[yesco]

I misunderstood what you were trying to imply but still think your premise is mistaken. My reply is merely directed at anyone implying the US's free speech-laws are somehow comparable to the authoritarian anti-free-speech laws the UK has.

[tolien]

Do expand on that point then.

Edit: If I remove the reference to Brandenburg, I'm not sure my point substantially changes:

Incitement is an offence in the UK and also in other countries. You can argue whether that should be the case or not but that's completely orthogonal.

Gathering a whole lot of offenses which happened to include online activity to produce a big number of people who you can claim were prosecuted for something that you can claim is as innocuous as "online posts" is dishonest.

[yesco]

You're playing a shell game with definitions to justify authoritarian speech laws.

> lumping together arrests for stalking, incitement to violence and other forms of harassment to produce a big scary number

But that's exactly the problem - the UK defines "incitement" and "harassment" so broadly that ordinary political speech becomes criminal:

UK "Harassment" includes:

- Misgendering someone online

- Posting offensive jokes

- Retweeting protest footage

- Criticizing immigration policy "grossly"

UK "Incitement" includes:

- Lucy Connolly's Facebook post (31 months)

- Jordan Parlour's "every man and their dog should smash [hotel] up" (20 months)

- Tyler Kay's "set fire to all the hotels" retweet (38 months)

NONE of these would meet Brandenburg's standard in the US. They lack:

- Directed at specific individuals

- Imminent timeframe

- Likelihood of producing immediate action

> if the stated number is true, there should be thousands of examples every year

There ARE thousands. In 2023:

- 3,537 arrested for online speech

- 1,991 convicted under Section 127 Communications Act

- Hundreds more under Public Order Act

You don't hear about most because "UK citizen arrested for offensive tweet" stopped being newsworthy years ago.

You're using the word "incitement" to equate UK thought policing with legitimate US restrictions on speech that creates immediate danger. That's like defending China's censorship because "every country bans fraud."

The definitions matter. The UK criminalizes hurt feelings. The US criminalizes immediate threats to public safety.

[tolien]

> There ARE thousands.

And here you're getting in on the dishonesty.

How many of those were examples of "hurt feelings" and not "put a whole lot of foreigners at risk of their lives" or any of the other classes of "online posts"? We don't know because in their rush to say "the UK's arresting 30 people a day for posting things online", the Economist didn't bother breaking that down.

> NONE of these would meet Brandenburg's standard in the US.

None of them happened in the US so that's irrelevant. My misunderstanding of the precedent around incitement isn't central to my point.

[yesco]

'We don't arrest people for speech, we arrest them for crimes we've defined as speech' is not the defense you think it is.

[immibis]

The USA doesn't arrest people for speech, but for crimes it's defined as speech, right?