Criminal Memes: The Ballad of Ricky Vaughn
Podcast - Bob Zadek Show
English - March 14, 2021 17:33 - 71.8 MB - ★★★★★ - 6 ratingsNews Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Eugene Volokh on Libel, Free Speech, and Criminalization of Memes.
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Should this meme - a satirical piece of “fake news” from 2016 - be illegal?
At the time, it may have fooled some people into voting online. More recently, the disseminator – infamous meme-maker "Ricky Vaughn" – has been charged with a crime.
In Tablet Magazine, Eugene Volokh searches in vain for the statute he violated:
It’s not obvious that deceiving someone into voting in an invalid way qualifies as “injur[ing]” or “oppress[ing].” … Alleged lies about the government or national security or the economy could also be prosecuted, if the government thought they were intended to discourage people from voting. Some might applaud that, on the theory that the law should do more to punish political lies generally. But as we saw above, many courts are quite skeptical about general bans on lies in elections.
The legendary legal scholar and blogger behind The Volokh Conspiracy joined me to discuss this troubling precedent for free speech. We also discuss the trend towards overbroad injunctions against free speech in age where social media makes talk cheap.
Eugene Volokh is a professor of First Amendment law at UCLA School of Law, and the co-founder of the law professor blog The Volokh Conspiracy, found at Reason.com. He is also executive editor of the new Journal of Free Speech Law.
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LINKS:Are Douglass Mackey’s Memes Illegal? - Tablet Magazine
The Volokh Conspiracy at Reason.com - Eugene Volokh archive
The New Journal of Free Speech Law
AUDIO/VIDEOEugene Volokh and new frontiers in the First Amendment: So to Speak podcast
The Future of Libel Law | The Federalist Society short video featuring Eugene Volokh
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