very short "jail" sentence she got, personally I would say so but it probably depends on the person.
Personally I would agree that his sentence wasn't harsh enough, but German law doesn't really like giving minors harsh sentences. I think her punishment for the threats of violence were completely reasonable.
> She was not jailed solely for the threats of violence.
As far as I understand, yeah she was. I'm not an expert in the German legal system but while the defamation was also a crime my understanding is she wouldn't have been sent to jail for that.
As far as the rest of your comment goes, I already said in the comment you're replying to that in my opinion the sentence he was given was significantly too light. Thats a specific weird thing about the German legal system, they are (in my opinion) very light on people who are being tried as juveniles.
> You also missed the part about the fact that she got a harsher sentence for her speech than the rapist himself
I literally mentioned that in the comment you're replying too and as I've now said three times, in my opinion his sentence was not harsh enough.
> my understanding is she wouldn't have been sent to jail for that.
Your "understanding" directly contradicts the links I posted saying that she was jailed for her insulting/offensive remarks.
> I haven't lied anywhere on this thread.
> He didn't get 3 years in prison for telling people to go out and protest, he told people to “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards”.
That's a lie, right there. I was not referring to that person.
...which is the falsehood that I pointed out with those links. I never claimed that the threat of violence didn't factor into it - you're the one who claimed that the insults didn't.
> I didn't lie in the comment you linked
You said something factually false about someone while knowing it could be false. That's epsilon away from lying, and it's certainly deceitful and deceptive, as are your statements above.
> didn't magically guess
So you magically guessed in the most malicious way possible instead of asking who I was talking about.
You also said:
> Are you lying or misinformed?
So you extremely confidently and aggressively projected your assumptions onto me.
>> my understanding is she wouldn't have been sent to jail for that.
> Your "understanding" directly contradicts the links I posted saying that she was jailed for her insulting/offensive remarks.
My copy and paste of the third sentence of your link was to point out that this is false.
As far as the lying goes, if I was trying to lie I wouldn't have linked an article naming the guy in my message. What I said was completely correct about a guy who matches the description you gave as much as the person you intended did (both told people to protest, both called for violence against migrants (in my opinion)). I made a mistake in that I didn't know there was a second one of these scumbags in the news currently. That mistake is on me but its not a lie.
Imagine people imprisoning a 90 year old woman for refusing to adopt their imposed narrative of a historical period in which she actively lived and participated.
Voice of America is a US government propaganda outlet that was barred from broadcasting directly to US citizens until the Smith-Mundt Act was amended in 2013. VoA is the primary source for this article.
Seems like you are trying to discredit the source as a way to get people to question the facts. The facts are that this story has been widely reported. It’s well documented that the Iranian government persecutes and foments violence against authors critical to their regime.
Then it should be easy to find an alternative source, right?
I don't question the particular facts of this situation, but Voice of America is literally a propaganda outlet. It is not meant to be objective journalism, and was used during the Cold War to counter Soviet propaganda. It should not be cited as a reliable source.
The dot got more "likes" than Khamenei's Tweet. He was able to "ratio" the supreme leader's message without saying anything at all, and apparently the government decided that's worth 12 years in prison.
We should probably read the article rather than the other comments. The article does mention that, while the accused's family is unsure of the exact motive, the arrest happened shortly after the "dot" post. Perhaps it was just the most visible form of dissent that they committed just prior to arrest.
your bully replies to your tweet with a single period. you don't know precisely what he means, but you do know he's bullying you. You and your bully are adversaries, he's adversarying you. I'm not saying that Shanbehzadeh is the bully, I'm sure it's vice versa, but if you respond to your bully's post with a single period, prepare to get your ass kicked in school the next day.
it might be fun to play the legal game "but what law did I break" in a country with rights and rule of law, but in a country without it...? I'm pretty sure Shanbehzadeh knew what he was risking.
Look up what for people in Belarus are being locked up daily since 2020. Emojis, likes, simply caught with preview of the news cached on their phone... We call border crossing, either on land or thought airport, a "Belarusian roulette", because your never know... And it is not prominent people, just regular folks. And it is not in completely different culture - it is a very close to western traditions country, right across Poland's border...
> Look up what for people in Belarus are being locked up daily .... simply caught with preview of the news cached on their phone
I live in Belarus, haven't heard of anyone locked for news cached on their phone. Could you provide sources of that info? I read all kinds of news, what if I am in danger...
