Do you have any evidence that Luigi carried out any violence whatsoever? He's been accused of a murder, but there seems to be no appreciation that people are innocent until proven guilty.
Happy to clear this up for you. Only courts of law are held to the “innocent until proven guilty” standard. Ordinary people are free to form and share their own opinions based on reported facts. Mangione is a murderer. Hope that helps!
I don't think you should be opening yourself up to accusations of libel like that. It's foolish if you don't have any proof to incur the possible threat of being sued without any upside, apart from appearing "edgy".
Opinion based on disclosed facts is not illegal in the US; Mangione would lose the suit, if he bothered to sue. Unlike the UK, we have free speech in the US.
Surely that's a libellous thing to say, or is there no rule of law in the USA these days?
Luigi has been accused of the shooting, but there's discrepancies with the possibly illegal search of his backpack and the body cameras of the police were turned off for 11 minutes which raises suspicions of planted evidence.
You appear to be based in the UK. Speech laws are very different in the US. It is a mistake to project your understanding of censorious UK speech laws on us.
Unlike the UK, expressing opinion is inherently legal here. What would be illegal is lying about specific facts, or expressing opinion based on secret facts you falsely claim to have. However, the standard for damaging a public figure, which Mangione certainly is, is very high -- Mangione would need to show "actual malice" (that is, that the speaker knew or should have known they were making false statements).
> $200/month is already out of reach of the majority of the population. Increases from here means only a small percentage of the richest people can afford it.
This is an absurd claim. There are many things the majority of the population spends money on that cost more than this.
I'm going to take your comment at face value, and I'm also going to assume that you're US-based.
You need to take a step back and look at the economic reality of the majority of Americans today. Many live paycheck-to-paycheck, even those with "middle class" incomes. For many a $200 one-off bill is debilitating, yet alone a recurring subscription. If you don't know that, you have a dangerously narrow view of the economy.
If you think that a $200/month subscription is "out of reach" for the majority of Americans, you are just plainly and simply wrong about that. They might have to make some tradeoffs by reducing spending in other areas, but that's part of life.
Yeah, people keep making the comparison to cigarettes but to me this is wildly different.
Cigarettes directly cause physical harm and even death. Social media can sometimes, under certain circumstances, depending on who exactly you're interacting with on social media, indirectly contribute to emotional harm.
Cigarettes are also physically addictive. Your body actually becomes dependent on them and will throw a fit if you try to stop using them. Social media is only "addictive" in the loose sense that all fun, mentally engaging activities are.
I'm not saying social media is fine for kids and we shouldn't do anything to reduce their use of it (TV and video games can be equally unhealthy IMO). I'm not even necessarily against legislation on the subject. But there's a huge difference between fining a company for breaking a law, and fining them for making a perfectly legal product "too fun" because you let your kids spend all their time on it and that turned out to be unhealthy.
This type of civil litigation where the courts effectively create and enforce ex post facto laws based on their opinion about whether perfectly reasonable, 100% legal actions indirectly contribute to bad outcomes is not a great aspect of our legal system IMO.
There are different kinds of addiction. The difference is physical vs. mental.
The best example of this is heroin, which has both a severe physical and mental addiction component, and it's the mental addiction that makes relapse so common.
Mental addictions rewire the brain's chemistry, causing the user to seek and only find joy in the substance. This is a better comparison for social media (albeit not as destructive and instantaneously harmful as narcotics)
Everything you do or even just think about "rewires" your brain to some extent. The difference with addictive drugs is that they do so in a way that bypasses your brains' natural processes. The same cannot be said for "addiction" to games or social media, or other entertainment.
There can still be social ills associated with these forms of natural "addiction" (e.g. gambling), and I'm okay with regulating those ills, but I'm less okay with the courts doing so unilaterally based on their subjective opinions with no concrete law backing them up.
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