Look, the kid was a hero, but this is also patently false.
He was not sentenced to 35 years. The trial hadn’t started. 35 years was the maximum possible sentence. He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected.
We don’t need to spin lies to make his story more tragic than it already is.
Be thankful it didn’t take an explosive shit.
They’re also evidence of why the book banning doesn’t really work as well today as conservatives would like it to.
Book banning was an effective way of controlling what your young population was exposed to before the internet and social media. It worked best when the young weren’t even aware of the information they were being denied.
But social media is making sure they’re all very much aware of what has been hidden from them. They know what’s going on. You will find teenagers in particular are kind of resistant to being told no by an authority, so they’re going to do something about it.
Now, don’t feel too excited about this, because there’s a threat here. Every single time you see a conservative talking about more stringent age verification for things on the internet, part of what they’re actually trying to do is create an avenue to control the information kids are exposed to. They are pretty open about how LGBT issues, particularly the T ones, can be labeled as “sexual” and “inappropriate”. With very simple changes to the regulation, they can suppress children’s access to anything they like as long as they make a half-assed argument that it’s “inappropriate”.
For the record, Aaron Swartz never actually went to trial, nor was he “sentenced” to anything.
Federal prosecutors came after him with overzealous charges in an effort to make him accept a plea deal (they do that a lot), which he rejected. It would have gone to court where the feds would have had to justify the charges they were bringing.
But that never happened because he killed himself.
We don’t actually know how this all would have played out.