OK. By popular request, I'll recreate that Chaplinksy thread. But I'll wait until April 6, the anniversary of Chaplinksy's arrest to do so.

David I think you're right that their principal concern is being filmed and the resulting optics and have far less, if any concern, for the actual actions or any willingness to change policy. Trump will dump those who don't message extrajudicial killings well, but not those who kill

I could recreate that thread here .... but until them listen to @kenwhite.bsky.social 's podcast about Chaplinsky and other Jehovahs Witnesses cases t.co/GOoPerA7ZW

Because a violent response by a marginalized person was never seen as reasonable - it was always uppity - and the only ones who could "naturally" respond violently to words were those doing so to preserve their power.

But Homan's words should remind us that the fighting words doctrine was not historically an antisubordination tool. It was a pro-subordination, pro-majoritarian tool subject to prosecutorial abuse from its inception. It remains a bad fit for fighting hateful speech directed to marginalized persons.

as we know from RAV v St Paul, decided 50 years after Chaplinsky, in which SCOTUS explained that fighting words cannot be regulated because of hostility toward a message. So the ideas expressed cannot make words “fighting words.”

So calling cops "damned fascists,"the words in 1942, is now protected

and the speaker was a street preacher/guy-shouting-at-passersby who thought the police had shown up to help him, not arrest him.

I wrote a long (22 tweets!) thread about the Chaplinsky case on that other site a few years back to explain how that concept of fighting words was abandoned ...

But the idea that some speech naturally caused the person to whom it was directed to lash out at the speaker violently was the original, though since discredited version of the fighting words doctrine And in the case it which was created out of whole cloth, the violent actors were the police ...

From the AAUP v Rubio trial exhibits ... Motherwell hung vertically?

I say this same thing about contemporary free speech jurisprudence in the US, that so much of the strongest parts of current doctrine arose out of the practical need to protect the civil rights movement, and not really other speech concerns. I wrote this a while back www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

And remember this, which might have been the ultimate "I have a JD so I am an expert in every topic ever" www.hoover.org/research/cor...

And here's our FPIA lawsuit seeking records of the US government jawboning platforms about ICE tracking apps www.eff.org/cases/eff-v-...

{And yes I know that the Oversight Board is not some magic fix. It's just an available path to follow that does have some capacity to act quickly and some potential to change policy. In the meantime, continue all of the other stuff that pressures Meta to reverse this course of action.}

should really have cced: @oversightboard.bsky.social

cc: @icelist.bsky.social @domskinner.bsky.social

As @evacide.bsky.social and I said when the deal was first announced and the admin said the algorithm would be retrained to act "properly," "people can now be concerned that TikTok could be a conduit for U.S. government propaganda." They are indeed concerned. www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

One of the chief values in the strict scrutiny First Amendment analysis we and others urged the SCOTUS to apply-but SCOTUS declined-is that it would have forced the government to prove its concerns were real. Instead SCOTUS deferred to the government's claims. So here we are: users don't trust it.