I've been hearing lots of crazy things about people getting arrested in the UK for posting "memes" or things like that. So I decided to look for examples. All the examples I can find are clearly hate speech, policed more strongly than I would prefer but not that much more strongly, if I'm honest.
The most egregious case I could find was someone arrested for a meme of a pride flag morphing into a swastika. Probably not arrest worthy but perhaps it was the last straw for someone with a history of hate speech.
It's also hard to find examples because everyone writing about this has an agenda. So if anyone can find examples of people being arrested for things that are clearly jokes or memes rather than clearly hate speech, I'm curious to see them as well.
Why on earth would you support arresting people for any speech, hate or otherwise? It is just so obviously a terrible idea that has been regurgitated over and over for thousands of years, countless books, wars, philosophical treatise and here we are. No wonder we aren't going to make it.
I am very much pro free speech, but I do draw the line with implicit or explicit threats of violence. And this line is debatable, sure, but saying any words are just free speech? To escalate the example, Hitler giving the order to exterminate the jews was just free speech?
My real point here is that this discussion specifically has been so thoroughly debated by brilliant people that I have trouble understanding why this hasn't been simply closed as proven like we do in math. Eventually you reach a level of argument where there is simply nothing left. We have reached it. Curtailing speech and thought simply never works as intended and always brings greater harms than the alternative.
> I am very much pro free speech, but I do draw the line with implicit or explicit threats of violence. And this line is debatable, sure, but saying any words are just free speech?
Hard to say without evidence of the intent and records of the context.
> Hitler giving the order to exterminate the jews was just free speech?
That is clear but. It was directly ordering murder.
Direct calls to violence have been crimes for a long time, so has conspiracy to organise violence. Hate speech laws go far beyond that.
> I've been hearing lots of crazy things about people getting arrested in the UK for posting "memes" or things like that.
Several (christians) people in the UK have been arrested for "praying in their heads" outside of an abortion facility.
I don't find it classy to go pray for unborn babies that are getting "killed" but that's being arrested for a thought crime and it's not OK.
But then hundreds of muslims regularly openly praying in the streets even though the country is covered with mosques: not an issue. Nothing to see here. All perfectly normal.
The pro-muslim / anti-christian two-tier policy in the UK is just wild.
It's illegal to protest outside of abortion centers for very good reason, because it targets vulnerable women going through a difficult medical procedure. These people were arrested for protesting outside an abortion clinic. They can go and "pray in their heads" literally anywhere else in the entire country and they won't get arrested. They can even stage full on peaceful protests against abortion and they won't get arrested. They just can't do it next the actual clinics.
The first part of what you say is true. You can be arrested for what silent prayer with no outward sign - in other words for what was going in in your head. It is a thought crime. There are also arrests for reasonable free speech - for example holding up a placard offering to talk to women who were coerced into having an abortion.
The second part is nonsense. Anyone of any religion or none doing the same thing would be committing the same crime. It is perfectly legal to pray in the street except close to a place offering abortions.
The flaw in your argument is that it assumes a clear and workable distinction between "a joke" and "obvious hate speech." Yet one of the strongest objections to the very concept of "hate speech" is precisely that we lack a reliable way to stop the term from expanding indefinitely.
The case of Count Dankula is a textbook example: it is plainly a joke, and interpreting it as Nazi promotion or hate speech requires an extraordinary degree of bad faith. And yet, that is exactly how it was treated.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/youtube-count-dankula-mark-m...
This is what I mean by everywhere having an agenda. Because if you just read that Vice article you'll come away thinking he's a "Scottish comedian" who was just joking around to annoy his girlfriend. And after all, they're well known to like off color jokes, the Scottish. This is clearly unfair.
But if you dig a bit deeper, you'll find out that he soon after became a member of the far right UKIP party and was considering running for MEP. Also, his YouTube channel had over a million subscribers, of which his girlfriend was not one. So the reality is not that he's just a Scottish comedian, but rather he's also a far right political wannabe using his platform to spread anti-Semitic hate speech in the form of "jokes".
So perhaps "making anti-Semitic jokes for your girlfriend" should be treated differently than "making anti-Semitic jokes for your million YouTube followers"? At the very least, that is what happened here.
