SolarSailer

An excellent decision. If it had gone the other way we likely would have seen social media websites shutdown entirely and comments disabled from YouTube. This also would have directly affected anyone in the U.S. that wanted to run an instance of Lemmy (or any federated instance that users could post content on).

The rulings were in regards to Section 230 which was a law passed in 1996 aimed at protecting services which allow users to post their own content.

The supreme court tackled 2 different cases concerning this:

1. Whether social media platforms can be held liable for what their users have said.
2. This was very specific to whether algorithms that refer tailored content to individual users can cause companies to be considered as knowingly aiding and abetting terrorists (if their pro-terrorist content is referred to other users).

This specific case revolved around a 94 yr old woman in Minnesota who owed $15k in taxes. Her home was taken away and sold for $40k and the government kept everything from the auction.

It's hard to believe that this was ever legal, this is a major win for common sense rulings.

Have you ever wondered why officers like to ask how much cash someone has that they have pulled over?

Probably one of the worst laws that is easily abused (as written) in the U.S. is Civil Asset Forfeiture. A simple way to describe it is legalized robbery by law enforcement. This is one of the ways that the law essentially treats the victim (property owner) as guilty before a trial has even begun. Law enforcement does not even need to charge you with a crime to take your money.

In order to get your money back the property owner would have to sue the federal/police organization. This means spending your own time and money to fight in court to prove your innocence (rather than law enforcement having to prove you guilty).

In most cases the property owner will spend more money fighting in court than they would get back if they won their court case. In other cases, law enforcement will generally offer a small percentage of the money back.

I get that these can be useful laws when actually taking down criminal organizations, but we really need to fix the laws so that law enforcement only gets the money/assets when the offending party is actually guilty of a crime.

As of 2021, only Maine, Nebraska, New Mexico, and North Carolina have completely overhauled their laws to require that prosecutors prove the owner's guilt. 36 States (and the District of Colombia) have taken steps to scale back these forfeiture laws, however, the vast majority of them have a major loophole in which law enforcement can partner with federal departments (such as the U.S. Justice and Treasury) and split the earnings from a forfeiture. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/08/19/states-work-scale-back-civil-forfeiture-laws-amid-federal-loophole/8181774002/

A little over a week ago a jury rejected a truckers claim to money that had been seized (even though no criminal charges have been brought against him). They took $40k that he had gathered together and was on his way to buy a truck.

https://landline.media/texas-jury-rejects-truckers-claim-to-seized-money/

Additional Sources: https://ij.org/report/policing-for-profit-first-edition/part-i-policing-for-profit/

John Oliver also did a video on this 8 years ago: https://youtu.be/3kEpZWGgJks