I've seen a few recent videos out of the UK that made my blood boil. Police visits to your home because of mean posts, and then off to jail in handcuffs. It's absolutely ridiculous.
Those “mean posts” were people organising violent riots that cost the country millions and targeted small business owners just for being ethnic minorities.
People shouldn’t get a free pass on organising violence and riots just because they did it online.
Edit: I don’t normally comment on the peer moderation that happens on HN but wow there are a lot of people online today that believe free speech trumps all other laws.
Seems it’s ok to destroy people’s property just so long as you arrange to do it online. /s
Perhaps someone can explain why they think this way?
I'm a little hesitant to comment because I haven't been able to dig up the actual charges, but there is a history of people in the UK being charged and arrested for mean posts. A few storys jumped out at me, eg the Kelly case did seem at the time to be a betrayal of the liberal tradition assuming the BBCs reporting is accurate - realistically people should be able to gratuitously insult people who contributed of the largest imperial project in history as military officers. For all that it was in terrible taste.
It’s hard to comment on that case without knowing what was Tweeted but on the surface of it, I do agree with you. However he wasn’t sent to jail and thus it wasn’t the incident the GP described.
What the GP was referring to was those jailed for inciting violence and hatred during the wave of riots the UK suffered last month.
Their actions were a lot worse and had real world, tangible, effects on people and their property. It wasn’t just them sharing a meme (which is the popular trope some on HN describe the event as).
It’s worth noting that people in America get arrested for similar actions. In another comment I drew parallels to the Capitol riots.
The crux of the reason people get put in jail “for posting mean things” is because they’ve broken other, much worse laws in the process.
Then perhaps you can share what other recent cases there have been of people jailed for posting stuff online.
And please don’t call me a liar. You said it was recent, and they were jailed. I don’t know of anything else besides the incidents I’ve covered. Worst case is I’m misinformed. And if that’s the case then I’m sorry. But I assure you that I’m not a liar.
Oh I’m well aware of how strict the uk is. However none of those articles you shared are about people getting jail time (most of those cases were likely dropped in fact) and they certainly weren’t recent.
I’m not making generalisations here. The OP made a very specific statement about people being jailed recently for posting online and I’m saying they’ve completely missed the truth behind those actual arrests.
Just as all the subsequent posts yourself and others have made are glossing over the very specific claims the OP made.
I’m not going to argue that I think the UK gets things right with its approach to online content. But the OPs specific claim of people being arrested is missing the bigger story about why they got arrested. And that’s what I’m specifically calling FUD on — not the UKs wider policy. The uk is a shit show for a great many reasons (as a UK citizen I’m not blind to this at all). But that doesn’t mean we should exaggerate the truth for the sake of gaining a little extra karma on HN.
The simple fact is the reason for the recent arrests and jail time is for similar reasons people have been arrested and jailed for online content in the US (yes, it’s happened there too). This isn’t a problem with free speech, it’s actual criminals causing actual physical damage and thus who have broken other laws besides just communicating about it online. Hence my comparison to the Capitol riots.
If you're trying to be precise about specific meaning, you probably should also be specific about only using the word jailed. You use "arrested" a few times there, and people do seem to be being arrested for mean tweets.
People were arrested in America over the Capitol riots and messages online was used as part of the evidence.
What happened in the UK was exactly the same. We had violence and riots, millions of pounds of damages, innocent small business owners targeted because of their ethnicity. It was actually a much worse scale than the Capitol riots and thus people should absolutely be held accountable for their actions.
>Yes, USA is indeed the only country on the planet with absolute free speech. Most residents of other places doesn't actually want what the USA has.
The US does not have absolute free speech. Laws exist against slander, libel, perjury and making terroristic threats. The FDA regulates the speech of food producers and pharmaceutical companies. The FCC regulates speech on broadcast television and radio. It's a felony to lie to Congress. It's a felony to call for the assassination of the President.
Even speech in "public squares" is regulated by public nuisance and noise laws and curfews.
Yes, what's considered "hate speech" elsewhere is (mostly) legal in the US. But that doesn't make free speech in the US absolute, just more amenable to forms of racism and bigotry the rest of the world decided weren't worth defending after the consequences of World War 2.
Free speech should not be an absolute. No freedom in a society is absolute. Living in a society is a huge compromise.
EDIT: I am not in favor of the Chat Control proposal by the way. It is poorly thought out and will only serve to harm innocent people. True criminals will use encryption and such anyway.
It’s the only place that ever had it, if imperfectly. Everyone else pretends they have it, but it’s a joke. Everywhere else has these red lines they will simply pretend do not count as valid speech.
- In China you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t criticize Xi or though, that would be ridiculous)
- in the UK you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t say anything untoward about anyone, that would be ridiculous)
- in Denmark you can say anything you want! (of course you can’t say anything that would offend religious sensibilities — this is real by the way, Denmark has reinstated blasphemy laws as of 2023)
There's not a single place on earth that "has" free speech, it's all shades of gray.
The US government will have you jailed, tortured, or just ruin your life in other innovative ways if you dare expose their crimes, e.g. Snowden, Assange.
- "Is the US the only place on the planet that actually has free speech?"
I'm not aware of any other country with stronger protections, on the topic of the thing going on in the UK, of heated and violent rhetoric than the US has. US jurisprudence explicitly protects advocacy of violence and lawbreaking (up to the Brandenburg test is a very high bar), and I don't know if there's any other country with comparable protections.
(By which I specifically don't mean "has 'freedom of speech'" written on paper somewhere; nor "doesn't typically hassle people over tweets (but has legal options to do so should they choose)". I mean binding case law that weighs quasi-incitement to violence against the right to hyperbolic political rhetoric, and deliberately chooses the latter).
If people in Switzerland wanted that they could vote for it. But they actually prefer having limits on other peoples' speech more than they resent the limits on their own, so they don't.
Depends on what you publish.... if you just yell about different random people, sure... if you post a video of war crimes, well.. that's a different story now.
There’s also a bunch of stuff that falls under free speech most people don’t realize (at least in the US): what you can or can refuse put in your body, what you can refuse to say, how you spend your money, what you can hear, where you can read/write/speak/listen, etc
All of which has been being curtailed substantially in many ways since the 80s in the United States.
The US does not have free speech. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/us/pro-palestinian-... I’m not suggesting the UK is better, btw, just rather that free speech already doesn’t exist anywhere. Some of these you can criticize because they aren’t public universities, and perhaps that’s fair, and the rest you can criticize because they weren’t arrested for protesting, but rather having “illegal encampments”, but a rose by any other name is still a rose.
free speech is often not something one “enjoys”. If you are at a funeral and have protesters burning pictures of your dead child then you aren’t “enjoying” that.
Howver the US does not have free speech. It has some speech which is not allowed by law, some which is allowed in theory but not in practice, and some which is allowed completely.
