News of the Cyber World

[kyonides]

French woman faces TRIAL, €12,000 FINE for 'insulting' Macron on Facebook

A woman in northern France is to be put on trial on charges of insulting President Emmanuel Macron after describing him as 'filth' in a Facebook post, a prosecutor said on Wednesday. The woman risks a fine of 12,000 euros but not prison if convicted at the trial due to be held in June.

She was arrested on Friday and held in custody for questioning after the state's local administrative office filed a complaint over her Facebook post, the prosecutor in the northern town of Saint Omer, Mehdi Benbouzid, told AFP.

The complaint focused on a post on her Facebook page made on March 21, the day before Macron gave a lunchtime interview to TF1 television to defend his controversial pension reforms that have sparked nationwide protests.

"This piece of filth is going to address you at 1:00 pm... it's always on television that we see this filth," she wrote.

The woman, in her 50s, had been a supporter of the 2018-2019 "Yellow Vest" protests that shook Macron during his first mandate.

She stands accused of "insulting the president of the republic" and will stand trial on June 20 in Saint Omer, the prosecutor said.

"They want to make an example of me," the woman told La Voix du Nord regional newspaper which first reported the accusations.

Online Influencer Who Posted Hillary Clinton Meme
Found Guilty of Interfering in 2016 Election

A man who posted memes about the Hillary Clinton campaign during the 2016 presidential election was found guilty of one charge of conspiring against the right to vote on Friday.

“Douglass Mackey, also known as ‘Ricky Vaughn,’ was convicted today by a federal jury in Brooklyn of the charge of Conspiracy Against Rights stemming from his scheme to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote,” reads a statement released by the Eastern District of New York on Friday.

Members of the jury reached the unanimous verdict after a little less than a week of deliberation starting Monday afternoon after a weeklong period of arguments.

Mackey’s online persona, “Ricky Vaughn”—a reference to the sports comedy film “Major League”—had an online following of over 50,000 during the 2016 presidential election that frequently amplified his pro-Republican voice during the 2016 elections.

Mackey was on trial for a charge of allegedly conspiring against people’s right to vote with memes—or generally satirical online images—including one depicting an African American woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign. The meme instructed people to vote by text during the 2016 presidential election.
...
Mackey’s case is a historical first, in that alleged falsehoods are being argued as a form of election interference, Eugene Volokh, a professor at UCLA School of Law specializing in First Amendment Law.
...
Mackey will be sentenced on Aug. 16, 2023, and faces a maximum of 10 years in prison.
...
Authorities arrested Mackey in January 2021 on that allegation, and a grand jury indicted him within two weeks of his arrest.

According to the prosecutors’ evidence presented in court, Mackey’s Twitter posts included one that suggested limiting “black turnout,” a statement that prosecutors said supports the charge that Mackey intended to conspire to interfere with the election. On the witness stand, Mackey described it as an “exaggeration.”

But according to Mackey’s defense attorney, Andrew Frisch, that meme and Mackey’s Twitter posts were obvious jokes and cannot be taken as a serious attempt at conspiring against the opposition to Mackey’s preferred political party.
...
Although a material injury—in this case, people’s right to vote being taken away—is not required to establish the conspiracy charge, the government said during the trial that people’s votes were “vaporized” by Mackey’s “digital flyers.”
...
Mackey’s defense lawyer said the 4,900 texts were sent after Mackey’s Twitter account was suspended and following media reports of Mackey’s memes. Frisch said that the 4,900 texts were sent because of media reports on Mackey’s memes rather than in response to Mackey’s memes.

During the trial, testimony presented by the prosecutors showed that members of the Clinton campaign reported Mackey’s memes to upper-level campaign managers during the 2016 election cycle, but the managers dismissed their concerns. Prosecutors, when confronted by Frisch about this evidence, did not dispute the factual validity of this evidence but noted the Clinton campaign personnel’s evidence should not be considered as evidence for or against the conspiracy charge.

Frisch, on the other hand, said during the trial that this evidence shows that the government withheld exculpatory evidence, citing Brady v. Maryland, a 1963 case in which the Supreme Court held that prosecutors must make available exculpatory evidence to defense counsel. Frisch said that the government’s withholding of evidence irreparably damaged his opening statements at trial and requested that the court declare a mistrial.

Open Editorial

First, a woman sent to prison for insulting French president Macron and now a guy put behind bars for posting memes that weren't even violent nor aggressive at all.

If you ever cared about democracy, know it's been dead ever since the   was released in Wuhan, China. We're just watching communism take off its  mask now.  Free speech is an endangered species, guys.