I can't find it easily now, but it was Zerkalo reporting on yet another person returning to Belarus caught at the Poland border. The conclusion was that despite not being subscribed to one of the "terrorists channel" (for readers not from Belarus - news channels, that are posting news not in favor of the state), mere opening such channel will cache images from such channel locally. When authorities grab the phone, they make full dump of it and look for illegal stuff. And mere possession of such image is enough to get locked up.
Proposed solution was - disable all media caching in Telegram.
If you find the source in the coming days, while the HN thread is not yet blocked for posting - please share. I'd like to be aware of facts like this.
Question. If you read Belarusian news, have you noticed that tut.by, being a quite decent, balanced news site in, say, 2013, 2014, in last years of its existence, maybe 2018, 2019, 2020 was quickly degrading, somewhere towards the Radio of the Thousand Hills? Deliberately falsifying the picture of reality for its readers?
(Personally, by the beginning of 2020, long before the election, I had a text in mind, called "Осторожно, tut.by". Just didn't have time to write it up and publish.)
I did not notice deliberate attempts like that, but in the vacuum created post 2020 there is not much left to be trusted besides zerkalo. They rely on sources they likely can not verify all the time, and as such they do make mistakes occasionally and post corrections - this indeed happens from time to time. If you have suggestions of better source of news - please share.
I can't suggest good sources, but I can suggest a method. The Scientific Method. For news reading, in a nutshell, it means to search for information that contradict one's views. Because one of the main methods of manipulations today is selective presentation of true facts.
There are no sources to be trusted. And let me warn you against trusting Zerkalo.
But armed with the scientific method, one can use any propaganda as an informative source. And the more it contradicts one's views the more informative it is. On the other hand, reading confirmations of what one saw already confirmed many times is basically a waste of time.
As for the deliberate manipulations and back to the HN topic. Have you noticed that the Iranian man was sentenced "after" tweeting a dot? Not "because", not "for" , but simply "after"? If you read the article, there is no evidence of causal link between the dot posted and the arrest. The arrest just happened chronologically after.
The actual charges are different and the man has a long history of being at odds with the ruling regime.
I think that's an intentionally misleading title. And you seem fallen for it, replying "what for people in Belarus are being locked up".
I mean.... It is sorta implied. No belarusians are locked up for "unsanctioned public protest" or "spreading extremist information", all of them are locked up to teach them a lesson and promote fear in society of acting or voicing against regime. I do personally know people locked up for 2+ years for clicking the like button (and not after clicking on the button) on the article in telegram. While it is not cached news issue I mentioned above - it is not a leap from one to another. I also know people who's phones were picked up at the crossing border in airport, seemingly randomly, and thoroughly examined. Connecting two together is not a leap of imagination too.
I understand why the regime is posting all these "confession videos" - it is the same propaganda, but aiming to coral people into being afraid to read news. And it seems to work. (And in a way opposition media is helping regime with this task.)
And no, I am not suggesting to not read. Someone on hn is plenty equipped to get through these things technologically, without becoming another piece of regime propaganda and/or getting their life ruined. It is absurdity of what people in civilized country in 21st century are subjected to is what drives me nuts.
You mean the other charges are just formality, while the real reason is the dot posted on twitter? No, just because they have bigger real reasons to lock him up. The man is "a longtime critic of Iran’s leadership", was already imprisoned for that once. After returning from prison he continued his writings. The dot is not the single action he took against the regime.
I hope it's clear I am not supporting the arrest. I just don't like fakes.
> I do personally know people locked up for 2+ years for clicking the like button (and not after clicking on the button) on the article in telegram.
What are the official charges? I did a quick search. Actions like this fall under article 19.11 of the Administrative Code. (https://etalonline.by/document/?regnum=hk2100091). Distribution, production, or possession with the goal of distribution, of information products containing calls to extremist activity.
(I know you probably can't access the URLs from abroad, maybe will post screenshots later).
But the penalties under this article do not include prison. It can result in fine, confiscation of the device used, administrative arrest (max 15 days), community service.
Aren't you confusing people who got 2+ years in prison for a like with people who say they got 2+ years in prison for a like?
Overall, that's not a topic for the HN forum, but let me say that the political views you (and many others) seem to have, are mistaken, in my opinion. The mistake is not in what you see. The suppression of the protest exists, although maybe not in such extreme form as you think.
The mistake is in the gigantic "elephants in the room" that you don't see and don't account for.
quick search failed me at finding actual news article, here are recommendations for both Telegram and Viber regarding cached media files - https://news.zerkalo.io/life/69371.html
I know people who experienced various degrees of consequences after 2020. I know people who often cross border. But haven't heard of anyone arrested for a cached media.
