“The kids these days have a lot of silly euphemisms. Porn becomes corn. Sex becomes seggs. Nipples are nip nops and a picture of an eggplant can stand in for a penis. Killing someone becomes unaliving them, and people kermit sewerslide instead of committing suicide. Everything slightly risqué or unpleasant becomes baby talk. But not because teens are overgrown infants—it’s a bottom-up response to top-down censorship.
As social media has become a bigger part of modern life, platforms have adopted elaborate policies to appease advertisers and politicians who might not be happy with the content that people organically share. Besides simply deleting content and banning creators, sites can subtly nudge users, algorithmically promoting certain sorts of content while demoting others. The policies are often frustratingly opaque, but many users have figured out well what will or won’t anger the invisible censor.
That doesn’t stop them from talking about taboo topics.
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So teenagers have come up with an elaborate system of cheeky substitutes for words that would otherwise get their content shadow banned. Emojis and wordplay form a language.”
Thanks to Trump and Trump supporters, the United States is not currently a strong Constitutional Democracy.
“After the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in September, many on the political right set out to punish anyone making light of the tragedy, or even simply being insufficiently upset. In one of the more brazen examples, a Tennessee man was arrested, accused of threatening a school shooting, and held on a $2 million bond, for posting a somewhat uncivil meme on Facebook.
Larry Bushart, a 61-year-old former police officer, posted the offending meme last month. In response to a Facebook post about an upcoming vigil for Kirk, Bushart shared an image of President Donald Trump with the quote, “We have to get over it,” which Trump said in January 2024 after a shooting at Iowa’s Perry High School. Text added to the image said, “This seems relevant today.”
Bushart did not elaborate, but the context seems clear: Why should I care about this shooting, when the sitting president said I should “get over” this other shooting?
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According to the Perry County Sheriff’s Office website, Bushart was arrested the following morning on a charge of Threats of Mass Violence on School Property and Activities—a class E felony punishable by between one and six years in prison and up to a $3,000 fine. Worse, Bushart’s bail is set at an astonishing $2 million.
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In its entirety, the post consists of a direct quote of a statement by the then-former president about a newsworthy event, with text providing context, plus a four-word phrase added. Bushart didn’t even create the meme: The Tennesseean’s Angele Latham noted it had been “posted numerous times across multiple social media platforms not connected to Bushart going back to 2024.”
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In context, it’s clear Bushart meant to suggest that since Trump previously said people should “get over” a school shooting, then they shouldn’t be expected to care about the murder of a conservative public figure. It’s quite a stretch to suggest this constituted a threat to shoot up a high school. Yes, a nearby high school happened to have a similar name, but that was clearly a coincidence, and there is nothing to suggest Bushart intended to carry out violence against the local school.
On social media, some have suggested the meme in question was part of a larger pattern indicating Bushart posed a threat. But in his statement to The Tennesseean, Weems specifically singled out the Trump meme as the offender, saying while the other posts were “hate memes,” they were “not against the law and would be recognized as free speech.”
Perhaps some teachers, parents, or students really did find Bushart’s post threatening—though since it was a reply on a Facebook page for local news, it’s not clear how many people even saw it. And even if people did see and interpret it as a threat of violence, that doesn’t mean it meets the standard for a “true threat,” in violation of the First Amendment.
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Bushart’s arrest would be humorous if it weren’t so serious. He now faces a potential years-long prison sentence for reposting a Facebook meme that doesn’t come anywhere close to qualifying as an exception to the First Amendment. Even if the case gets thrown out, he has already spent two weeks in jail and is set to spend two more months until his first hearing.”
“Over the last eight months, the Trump administration has run roughshod over Congress and its constitutional prerogatives. Trump’s decision to ignore the TikTok ban on his first day in office may seem minor in the grand scheme of things, but it foreshadowed a series of far more aggressive moves to usurp much of lawmakers’ constitutional authority: dismantling congressionally-created agencies, redirecting congressionally appropriated funds and implementing a massive tax hike on the American public in the form of Trump’s chaotic tariff regime.
