My entire goddamn point which you are still failing to read is that behaviors can still be a behavior regardless of legal definitions. The Purge (other than just being a joke since I liked the image in my head of Trump watching an extremely dumb movie and thinking it presents a good idea, but I guess you don't really…

There's not really any other reasonable way to read the last part of the statement. It's a threat. A veiled threat maybe, but a threat.

No one said zero consequences, ever.

You're still completely flying by my point that legal definitions and colloquial or dictionary definitions are often NOT the same thing. Legal definitions tend to be a lot narrower. How are you not getting this?

I never said anything about playing nice. I think news outlets should have been targeting shitheads like Steve Bannon a lot earlier than they did.

My entire point is that by targeting people like this racist shitposter, we are paving the way for people who are not racist shitposters (say, Black Lives Matter activists, or anti-war activists, or transgender activists) to be outed and smeared in the exact same ways, as well as fueling the kind of hate espoused by…

Okay sure, but in that case the reason they published that finding is because it turned out the founder was an actual powerful and therefore newsworthy person. CNN could have done some minimal digging, figured out whether this guy was newsworthy in any way, and then opted not to publish any of what they found once it…

I've said this elsewhere, but shaming this one guy does absolutely nothing to stop racism. Nothing. It ruins his life, drives him even further in bitterness and hate, and makes him into a martyr. This scenario where you think that shaming random redditors for making GIFs is somehow going to make people be less racist…

For one thing, because the definitions we use to define what is isn't hate speech, or even "inciting" speech, are incredibly flimsy and easy for powerful people to misuse or turn on people we find less deserving. It would be incredibly easy to accuse Black Lives Matter protesters, or many disability advocates, or…

There are qualifying legal definitions for all sorts of crimes. You realize this, right? Like people can commit murder and have it not be considered murder (as opposed to "manslaughter" or some other definition) in a court of law? You get that, right?

I've had racist bosses. I've had racist bosses say racist shit TO ME. TO MY FACE. ABOUT MY RACE.

Well, I do hope you also appreciate how flimsy and subjective "hate speech" definitions can be and how easily that can be turned on people you might think to be less deserving than this Redditor. There are few things I like about America these days but the robust free speech laws (if not always meaningful protections)…

You realize that sometimes two sides in a conflict can both be bad, right? That CNN are not suddenly heroes just because Trump hates them?

It is extortion in any meaningful sense. Someone else (Stitchface I think) already said this, but CNN of course has every (legal) right to broadcast whatever information they can get on this guy. However, once they specifically make not publishing it a condition of the guy's behavior, then that very obviously…

To be clear, Trump supporters are making hay out of it because CNN decided that Trump making a dumb tweet was newsworthy (and to some extent it is) and decided to focus in on the Trump supporter that originally made the image (which is not newsworthy). Yeah, no shit, if you turn some random gif maker into a martyr the…

Okay, so why is this entire AV Club article and most of the CNN article in question mostly about this one Redditor and not about Trump?

Okay, so tell me how "if you continue to post these things we don't like, we will possibly publicly out you" is not a threat. Tell me. Seriously, tell me. Tell me. No one has been able to tell me how that is not a threat. So tell me.

It might not meet some technical or legal definition, but it is definitely extortion in any meaningful sense of the word.

IDing him is not doing their jobs. Doing enough research to say "the user who created this meme appears to be a racist troll, and the president should have known better than to tweet it" is enough. There's absolutely no reason to ID him. It serves no journalistic purpose to the actual main story.

So? The CNN executives are public figures. I'm not excusing it, but he's not ruining their lives posting publicly available information.