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Comment by meragrin_ | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen the content posted? The only thing I've been able to find about it does not give me the feeling the page was parody.

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The parody page heading was "We no crime."

Content included things like "Stay inside and catch up with family day" as a crime-prevention measure.

The Parma PD arrested him for disrupting the police, which as far as I can tell was based on a whopping 12 minutes spent answering phone calls from other residents who couldn't distinguish parody from real life any more.

Except under oath the cops said no one actually thought it was real, they just called to complain.

Sounds like it's the complainers who should be prosecuted for unnecessary use of police line.

Eh. They didn’t call 911 they called the non emergency number.

Calling and asking about the Facebook page would be the same as calling an asking what hours a certain precinct is open or a noise complaint.

Staffing the non emergency line is an administrative duty not an operational duty. One person staffs this desk. Their only job is to take non emergency calls on shift.

Edit: I would be more understanding if 911 was effectively DDoS by callers inquiring about the Facebook page causing real emergencies and help to be delayed. But this is not the case at all. The people did the right thing by calling the non emergency number and the police arrest a guy because they were forced to answer questions about a parody Facebook page.

If we're going to arrest people over spewing bullshit on Facebook, that causes disruption of public services and welfare, I have a very long list.

Yah, that officer is a real POS. He initially testified they thought the page was real. Only changed his tune under appeal.

This is an image of part of it:

https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/city-parma.pn...

and another one:

https://static1.therichestimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/up...

as I see it, it is not particularly subtle.

Black humor is rarely subtle.

Even if not parody, it's not a crime to post made up stuff on Facebook.

If it's libelous, couldn't it be? I'm not saying that's the case here, but wanted to point out that defamation is a crime, or tort depending on the case.

In the United States (but not necessarily elsewhere), public officials have a very high bar to overcome if they're making a defamation claim.

As First Brother Billy Carter once put it, "You can call a congressman a no-good sumbitch and he can't do anything about it."

Ohio doesn't have a criminal libel statute (13 states do, and most are no usually enforced).

Libel & defemation are civil matters, not criminal.

Edit: bad autocorrect

They also require a statement presented as fact, not opinion, which is false and designed to harm someone's reputation.

Some states have criminal defamation statutes, which is why I mentioned it depends on the case. I could've made that more clear though. As another comment mentioned, Ohio isn't one of those states though.

My main point was that sometimes "making stuff up online" is a crime, or in the least, unlawful. And as far as colloquialism goes, crime, illegal, and unlawful are used interchangeably by the general public.

If it induces panic or a crime, sure it is.

>The only thing I've been able to find about it does not give me the feeling the page was parody.

Can you share?

Read the pdf by the onion. It has examples of the content, which is clearly parody e.g. his post suggested that the police is providing free abortions to teenagers in a mini van. I guess these days the line between parody and nut case is thin ;)

I was just hoping that OP could clarify what didn't seem like parody to them. ;)

Publishing nutcase craziness also isn't a crime.

Not really worth bothering. It was a single picture which showed only a small part which was an exact copy. No real content.

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