The vast majority of this was made possible by congressional Republicans, who have largely turned a blind eye to all of Trump’s gambits, and by the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, who have handed Trump a series of victories this year in his wide-ranging efforts to both unilaterally slash the federal government while dramatically expanding the powers of the presidency.
The acquiescence to Trump’s TikTok reprieve this year has been a far more bipartisan affair, but it has been a constitutional farce all the same, and it is not over yet.”
“the idea that people—especially young men—would not be radicalized if it weren’t for social media belies most of human history.
I’ve been listening recently to a podcast called A Twist of History. One episode details Adolf Hitler’s attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic in 1923. Another episode features a riot during a Shakespearean performance in New York City in 1849, fomented by Ned Buntline, a nativist newspaper pundit with ambitions of fame and notoriety. Both instances featured fringe political elements, violence, and deaths.
History is littered with examples like these: men driven to violence by people in close physical proximity, sometimes with the help of inflammatory political rhetoric printed in pamphlets and newspapers.
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if he encountered bad ideas online, it’s because the internet is now where we encounter ideas. If he cloaked his violence in the language of internet memes, it’s because that’s where culture is these days.
In another era, he may have encountered bad ideas at a town hall and dressed up his horrific act in different slogans. But a man with a capacity for such premeditated and dramatic violence is a man with a capacity for such things in any era. And conversely, countless billions of people encounter the same online ecosystem without committing assassinations.”
Criminals can steal your car’s key fob’s signal and use that to steal your car. This is causing insurance rates to go up. Some kids do this because Tik Tok teaches them how to do it.
One through-line with many assassins and mass shooters beyond ideology is that they are young men with access and familiarity with guns who radicalized on the internet. This is happening with a variety of ideologies. The internet and access to guns are key causes in many of these tragedies.
Prominent people on the right are using this horrible murder to falsely blame Democrats and the entire left. They falsely claim all of the right is under attack, subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, encouraging more violence. While, of course, ignoring the times people on the left are attacked and murdered.
Gavin Newsom tweets in a manner that mirrors Trump’s tweets; Fox News calls it childish for a governor to tweet in such a way while not similarly criticizing the president of the United States. Ridiculous hypocrisy.
“”This case illustrates how the Section 230 precedent is fading, as courts keep chipping away at its edges to reach counterintuitive conclusions that should be clearly covered by Section 230,” writes law professor and First Amendment expert Eric Goldman on his Technology and Marketing Law Blog.
The case in question—Nazario v. Bytedance Ltd.—involves a tragedy turned into a cudgel against tech companies and free speech.
It was brought by Norma Nazario, a woman whose son died while “subway surfing”—that is, climbing on top of a moving subway train. She argues that her son, 15-year-old Zackery, and his girlfriend only did such a reckless thing because the boy “had
become addicted to” TikTok and Instagram and these apps had encouraged him to hop atop a subway car by showing him subway surfing videos.
Nazario is suing TikTok, its parent company (Bytedance), Instagram parent-company Meta, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the New York City Transit Authority, in a New York state court, with claims ranging from product liability and negligence to intentional infliction of emotional distress, unjust enrichment, and wrongful death.
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teenagers doing dangerous, reckless things is not some new and internet-created phenomenon. And the fact that a particular dangerous or reckless thing might be showcased on social media platforms doesn’t mean social media platforms caused or should be held liable for their death.”
“In 2024, Congress passed the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which prohibited operating or hosting “a foreign adversary controlled application (e.g., TikTok)” within the United States. The law required TikTok to find a buyer by January 19, 2025, or else shut down operations within the United States.
Ultimately, neither happened…Trump issued the executive order on his first day, “instructing the Attorney General not to take any action to enforce the Act for a period of 75 days from today.” He has since issued two additional orders further extending the deadline
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“But no president has the authority to simply postpone the enforcement of a law passed by Congress. The fact that Congress seems content to let Trump decline to enforce it does not obviate the law itself. And for that reason, if Congress will not repeal the law, then it should insist Trump enforce it.”