I neither study this subject, nor watch it closely. And I can imagine anything. But until I see real facts of such arrests, I will stay in doubt. And will continue reading whatever I want.
I work on an organisation that does anti-corruption reporting. We have some software for that and the search box has "Vladimir Putin, TeliaSonera" as a placeholder example.
Few months back a new hire quit on his second day when he saw that, because he was afraid he might get into trouble since he has to regularly travel to Russia (he was from, eh, somewhere in Eastern Europe or the Balkans or some such – I forgot).
We had some discussions about whether that was completely paranoid and stupid, or whether it was somewhat reasonable/understandable.
I was firmly in the last camp. Yes, maybe the chance of actually suffering consequences is small and in that sense it's paranoid, but people buy lottery tickets with a lower chance of winning. The arbitrariness of it is the point.
Stifling thought crime does indeed seem best by punishing even trivial offenses. The gestapo cannot be everywhere, so encourage people to self censor or else.
Unfortunately his concerns are all too reasonable. Here's a recent case where Putin's people had a dual Russian-American citizen arrested while visiting her family, and then slapped with a 12-year jail term for the crime of donating $51 to a humanitarian charity (from within the US):
While small, the chance of getting caught up in these shenanigans is far higher than that of buying a winning lottery ticket. And the potential penalties much worse than could be alleviated by most any prize won in the lottery. (If they were from one of Russia's allies, such as Serbia or Hungary, they probably wouldn't have much to worry about. But if they're from a NATO country, then definitely so).
"Humanitarian" charity is not exactly a fitting description of the organization she donated to (though I agree that the sentence is out of proportion). To flip this around: imagine that someone was going through US customs and border clearance, and it became known that they donated money towards Russian FPV drones that hit Ukraine. Would you support giving this person a jail term or not? Now imagine that this person is a US citizen. Does that change your answer?
Can you provide us with any indications that the charity in question (Razom) channelled money towards actual military drones for Ukraine?
We see they had a project in 2022 that did provide some drones, but this seems to have been in the context of supporting search and rescue operations and the like, not military operations.
Razom maintains that it does not provide military supplies of any kind. Let alone "weapons and ammunition" per the FSB charges.
Overall the charges seem to have as much credibility as the initial charge against her of "swearing in a public place".
Huh, they significantly sanitized their website following all the media attention. Now it does say it's all about medical supplies. However, one can't sanitize the entire Internet. Here's a page that mentions that Razom funds drones: https://dobro.ua/member/operator/bf-razom-dlia-ukrayiny/
But in any case, my question stands. Let's say a US citizen donated to a fund that supplied drones to Russia. Said drones do not carry a military payload, but can be used for recon and artillery targeting. What would you think about this person?
Good catch. It seems the U.S. organization did provide funds for military drones for Ukraine, at least for a certain time after 2016. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. Sounds like a perfectly wholesome thing to do, in fact, given the situation Ukraine has been facing since 2014.
Whether it continued to do so by the time of her donation (in late 2023) -- being as Razom does seem to have shifted its emphasis in recent years (completely independent of any recent "sanitizing" of their website as you allege, but based on my own recollection of their messaging 2022-2023) -- is a different matter.
That's all I have time for at the moment. I may comment further again in 1-2 days.
At first I believed it was trumped up charges, but now I realize theres more to the story. We went from ukrainian charity, to they provided funds for military drones in 2016. And the western media is not reporting this of course. Its as much propaganda as the russian media...
Not intentional propaganda (as far as Western media goes), just the usual cut-and-paste reporting with no particular directives from the editors to look more deeply into the story. It may reflect a bias, but in this case most likely an entirely unconscious bias. This is quite different from the state-originated propaganda (especially coming from deeply authoritarian governments such as that of Russia) which is very intentional and often more or less scripted and templated.
Meanwhile let's remember that the arrest (and draconian sentencing) were in themselves a very deliberate form of propaganda. It's not like the various Russian agencies could begin to care about a $51 donation. They did what they did for certain reasons, one of which was to send some very specific messages -- on one hand to the U.S. government; but also to their own people, both inside the Motherland and abroad.
That latter message being: "We're watching you, wherever you are, and however small and unimportant you think you are - so don't you even begin to think of crossing us."
This case was probably particularly appealing to them in part precisely because the charges could be presented as borderline plausible (rather than being simply trumped up from scratch). Even if they would ultimately prove to be quite flimsy if evaluated by the standards of countries with actual working justice systems, as seems to be the case here.
> Would you support giving this person a jail term or not? Now imagine that this person is a US citizen. Does that change your answer
How is that relevant? You're trying to equate someone's personal opinion to the Russian government putting someone in prison for 12-year due to $51?
