Drag is worried this post may break rule 1 about being involved in drama. But drag was not involved in this issue before drag decided to investigate it and to conduct an experiment to determine the actual situation. Drag would like to publish the results of this “investigative journalism”, and doesn’t believe this is covered by the intention of rule 1, but drag may be wrong.

Introduction

The issue of censoring discussion about Luigi Mangione and the CEO shooter has been controversial across the whole internet, not just the Fediverse. Reddit banned its Luigi Mangione community. Many people on lemmy.world have raised concerns that Dutch law would prevent people from praising the CEO shooter, as this is “inciting violence”. Lemmy.world is run according to Dutch law.

Over several days, drag found a LOT of contradictory information about Dutch law and incitement to violence. Some of the articles quoted from the Dutch Criminal code were non-applicable, non-obvious in their application, or entirely unclear when drag read them dragself.

After a day or so of reading the DCC and discussing it with other Lemmy users, Article 131 emerged as the best candidate for applicability to the Mangione situation.

Any person who in public, either verbally or in writing or through images, incites another or others to commit any criminal offence or act of violence against the authorities, shall be liable to a term of imprisonment not exceeding five years or a fine of the fourth category.

If the criminal offence incited is a terrorist offence or is a serious offence for the preparation or facilitation of a terrorist offence, the term of imprisonment prescribed for the offence defined in subsection (1) shall be increased by one third.

What is very difficult about this article is that “against the authorities” is ambiguous in whether it applies to the first part, inciting, or just to actually doing violence, the second part of that sentence. Drag analysed the original Dutch and as far as drag can tell, it’s no clearer in the native language. Drag chose to hypothesise that article 131 applies to inciting crime against anyone, and tested this hypothesis.

Methods

Given the fears of some people that the broader interpretation applied, drag created a community, !opruiing@lemmy.world, to document violations of the more broad interpretation of the law on lemmy.world. Drag made four posts: about inciting shoplifting, about inciting assassination of government officials, about inciting eating hot dogs in North Korea (this is reportedly illegal), and about inciting shooting CEOs. This is a variety of levels of seriousness and a variety of levels of applicability to Dutch law.

Results

The community was locked and made modless by the admins and none of the linked posts were removed.

Analysis

Despite worry from users on lemmy.world that the platform must remove article 131 violations (opruiing) in order to continue to operate, the admins did not seem to share this worry. Calls for violence against CEOs and politicians were made visible to the lemmy.world admins and were not removed.

The admins don’t care about opruiing. It’s not an issue they care to moderate. In fact, they categorised identification of opruiing as “trolling”, or in other words divisive and contrary to lemmy.world’s aims.

Discussion

There has been concern that praise of Mangione and the CEO shooter would not be allowed on lemmy.world. This experiment revealed those fears are unnecessary. Users can call for the assassination of CEOs on lemmy.world as much as they like.

Drag hopes this experiment will clear up the drama over whether Luigi praise is allowed on lemmy.world by providing useful information. And again, though most of this post is in a first person perspective, drag was making an active choice not to participate in the drama by adopting a neutral stance on the morality of Luigi praise until the experiment was over. So drag hopes very much that this post follows the intended spirit of the rules.