gingerautie:

argumate:

arjan-de-lumens:

argumate:

Prosecutor Angela Conlan said Russell’s defence also argued her
profile “wasn’t public”, but it had been proved in court that anyone
could access it and “see the offensive language”.

She said
prosecutors also “sourced case law that showed that posting the profile
on her account constituted sending it and making it public”.

@stumpyjoepete

I am trying to find what lyrics in that song would make a good
“tribute to a boy who died in a crash”

This part actually felt like it did make sense to me, albeit in a rather roundabout way.

Looking at this thing, it kind of felt natural for me to start with the official music video for the song in question (content warning : lots of drugs, gun violence, N-word use etc):

ok, so relatively aggressive gangsta-rap type stuff. Looking a bit further, the police scene in the first 30 seconds of the video is apparently actual real-life footage of Detroit police interfering with the recording of the video, and from his life story, I seem to get a bit of a sense that this thing is to some extent based on actual real-life experiences of his (his father being a drug dealer, his brother dead from gang violence, himself apparently having done a lot of street gang stuff, eventually seizing upon rap music as a way to try to escape that kind of shitty life situation, that level of stuff) – which adds a fair bit of a “real deal” feeling to something that seems otherwise easy to dismiss as ludicrously exaggerated.

Adding to this that the car crash victim in this case was a 13-year-old boy living in an area that’s apparently well-known for having issues with criminal youth gangs – it seems to me at least very understandable that this sort of music would hold a very strong appeal to such a boy, to the extent where he would probably openly proclaim to anyone willing to listen that this was his favorite or something like that –

if this is correct, then it would seem … actually rather natural for people who knew him and his reasons for liking this sort of music to actually post this sort of thing as an attempt to make a tribute to his memory.

Which … is a bit fraught – it makes sense in enough context, but when posting an isolated Dogg lyric like that on social media, it’s kind of hard to convey that sort of context (especially to people outside his social circle), and … ignoring that sort of context, having a chunk of naked text that looks like

“I hate fuck shit, slap a bitch n***a, kill a snitch n***a, rob a rich n***a I think I’m trippin’ “

does come across as rather crass.

Yet … even without this specific context, gangsta-rap with this kind of language have been kinda ubiquitous for a rather long time now, to the point where even UK’s state-run BBC has been running an entire radio channel for years full of content like this (content note : N-word usage from roughly the 1-minute mark onwards):

which makes this particular court ruling come across as … basically insane from pretty much any perspective I can muster.

“She was charged after Merseyside Police were anonymously sent a screenshot of her update.”

seriously we could automate this process by scraping Twitter and Facebook and Reddit and put half of Liverpool behind bars.

Free speech laws in the UK are atrocious. A hate speech conviction for quoting song lyrics is ridiculous. 

Honestly this probably should have failed the “in the public interest” requirement for prosecution. If it’s fine for this song to play on radio1x, then its fine for someone to quote the lyrics. Maybe into the realms of social disapproval, like someone should tell her to censor the n-word even when she’s quoting, but not into the realms of prosecution.

Would this have been fine if she’d starred out the n-word? Then it’s probably not hate speech. If someone were to say e.g “All n-words must die” then that’s hate speech even if you censor the slur. 

I feel like her lawyer really let her down. It’s a quote, this is stupid as fuck.

I’m also really uncomfortable with the quote from the police. 
“
The screenshot was passed to hate crime unit PC Dominique Walker, who told the court the term was “grossly offensive” to her as a black woman and to the general community.”

It’s a bit tricky to articulate, but I feel like that’s a really inappropriate stance for the police to take. The role of the police is to enforce the law neutrally, not to take offence? Would the prosecution not have happened if the officer on duty at the time had been white? Police officers shouldn’t be talking about their personal views. “The black community finds this offensive” is fine, but “I personally find this offensive” seems inappropriate for a police officer. 

And from a legal perspective, if the claim had just been about the community, then there would maybe have been a sensible argument about if the black community in the UK as a whole finds rap lyrics using the n-word offensive, rather than just this one police officer. 

This looks more like a case of someone with a grudge against this girl using overly broad, rarely enforced laws to score points than a sensible use of the law.

Rap lyric Insta post ‘a hate crime’