The slope is slippery because, given enough time, lawyers are always be able to form a causal effect chain from human action A to undesirable outcome B.
This implies all such causal chains, regardless of their nature, will always be accepted as valid. If that were true, no lawyer would ever lose a case.
It's the same argument that people make when they say, because any word can be claimed to mean anything, any so-called hate speech crime can be used to make any arbitrary speech illegal, simply by labeling any form of speech "hate speech."
It's the 'perfectly spherical cow in a frictionless void' model of society that assumes societies are not made up of humans with brains already aware that people can lie and attempt to game the system, and that no one will ever be willing or able to correct flaws in the system. Even in the case of OP, I doubt the UK could take any arbitrary tweet and sentence someone under the same law.
That said, I think the laws in the UK in this regard are going too far - but a slippery slope implies an irreversible process. These laws exist because the people of the UK want them to. If they wanted otherwise, they could change the laws to reflect that. That isn't a slippery slope.
Okay, buddy, we have this thing called the Internet now. It's a magical place where you can be anonymous and say whatever the fuck you want. The cat has left the bag.
All restrictive speech laws do now is push dissidents underground into radicalizing echochambers like 4chan, while at the same time rapidly expanding the scope of "dissident" to include anyone who says anything remotely offensive to anybody. Is that what you want?
It's odd that you seem to find restricting speech and pushing dissidents underground into radicalizing echo chambers to be a problem, while not being at all concerned about those dissidents' capacity to radicalize orders of magnitude more people and form even bigger echo chambers when given free rein on the biggest platforms the internet has to offer.
The entire point is to slow the ability of dissidents to spread their message, because despite what believers in free speech maximalism claim, truth doesn't always out. "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on" was a meme well before the internet gave lies the speed of light.
>while at the same time rapidly expanding the scope of "dissident" to include anyone who says anything remotely offensive to anybody. Is that what you want?
I've already commented that I reject the slippery slope argument. If the people of the UK find their free speech laws go too far, they can change those laws.
It's the same argument that people make when they say, because any word can be claimed to mean anything, any so-called hate speech crime can be used to make any arbitrary speech illegal, simply by labeling any form of speech "hate speech."
It's the 'perfectly spherical cow in a frictionless void' model of society that assumes societies are not made up of humans with brains already aware that people can lie and attempt to game the system, and that no one will ever be willing or able to correct flaws in the system. Even in the case of OP, I doubt the UK could take any arbitrary tweet and sentence someone under the same law.
That said, I think the laws in the UK in this regard are going too far - but a slippery slope implies an irreversible process. These laws exist because the people of the UK want them to. If they wanted otherwise, they could change the laws to reflect that. That isn't a slippery slope.