Link to the original news post
This morning on the 9th of July, Judge Terak announced his judgement in SD v bedshaped (Gato) after twelve long days in court.
The ex-journalist, founder of the news company “Gato Gazette”, and Prison President, who sent an image of Adolf Hitler shooting a bullet into his head subtitled with the text “Follow your leader” while pinging multiple other SimDem members, was charged with the crime of ToS Violation by state attorney Matt Cheney.
The court found this to be a direct violation of point one of discord’s community guidelines, which read as follows:
“Do not promote, coordinate or engage in harassment.”
Discord further elaborates in their Bullying, Harassment, and Threats Policy Explainer that this includes - among others - calling for the suicide or self-harm of others.
On the other hand, the court did not find that the former Independent Ombudsman violated the community guidelines' provisions regarding support of violent extremist groups and regarding threats to real life violence, as the image only contained a call for suicide and no threat to perform any actions.
Tangent on why ToS Violation even is a crime
Going on a tangent a bit, violating the Terms of Service is a crime within SimDemocracy because the state is expected to enforce the ToS. Discord has often subjected servers who cannot or simply don’t want to enforce the ToS and community guidelines within their borders to sanctions such as server deletion or similar. Thus, to ensure SimDemocracy’s continued existence, ToS violations need to be illegal; this is achieved by statuarily making them a crime in the Criminal Code and letting state attorneys charge persons for “ToS Violation” in order to ensure that all ToS-breaking conduct is penalized, even if it doesn’t fit any of the many other crimes described in the Criminal Code.
Concluding this article, the trial is now entering the mitigation phase, where the defence seeks to reduce the defendant's punishment. The prosecution however argues that Gato’s actions were targeted and thought-out, and that she did not show any signs of remorse. On the other hand, the defendant's lawyer, Literal, went on to submit multiple screenshots of Gato saying she “had some decent conversations [...]” and now knew that “[her] approach doesn’t do anything for [her] or the people [she cared] about”, thus attempting to prove the prosecution’s second point wrong. Whose side the Judge trusts more, and how long the punishment will last in the end is still an open question, only to be answered by the court.