It's also important to note the context that there is a massive and growing online hate speech problem and has been for several decades now.
The arrest does seem to have radicalized this guy. But he's just one person, and he was popular enough to get support from a ton of famous people, and no doubt his million YouTube followers. I would need to see more data before I can form an well founded opinion on whether these arrests work or not. Perhaps they do work as a deterrent for the kinds of people that don't get Ricky Gervais publicly standing up for them.
So we come to the conclusion that this is not just a violation of freedom of speech, but also persecution of political opponents? The situation didn't look any better.
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the state arrests someone for a joke, and that person, feeling persecuted, joins an anti-establishment or far-right group, the state cannot then say, "See? We were right to arrest him because he's now a member of that group."
You are using Meechan’s political actions in 2018 and 2019 to justify a legal conviction for a video made in 2016 (which you said happened "soon after").
"The flaw in your argument is that it assumes a clear and workable distinction between "a joke" and "obvious hate speech"
That is usually easy derived from the context and the cases I know of "missunderstanding a joke" was rather deliberate misinterpretation of the law to get someone out of line.
Ah yes, that famous "joke" which evolves a Nazi salute after antisemitic phrases are said. I think Israel is undermining the Jewish cause with their current label-everything-we-dont-like-as-antisemitic rhetoric. But this "joke" is probably where the line should be drawn for actual antisemitic behaviour.
Whether the person was an antisemite or not, just don't go there. There is no reason to. As a joke between you and your girlfriend, maybe. But not broadcasting it to the whole world on Youtube.
Israel is surrounded by a ocean of minority genociding imperialist islamo supremacists using proxies and petrodollars to subvert the umbilical keeping it alive. Up to and including pushing narratives about a genocide that never happened.
It has ever right to be worried and frankly seeing how much activist media and the west republished terrorist propaganda.. they are right.
The "the UK is a police state" meme is something amplified by the US right wing (it's always people from the US going nuts about it on HN, or those that consume too much American media). Like you say, it's dumb that the police are wasting their time moderating Twitter, but if someone (or a group) was verbally abusing another person enough in real life they would be arrested.
The law should be changed to somehow accommodate assholes on social media abusing people. Probably by forcing the social media platforms to moderate their shit. What little moderation there was, was all thrown out when the Trump second term started. Either to curry favour (Zuckerberg, probably) or just to create chaos for governments (Elon).
There is an explicit strategy from the US right wing to undermine centre ground politics in Europe. This comes directly from the Whitehouse via Vance and Trump.
I agree with you this is greatly exaggerated by the US right wing - along with much else about the UK.
However, there are serious issues with hate speech laws. They go a long way beyond preventing abuse - threatening behaviour and similar were illegal before hate speech laws were passed. What hate speech laws made illegal were things that were not illegal, bit views that were judged unpleasant. We also now have criminalisation of behaviour such as silent prayer, or offering help in the wrong place.
On top of that we have "non-crime hate incidents" where the police investigate and record people for doing things that are legal.
IMO it actually helps racist groups such as the BNP as they can hint to the worst of their supporters that they would like to say things that are more racist by the law prevents them, while at the same time not frightening off more moderate supporters by using extreme language.
Racists and xenophobes have a lot of gain from ambiguity. Not only not frightening off supporters from the ethnic majority by being too extreme, but also using bigotry between minorities. There are European immigrants who hate non-whites, there are Islamphobic Jews (a group the EDL works with), antisemitic Muslims and more.
> We also now have criminalisation of behaviour such as silent prayer, or offering help in the wrong place.
These are the kinds of examples that I keep seeing given as to why the law is bad. But nobody ever shares specific examples. Can you give specific examples of people being arrested, or even just warned, for "offering help in the wrong place"?
The most egregious case I could find was someone arrested for a meme of a pride flag morphing into a swastika. Probably not arrest worthy but perhaps it was the last straw for someone with a history of hate speech.
It's also hard to find examples because everyone writing about this has an agenda. So if anyone can find examples of people being arrested for things that are clearly jokes or memes rather than clearly hate speech, I'm curious to see them as well.