As far as I can tell this is just far-right propaganda to disguise what actually happened -- which is the UK imprisoning people for conspiracies to burn down hotels with immigrants in them; or participating in on-going violent riots by calling for various buildings to be attacked or people to be murdered.
This speech isnt covered by free expression, and is a crime in all countries, including the US.
> Chambers appealed against the Crown Court decision to the High Court, which would ultimately quash the conviction.
These are absolutely trivial cases to assume that somehow the UK has suspended the free expression rights of its citizens. These amount to over-reach by the lowest courts (staffed by volunteer judges, fyi) which were corrected. That's about as good as justice is in practice.
(It's also an unaddressed issue on exactly what social media is -- people tend to assume its some private conversation, but its at least as plausible to treat it as a acts of publishing to a public environment. When those actions constitue attacks on people, the UK/Europe have typically regarded public attacks as having fewer free expression protections).
Neverthless, these cases are used by the far right online to disguise what has been action taken by the UK gov against far right quasi-terrorist groups engaged in mass violence. The UK gov is not persecuting people for free expression, they have taken action against people using social media to organise murder.
One should be careful to note where this perception of UK speech laws is coming from. It's not free speech classical liberals.
This subject is always framed by people like yourself as being all about the far-right racists and somewhat recent riots, when it has been going on a lot longer than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_the_United...
Are you really going to defend the conviction of a teenage girl quoting Snoop Dogg lyrics on facebook?
While the punishments were light typically (usually fines). Many of these cases can end up with time in prison.
Then there is the communications act:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_2003#Malici...
Man was prosecuted because he sent a drunk tweet:
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/bad-tweet-uk-sir-tom-...
You are defending these these awful laws. There a plenty of cases that I've forgotten about because quite frankly there are so many.
> One should be careful to note where this perception of UK speech laws is coming from. It's not free speech classical liberals.
This is disingenuous. Firstly, it doesn't matter who the criticism is coming from if it is valid (which it is). Secondly you can see there are plenty of well know public figures that aren't far right that have criticised the current laws in the link to the selected cases, these include MPs, Comedians and Well known authors.
e.g.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c51j64lk2l8o
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/yorkshire-mp-philip-da...
If you've never been involved in court proceedings it will come as a surprise.
If you choose the first one, then you're preventing the investigation of mass riots, conspiracy to murder, mass disruption of public infrastructure -- and so on. All which have happened in the last 9mo, and gone through the courts. BUT you do have the advantage that police wont, once in a blue moon, turn up to someone's house and investigae them for a bit of nonesense that disappears within a day or at most a month when a real judge has looked at the case.
If you choose two, then you can still offer guidance to local police forces to be more careful in assessing complaints -- guidance which has almost certainly been given, since the gov arent happy theyre being distracted with this BS.
Now ask yourself: who at the moment really wants option number 1?
Yes. I do. I want them to put resources into catch the criminals in my area that have been stealing motor vehicles instead as that actually affect me and my community. Not policing social media.
Why?
For 40 years, Police in the US have been given basically carte-blanche to do whatever dragnet surveillance they want, as long as it "technically" is done by a third party they just buy services from. Police have had constant and perfect visibility into the digital world, with almost no moderating force, and yet they're so bad at finding culprits that violent crime clearance rates are still a coinflip.
Oh actually that's just in my State. ME claims the national violent crime clearance rate is ~20%. Jesus.
It seems obvious to me that police departments are either utterly incapable of, or utterly unwilling of, doing their damn job. We have given them near infinite power and zero responsibility and they've spent those immense resources being trained that everyone is trying to kill them, being taught how to shoot people first and ask questions later, and harassing people, often including journalists literally exposing their mob activity.
Please don't give them more power until they demonstrate an ability to productively use the power we have already given them.