On Wednesday, a court found vlogger Mark Meechan (AKA Count Dankula) guilty of a hate crime for posting a video of a “grossly offensive” prank on YouTube. He’s now facing jail time for the joke.
The 30-year-old, a self-described “s***poster” and free speech advocate, trained his girlfriend’s pug dog to raise his paw, mimicking a Nazi salute. Meechan filmed the trick and posted the footage to YouTube, where it has racked up over three million views. Meechan was reported to authorities, and in April of 2016, was arrested for his alleged hate crime.
Hours after the guilty verdict was handed down, Meechan sat down with journalist Tommy Robinson.
“I feel just drained, mentally. I have absolutely no energy,” Meechan told Robinson.
Asked about what sort of precedent this verdict sets, Meechan said a comedian’s intent and context no longer matters.
“I know why I made the joke. You know why I made the joke. Everybody knows why I made the joke, what my intent was and also the context that was pervaded,” he explained, adding that this never mattered to the court.
“It’s really scary for comedians,” he continued. “If they make a joke, their context and intent apparently don’t matter and it’s a case of, ‘No, you don’t get to decide what you mean. We get to decide what you mean.”
… context and intent apparently don’t matter and it’s a case of, ‘No, you don’t get to decide what you mean. We get to decide what you mean.’
-YouTube comedian Mark Meechan
Meechan hopes something good can come from his sentencing: U.K. residents will wake up to the tyranny of their own hate crime laws.
Even if it takes me going to jail for a year for me to show everyone how ridiculous and overreaching hate speech laws are, where a YouTube comedian — a s***poster like myself — can go to prison for an entire year for everyone in the country to realize, “holy s***, these laws need to be changed, they’re overreaching, they’re authoritative, they’re clearly being used to control public discourse, people are seeing things that we don’t like them seeing and that’s what these laws are being used for.” If it takes me going to prison for a year to actually get people to see that and campaign for these laws to be changed, I’m happy to do that.
“I would rather I go down for a year,” added Meechan, before Robinson finished the thought, “than the whole country be silenced,” he said.
“That is where this is headed,” Meechan agreed.
He also revealed that he believes the British government is pushing censorship of online videos, not YouTube.
“YouTube actually defended my video,” Meechan suspects.
“I’ve seen members of Parliament pressure people from YouTube … ‘Take this down. Why is that here?'”
“It seems that a lot of people at YouTube” actually believe in free speech, he said, “but it seems government policy is clamping down on them.”
According to a post from Meechan, the court ordered that he “meet with a court social worker for an assessment as to whether or not a Restriction Of Liberty Order will be placed” on him. “This would involve a GPS tracking device being attached to me and me being placed under house arrest,” he added.
Meechan is set for sentencing on April 23.
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