[kypro]

For those unaware, the UK police are currently promising to go after people posting misinformation and retweeting content (including video of riots) that might incite hate.

In response to this the UK police are being trolled on their live chats (largely by Americans I believe). I did originally post a link to these (you can find them on X), but given the content I don't want to risk it.

I'm assuming they're now blocking IPs because of the abuse.

This started yesterday when the police said they have officers looking through social media for offences, https://x.com/ElijahKyama_/status/1821180825007763660/video/...

But heated up again today after a 55 year old women was arrested for posting inaccurate information to social media, https://www.cheshire.police.uk/news/cheshire/news/articles/2...

I'm currently waiting for a knock at my door along with 65 million of Brits who have posted inaccurate information online from time to time.

Legal note: if anything I have said here is inaccurate I was unaware of it at the time of posting.

[zimpenfish]

> a 55 year old women was arrested for posting inaccurate information to social media

Well, it's not simply "posting inaccurate information", it's "publishing written material to stir up racial hatred" (which it clearly was) and "false communications" (technically true because her information was completely wrong.)

[katzinsky]

Regardless of the content, unless it's a death threat, I don't think going after old ladies is a great way to calm people down.

[crtasm]

Maybe look at it this way: they're going after people because of what they're posting, not their age or gender.

also 55 isn't old! but I realise I may be closer to it than you are.

[gorgoiler]

For completeness, the context here is a social media post alleging the identity of someone arrested hours earlier for a mass murder at a children’s play group — an extremely distressing event that has been followed, for unclear reasons, by nationwide rioting.

This person was “arrested in relation to a post about the identity of the attacker in the Southport murders” and specifically “on suspicion of publishing written material to stir up racial hatred”.

Most police forces / services / departments no doubt mis-use the law for vexatious arrests but this does not seem like one of those cases.

I do think it’s valid to question whether it’s moral for the Lilliputian Police to criminalise anti Big-Endian rhetoric. If everyone’s doing it it is hard to claim the nationwide rhetoric is responsible for specific violent crimes. If only a few people are doing it then there might be a causal link from their speech to the other crimes, and those links and subsequent crimes are a vital part of the debate.

[whatshisface]

I hope the police are ready for a decade where a single highly motivated person who is willing to risk punishment can instantly weild the credence of one half of the entire debate, and win the attention of everyone with hushed sympathies. This is an extremely dangerous political climate.

[gorgoiler]

Sadly, this began on July 29th with a single person willing to risk punishment for wanton violence. A common thread here is society producing outsiders: is this new or worse in the modern era?

[RIMR]

>But heated up again today after a 55 year old women was arrested for posting inaccurate information to social media, https://www.cheshire.police.uk/news/cheshire/news/articles/2...

I cannot visit that link, lol. IP blocked.

[anakaine]

What's amusing is you posted a link to the 5t year old woman being arrested, and that's also an endpoint which is blocking foreign access.

[BoredPositron]

>> I'm currently waiting for a knock at my door along with 65 million of Brits who have posted inaccurate information online from time to time. Legal note: if anything I have said here is inaccurate I was unaware of it at the time of posting.

how fucking funny. Everytime when something like this is getting discussed the only response is sarcasm and hybris. No acknowledgment of the problem, no ideas, just fucking bad one liners. It's a real problem and you can be glad that you haven't had to deal with it. Yeah, ofc what they are doing now is absolute shite but sometimes you could at least acknowledge the law in it's meaning and not the shitty execution of it and no I don't care about your sarcasm "disclaimer" you are not five.

[_heimdall]

I think part of the problem at hand is when laws written poorly can be enforced in ways that don't align with the meaning behind the original laws.

The solution really is simple - write clearly defined and contained laws or don't write any at all. Most people wouldn't be comfortable with that, though, and in a world where news stories and political debates are forgotten in a matter of weeks people won't find it acceptable if legislators spend months or years writing laws that are easy to understand and don't come with a mountain of edge cases and loopholes.