And that's far from the most egregious example. There are plenty of people in Russian prisons for much less than that (e.g. reciting poetry or ambiguous social media posts).
Anyway regardless of anyone's personal opinion that's not how sanction enforcement or the US judicial system on the whole works. The U.S. Treasury Department has allowed transactions related to humanitarian causes (and a bunch of other cases) so what are you even talking about?
If he was from the balkans his reason was definitely false and he just didnt wanna work at your place. We dont have that here, especially not for leaders not from our countries
Like I said, I don't recall exactly where he was from and can't be bothered to look it up, because it doesn't matter. But just because most people from location X don't have opinion Y, doesn't mean some don't.
Either way, I certainly don't think he was making stuff up. He could have left at any time without any reason. We weren't holding him captive.
"CIA front" is a weird thing to say. It's openly funded by the US Government, so it's not like Radio Free Europe's affiliation is a secret or a conspiracy; we don't need to exaggerate for effect here.
Anyway, his lawyer also spoke to a newspaper in Iran, so I think it's hard to argue that he was arrested and tried for something. Whether it was specifically for the dot thing is, I guess, the main thing that one could speculate on, if you were particularly distrustful of the sources.
I wonder if people realize they've been conditioned into nationalists or if the technology facilitating propaganda is so effective that they don't recognize the rewards and punishments to the amplified talking points they encounter online for what they are.
How often does anyone say, "I support censoring China to protect big tech interests and out of fear of what they will learn using methods of data collection that we pioneered and use, but here is why I think that's necessary..." in any discourse on TikTok? And why would they verbalize that when they can just do what worked on them - downvoting until you learn to adopt the right patterns or go away?
Indeed.. how often does anyone say that? Has anyone even said that? Or is that some distorted and dishonest interpretation of something someone might have actually said?
VPN services are also officially banned in China (except for a small number of exceptions), but everyone who knows even the slightest about tech probably uses one.
> ... how authoritarianism shapes public discourse
See I was onboard with this reasoning until last week - we arrested the boss of Telegram and charged him with allowing illicit activity, which obviously happens on WhatsApp and other apps too. Isis was literally recruiting members on western social networks!
And we spent months discussing banning of TikTok, my major politicians in mainstream parties. so we aren’t far
Reuters, for example[1]: “[Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de] Moraes ordered that those who continued to access X via VPNs be fined up to 50,000 reais ($9,000) per day.” I don’t get how a thing like that could effecrively be ordered into law at a judge’s discretion, but evidently it was.
The only ways for a service to be banned in the US are by court order (i.e. judge says the site has to come down) which carries no penalties for visitors, and sanctions in which case visiting is generally still OK but paying the site is a no-no.
In general, users never face fines in the US even for visiting "banned" pages.
>In general, users never face fines in the US even for visiting "banned" pages.
You might be oversimplifying. Yes, the US does have particularly free speech, and especially for listening to it. But using kiddie porn sites, president threatening sites, ISIS recruiting sites, US govt leaked secrets sharing sites, perhaps ghost gun or bomb making sites, stalking ex girlfriends... I think a good bit of that has legal consequences for people under many circumstances. Evidence used to convict you is not much different than... evidence.
The only one of those that's illegal just to visit in the US as far as I know is the child porn one, and even that only if you receive or attempt to receive actual child porn, as opposed to some other random content that might be on the site.
Some of the things you list are actual criminal acts, not Web sites. Yes, if you stalk your ex, that's criminal, but simply visiting some Web site is not in itself illegal.
If there is some US law that might purport to forbid just visiting a Web site, I've never heard of any attempt to enforce it.
What the hell is a "president threatening site"? Threats to public officials as a service?
if you internet searched "how do you dispose of a body" and then a body is discoved having been disposed of, and you are suspected in the killing, that evidence is introduced at your trial, and a jury will be influenced by it, even though all you did was visit and read the site. That evidence will be even more damning if the page you visited described a particular method that was seen in the case in question. This would be very strong evidence in favor of your guilt. Same for all the other ones I mentioned.
... and yet it is not illegal to do that search. You will not be fined, imprisoned, or whatever, for doing the search.
The fact that something can, in some circumstances, be evidence doesn't mean it's a crime, and the distinction is absolutely critical in the context we're dealing with here.
all of the evidence taken together is what convicts you of a crime. People have been convicted of murder where no body was ever found. You can't point to any piece of the evidence that was used to convict and say "well that was not a crime, so leave it out". My explanation here of how evidence is used in court in gaining convictions is more accurate and realistic than the distinction you are are trying to make.
