The Conservative Daily News reports that the conviction of Douglass Mackey for a meme that he posted about the 2016 election might open the floodgates for a variety of similar types of convictions based on political motivations.
A jury convicted Mackey of attempting to deprive voters of their right to vote by creating a meme that advised Clinton supporters of a way to vote via text message. Most read the meme and understood it as a parody, but not all did. It is, of course, not possible to vote via text message. First Amendment advocates are up in arms that Mackey’s conviction could lead to additional First Amendment issues for others wanting to express certain political viewpoints.
Some say that this will have a chilling effect on the right to free speech in this country, and they are highly concerned about the implications of depriving someone of their liberties over a meme. Many believe that it has gone too far at this point.
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Aaron Terr, director of Public Advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), told the Daily Caller News Foundation the following: “it’s not clear Mackey’s actions qualify as fraud in a legal sense,” and went on to say: “Fraud generally requires a speaker to make a false statement to obtain money or something of material value from the injured party, who relies on the false statement to their detriment.”
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He continued by pointing out the following: “It criminalizes conspiring to ‘injure’ or ‘oppress’ someone in the exercise of any constitutional right,” and “If that vague language covers speech that deceives people into voting improperly, it raises the troubling possibility of the government also applying it to allegedly false statements about political issues or candidates that discourage people from voting, not just misrepresentations about the logistics of exercising the franchise. Anyone who cares about free speech should be concerned about how the government might abuse this vague and broadly worded law to chill the spirited public discourse on which our democracy depends.”
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Mackey faces up to ten years in prison after being convicted on these charges, which is also highly concerning to observers of this case. They fear that a lengthy prison sentence for Mackey could mean that others become scared away from expressing their viewpoints about the issues due to the possibility of being convicted on a charge like this.
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