[BoredPositron]

Yeah, that's a cop out no law will ever be satisfactory initially with your requirements. Every constitution gets amendments and the same can go for a law like we are discussing now. That the only conclusion is "do nothing at all" is mind boggling.

[_heimdall]

Its not a cop out. How can you as a citizen try to stay on the right side of the law when laws are horribly verbose, difficult to understand, and full of gray area?

I wouldn't expect a law to be absolutely 100% buttoned up but we're very, very far from that today.

[BoredPositron]

Laws are difficult to understand? Is it the first one you've read? Oh no you haven't read it... because the one we are talking about is pretty straight cut. Sorry but you are really not commenting in good faith here. It's just straw man argument after straw man argument.

It's just liberté and nothing else for you I guess.

[_heimdall]

For the average person, yes laws are absolutely difficult to understand. We wouldn't need to involve lawyers nearly as often if laws were easy to understand and the process, defined by laws, was clear.

It isn't just about liberté for me. The law in discussion here may be pretty straight cut with regards to understanding what's on the page, but not with understanding what power the government is actually granted or when/how it will be enforced. The whole point in this thread was that the law is unclear as to how the government will define content posted online that may turn out to be inaccurate as illegal and worthy of leading to prosecution.

Consider it this way - if you handed said law to 10 people in the UK, would they all walk away with the same understanding of where the line is that they shouldn't cross?

[23B1]

The problem isn't the hate speech or the enforcement really.

The problem is that these powers have, can, and will be abused by petty bureaucrats, power-hungry law enforcement, the government itself and, as a result, enable actual tyranny.

[BoredPositron]

Because there is no other way in a democracy to handle overreach... it's always the same straw man argument.

"We'll end up in a dystopian autocratic tyranny nightmare TOMORROW if we do anything against it. With the only conclusion let's do nothing at all."

Great input.

[_heimdall]

Rather than disregarding the concern, how would you propose the overreach should be handled? And is it possible to handle the overreach before it harms citizens caught in the middle, or can it only be dealt with after innocent people are on the wrong end of the overreach?

[BoredPositron]

And innocent people that get harmed by non action are irrelevant? Laws can and will always be abused but if they are about online discourse the only possibility seems to be that there will be nothing but abuse. As long as you are in a country with an intact democracy and separation of power you'll be fine and if not vote against it.

[_heimdall]

Who is harmed specifically by online speech? Speech can certainly lead to people deciding to take some kind of action, but that action is what harms people and those actions are very likely already illegal.

When it comes to separation of powers, that's a much bigger discussion but I have concerns over how our three branches operate in the US today. Our legislative branch has outsourced much of their power to the executive branch, though the overturn of Chevron may eventually help that. I wish it were as simply as voting, but I'm generally only offered one or two options for most elected positions and when it comes down to it neither party will allow anyone on the ballot that wants to actually reform anything meaningful about how the system works.

[whatshisface]

Civil servants desperately trying to hide their mistakes won't believe they are overreaching, and neither will their friends or the politicians who would held responsible by the media.

[23B1]

Tyranny doesn't require an autocratic dystopia to make life absolute hell.

[lmaoguy]

They are actively being be abused. The UK, Canada, Oz and NZ are excellent examples.

[etothepii]

What do you want people to do?

[BoredPositron]

Be serious?

[whatshisface]

Totalitarian regimes don't win when the majority believes the general line. That never happens. Totalitarian regimes win when the people give in to despair. That's why people use the one-liners. They are coping.

[BoredPositron]

I saw your deleted comment and I am not gonna engage with you because of it.

[whatshisface]

I'm sorry that you didn't think my one liner was funny.

[lmaoguy]

I don’t think they can say the serious thing without being charged as a terrorist.

[kypro]

Heh. Sorry, it was a silly joke. I agree.

[sva_]

The situation here in Europe is gonna get a lot more tense over the next 10-20 years.

