It's not the same thing. One man was ranting about the airport. It's ok to investigate him, but it seems rather obvious it was just ranting.
The other two apparently made negative comments about british soldiers. That is nothing like yelling fire in a theatre.
And that was in the US, where he was supposedly exercising his right to free speech.
Calling for people to die will get you in trouble, no matter what the medium. For the record, the full text of the 'negative comments' post about British Soldiers read in its entirety:
"People gassin about the deaths of Soldiers! What about the innocent familys who have been brutally killed.. The women who have.been raped.. The children who have been sliced up..! Your enemy's were the Taliban not innocent harmful familys. All soldiers should DIE & go to HELL! THE LOWLIFE FOKKIN SCUM! gotta problem go cry at your soldiers grave & wish him hell because thats where is going.."
Not exactly a text for which you should go to jail, but then neither was the one about killing the president. Neither one of them is an example of responsible online behaviour either and I'm not one bit surprised that trouble came of it. The world we live in today is hair trigger about stuff like this and it has nothing to do with free speech. It's simply because a lot of people are very nervous and would rather err on the side of caution and jail a few innocents than they would take a chance and be left holding the bag if things turned out bad.
If you don't take that into account when you act then you can go around and blame the system, but that's like blaming the weather for being rained upon.
Personally I think the authorities (on both sides of the pond) should just investigate to send the message that there is some oversight but it should never make it to prosecution. Unfortunately fear & politics seem to go hand in hand this decade (and probably a few to come) so over-reaction will be the norm.
The one about the soldiers is almost the most worrying, because it doesn't even make any threats.
The one about Obama seems to make a much more detailed threat than the one about "burning the airport", too.
Anyway, this can't be resolved in a HN thread...
I must admit, I always wonder what is the better strategy: keeping your mouth shut and trying to make the best out of circumstances, or becoming vocal and trying to change things. In theory I think remaining silent is much better, but it is hard to fight those urges of talking too much.
Just saying this because obviously free speech is not working out online.
Actually I am not an expert on the free speech issue as practiced in the US, but doesn't it apply to opinions, mostly? You can't say "1000$ to the person who first kills person X" and then expect to get away because it was just free speech. I suppose the difference could be that expressing a death warrant is not an opinion, it is a call to action. But maybe if you phrased it differently ("soldiers should die"), you could get off the hook? Tricky subject...
That's the crux right there. Free Speech does not mean at all what the OP was referring to, and I tried to make that clear using a number of examples.
Yes, the United States has free speech enshrined in their basic legal concepts. But there are other countries where speech is freer than it is in the United States and there are ways to envision systems much freer still.
It all goes back to that sticks and stones rhyme, words really shouldn't matter, but actions do. Because words are powerful we tend to place some limits on what combinations of words are ok and which are not. Usually the ones that are not fall under the header 'incitement', and even in those cases I'd put the bigger part of the burden on the ones that let themselves be incited than on the speaker. In your $1000 example the speaker should probably be counted as someone who contracts someone else, that's beyond mere incitement.
Libel laws are funny in that way, the turn of phrase there is very subtle and can change (depending on the country and context, for instance satire) an innocent sentence into one that will get you into a lot of trouble. And it takes a lawyer and a judge to see the difference. 'You are a criminal' versus 'I think you are a criminal' can be all it takes.
