Criminal Memes: The Ballad of Ricky Vaughn
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 , found at Reason.com. He is also executive editor of the new Journal of Free Speech Law .
Transcript
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/VIDEO
- Eugene 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
RELATED SHOWS:
- Who Will Censure the Censors? with Frank Bukcley, June 20, 2019
- Social Media Censorship with Bill Ottman of Minds.com
- Why Government Regulation of Tech Censorship is Unnecessary and Undesirable with John Samples
- Whose Free Speech? Our Free Speech! , Marieke Tuthill-Beck Coon, April 16, 2017
- Freedom *From* Speech? The New Face of Censorship, Oct. 2014, with Greg Lukianoff
- Free Speech — There is No America Without It, Greg Lukianoff, December 9, 2012
Originally published at http://bobzadek.com on March 14, 2021.
