A Scottish YouTuber has been fined after being found guilty of being “grossly offensive” online for uploading a video of his girlfriend’s pug responding to “sieg heil” and “gas the Jews.”
In the allegedly offensive video posted in April 2016, Mark Meechan, otherwise known as Count Dankula on YouTube, said he was going to show his girlfriend’s dog being “the least cute thing that I could think of, which is a Nazi.” The video shows Meechan taught his dog to respond excitedly to the phrase “gas the Jews” and lift up its paw in response to “sieg heil.”
According to the BBC, Meechan was found guilty of being “grossly offensive” online in March 2018. Being “grossly offensive” is considered a violation of the Communications Act.
At the time, it was speculated that Meechan could receive between six months to a year in prison for what has been deemed a hate crime.
Instead of facing a prison sentence, Meechan was fined £800 (the equivalent of $1,117).
In a statement on the sentence, Sheriff Derek O’Carroll said that even though Meechan maintained the video was uploaded as a joke, jokes can still be considered “grossly offensive”:
The fact that you claim in the video, and elsewhere, that the video was intended only to annoy your girlfriend and as a joke and that you did not intend to be racist is of little assistance to you. A joke can be grossly offensive. A racist joke or a grossly offensive video does not lose its racist or grossly offensive quality merely because the maker asserts he only wanted to get a laugh.
Just days before Meechan’s sentence, a teenager in Liverpool was sentenced to eight weeks community service, eight weeks of curfew, ankle monitoring, and a fine for quoting rap lyrics that included the N-word.