[benmmurphy]

the wild thing is in the UK private citizens can bring about criminal prosecutions. section 179 is a hornets nest waiting to be poked. in the UK prosecutors are not a bulwark against bad law. the courts would need to thread the needle to protect freedom of speech for elites but allow suppression for plebs.

> at the time of sending it, the person intended the message, or the information in it, to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience, and

even announcing future legitimate policy direction by the government could be construed as causing non-trivial psychological harm.

[ethbr1]

As an American, watching the UK government wrestle with "free speech, except when we disagree with it" is a fun pastime.

It's definitely not a right if it disappears when it's inconvenient.

[krapp]

Speech is regulated in the US as well. Publicly call for the assassination of a President and see what happens.

[blackeyeblitzar]

The restrictions on speech in the US a much narrower and more clearly defined than in the UK or Europe, where there is an ever changing and unprincipled perspective on what speech is allowed. In the US you cannot directly call for violence but you can do a lot of other things and you can see the case law around this in Brandenburg v Ohio and other such cases. Vague restrictions like “hate speech” are meaningless in US law (since obviously such labels can be weaponized arbitrarily) and journalism is protected without restriction. Whereas in the UK, sharing a video of the riot is apparently enough to get yourself arrested by gestapo at the doorstep.

To offer more detail on how far the Brandenburg case went in protecting free speech rights: it ruled that seditious speech – including speech that constitutes an incitement to violence – is protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution as long as it does not reach a level "where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action”.

[ethbr1]

The exceptions are far more narrow than in the UK. Try and bring a libel charge in each country.

PS: And technically, afaik, it isn't a crime to call for the assassination of the president of the US. It's illegal to attempt it, and to take actions that support those attempting it. But if you just post on Facebook about it... you'll get a call from the Secret Service and a recommendation that you don't do that, but no charge.

[fragmede]

Post a copy of Pixar's latest movie online and see if that speech is protected. Or CSAM. It would be better to acknowledge that there very much are limits on the freedom of speech, just like everywhere else, instead of pretending we're better than everyone else and that we don't have any censors.

[ethbr1]

> that we don't have any censors.

That's not the argument I'm making.

I'm noting that the US started from a right to free speech, and then carved out exclusions to that.

Whereas the UK came at it the other way and added to a list of types of speech that are free.

[krapp]

Nevertheless, mocking the UK for having "free speech, except when we disagree with it" is kind of specious when that exactly describes free speech in the US as well. It's simply a matter of where different countries choose to draw the lines.

[ethbr1]

If you're making the absolutist argument, then yes, you are correct.

If you're making a practical argument, then we can trade exclusions 1-for-1 in the US vs UK, and the UK list will go on far after you've exhausted the US ones.

[pyuser583]

This mechanism exists theoretically in the US.

I live in a state that had a pre-Roe abortion ban on the books. After Roe was repealed. local prosecutors tried to use their prosecutorial veto to prevent enforcement.

It was pointed out that if they straight up said “we won’t enforce the law” Private citizens could enforce it.

Usually, a judge would throw the case out, but if a DA had publicly refused to do their job, judges would find it hard to simply defer to DA.

I suspect private criminal prosecutions are so rare because public prosecutors guard their monopoly.

[ethbr1]

Didn't Texas go a step beyond that and literally empower private citizens to bring cases?

[pyuser583]

That was a civil thing.

[m11a]

Theoretically yeah. Maybe not for this particular act (the Online Safety Act 2023), see eg section 179(7) and 179(9) which sort of imply only a prosecutor can bring proceedings. Though I think that's largely by oversight rather than design.

It's a really poorly written act though. Compared to acts written by previous governments, this one has a pretty bad structure.

[486sx33]

I hereby assert that the queen is still alive . Am I now guilty of an offense?

[dave333]

There's a difference between freedom of speech and inciting riots with lies. Also what can get by in normal times may not do so in an emergency.

[anal_reactor]

> There's a difference between freedom of speech and inciting riots with lies

The latter was exactly the excuse that communist regimes used to silence any criticism

[ethbr1]

Depends. How do you feel about her?