This started with somebody snarkily asking what the US fine was for just visiting a "forbidden" Web site, in the context of a Brazilian court order applying a large fine for just visiting Xitter. Not visiting Xitter in the course of planning a murder, not visiting Xitter in the context of sedition or whatever, just visiting any content on Xitter for any reason whatsoever.
It's pretty clear that this person thought there were such penalties, but in fact the US has absolutely nothing analogous. No order remotely like that would be issued in the US, because it's so obviously unconstitutional. If some third-tier hick judge did issue such an order, it would be overturned on appeal. If it were issued by the Supreme Court (and, no, not even the current Supreme Court would do that), all hell would break loose throughout the political system. It'd be a constitutional crisis. There are no such fines in the US. The US does lots of things wrong, but this is one of the areas the US tends to get right.
You're dredging up unrelated scenarios involving not-even-hypothetically-existent crimes that nobody was talking about. This is not about trying to use Web site visits to set somebody up for some crime they didn't commit, or even for some crime they did commit. Your weird scenario about, I don't know, being wrongfully charged with something else because your Web history somehow made somebody think you'd done it, is completely out of left field. The issue is entirely whether there's a penalty for visiting a Web site, and what you're talking about is totally irrelevant. And the hypothetical you seem to be trying to spin sounds less like being convicted of murder when there's no body, and more like being convicted of murder when the victim is known to be alive.
>Can you visit a Pro North Korea/ISIS/Iran website?
How about the website for Iran's supreme leader[1], with headlines like "ZIONIST REGIME FACES SEVERE CONSEQUENCES FOR ITS ACTIONS"? It's not blocked in the US.
How is it not? The original question was asking for a "a Pro [...] Iran website". If the website of the Iranian government doesn't count as "pro Iran", I don't know what does.
In 2006, a satellite repairman in New York City was imprisoned for allowing people to watch the television channel al-Manar, which is run by a political party which holds over 10% of the seats in Lebanon's parliament - Hezbollah.
That's not what happened. Javed Iqbal wasn't imprisoned for allowing people to watch Al Manar. He pled guilty to received payments from Al Manar. Hizbollah is a terrorist organization, regardless of their political status in Lebanon.
His name was Javed Iqbal. The charge was "providing material support to Hizballah". He plead guilty and was sentenced to 69 months. The government's story was that:
"From approximately 2005 through 2006, IQBAL, through a Brooklyn and Staten Island-based satellite transmission company he helped operate, HDTV Limited, provided satellite transmission services to al-Manar, in exchange for thousands of dollars in payments from al-Manar. IQBAL provided these services knowing that al-Manar is Hizballah's television station."[2]
It's hard to work out exactly what this means.
Another article[4] does some sleuthing and claims that Iqbal had an FCC licensed earth station that was uplinking in the Ku-band to "ALSAT". That implies that he was actually repeating the al-Manar broadcasts onto a satellite that had a footprint over the US.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism links[5] to some documents for the case, including the original indictment[6]. Some of the "overt acts" listed in this indictment included signing a contract in Lebanon in which his company agreed to provide broadcasting services for al-Manar in exchange for a fee. Additionally, he was charged with providing access to these broadcasts to satellite customers.
I wonder if he would have gotten in trouble if he had only done the latter - helped consumers to tap into al-Manar without actually being part of the technical broadcast chain.
Very interesting case, thanks for the rabbit hole!
Yet there is bipartisan action to ban TikTok in the US. We have effectively banned the import of Chinese electric vehicles. Does that make us authoritarian?
I'm always surprised why I constantly see messages downvoted (not only here), just because they feel unconvenient for the bubble?!
Imho you should all stop that. It's too simple. It doesn't really increase credibility.
Why not start dealing with actual discussions there, and maybe have a little less "everything was already said; just not yet by everyone" discussions in other places?!
I am sure Persia is not a great place to live. But I just cant trust sources like this to not twist and contort things.
And I mean at the end of the day they murder a lot less children than other regimes in the area, so it's quantifiably less evil than some middle eastern countries.
>Shanbehzadeh was sentenced to five years for alleged pro-Israel propaganda activity, four years for insulting Islamic sanctities, two years for spreading lies online and an additional year for anti-regime propaganda.
>His lawyer, Amir Raisian, told Shargh Network, a reformist newspaper in Iran, that he would appeal the verdict, especially the accusation of pro-Israel activity. The prosecutor’s office in Ardabil alleged that Shanbehzadeh had been in contact with Israeli intelligence officers and was arrested when trying to leave the country, according to Voice of America.