There's been a major update in free speech and it comes as a great relief to one of Trump's original keyboard warriors from 2016.
Douglass Mackey was sentenced to seven months in prison in 2023 for the crime of sharing what Biden prosecutors called "deceptive memes" in the 2016 election.
Mackey's prison sentence was stayed by an appellate court several weeks after his conviction.
That sentence has now been fully overturned.
Douglass Mackey tweeted some fake Hillary campaign graphics that told people to text in their votes, virtually no one even saw the memes, and he was sentenced to jail 7 years later, even though Hillary supporters made the same kind of memes and never got punished.
Mackey was then tried in deep-blue NYC because that's where Twitter's servers were.
(It was almost as if the Biden admin might have been unfairly stacking the cards against him due to his political allegiances!)
The conviction was based on the idea that Mackey was part of a 4Chan conspiracy to seed these memes in public and deceive voters. Mackey claims he just found them on his own, thought they were funny, and posted them.
The court ruled that the Biden admin's argument of conspiracy was nonsense, since it couldn't prove Mackay had done anything other than share memes he found funny.
It failed to establish, in accordance with its theory of the case, that Mackey became aware of the text-to-vote memes in the War Room and tweeted them pursuant to a conspiracy launched there. That theory was possible, but so was an alternative one: that Mackey became aware of the memes independently and decided on his own to post them.
...
A Section 241 conviction requires proof that the defendant knowingly entered into an unlawful agreement. Here, no 'rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.' ... For these reasons, we REVERSE Mackey's conviction and REMAND the case to the district court with instructions to enter a judgment of acquittal.
With no actual evidence of conspiracy, Mackey is acquitted.
Memes are legal again in America!
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