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Now, I know most of you guys hate Trolls... So the potential Arizona law sounds rather pleasing. In the bill it states that criminal penalties can be issued to people "using any electronic or digital device, instead of the telephone, with the intent to terrify, intimidate, threaten, harass, annoy or offend a person."
Now, let's all face it, we all have been mean on the internet at one time or another. Some of us (Not pointing fingers) have done it more than often. Now under this bill, everyone who has used the internet would receive some penalty or the other. It's clear that these people have never used the internet to begin with. (Similar, If you watched the SOPA debates, they were hilarious)
Now, let's say some other ridiculous bill was about to get passed. And you commented on some article that the lawmaker was "Really, really, stupid." See, now you've gone out with the intent to offend therefore you will now be facing some sort of punishment regarding that comment.
This is why I think any law that gets you in trouble for saying or posting something is no good. It's all a slippery slope. This one especially. I mean seriously! The language is so broad! If you made a typo, you could have annoyed someone for all we know!
This law will probably use Cyber-Bullying as an excuse, but cyber-bullying must be dealt with in another fashion. I know this sounds really lame, I don't know how to deal with cyber-bullying, but this clearly isn't the way.
I made this argument for SOPA but I feel it pertains here too. Censoring is a slippery slope, no matter what. If you can take a law, and summarize it to "If you say something along the lines of ______ you will get in trouble." Then the law is a sucky law.
EDIT: I know this sound really lame, again, but I feel the exception to my slippery slope argument is child pornography. Child pornography should be censored because there's no slippery slope to it. You can't take an speech, or posts down, and claim it's child pornography.
