[Forgeties79]

Maybe I am reading these wrong, but it doesn’t appear to me these sources indicate that a significant number of people are being arrested for “speech offenses,” which I’m guessing you are using as shorthand for statements akin to those that would fall under “free speech” in the US. If I’m not seeing it or I am not correctly defining what you mean, feel free to correct me. I’m having to make some assumptions here

[piker]

It can be hard to wrap your head around it from the US, but many of these are people that are in fact being arrested for writing posts on social media, e.g.,

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-6... (arrested for post wearing a Manchester Arena bomber costume)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-60930670 (arrested for posting "the only good British soldier is a dead British soldier" from Scotland)

that would be categorically protected speech in the US.

[Forgeties79]

> It can be hard to wrap your head around it from the US,

Come on. Was that necessary? I understand what we are talking about, I am saying none of those articles indicate that there is some huge thing going on where people in the UK are being arrested by the tens of thousands for irreverent memes or whatever. The issue is not my understanding, it’s the handwaving and vague generalizations that are causing issues. It’s coming across as fear mongering and I am looking for clarity.

[piker]

I don’t think you understand. Either of those arrests are unconscionable by American standards. Most U.S. folks would be shocked to ever see such a thing, so it’s necessary to first show it to level-set that non-US jurisdictions don’t have any concept like the 1st Amendment. It wasn’t a slight in any way.

It was to say: even a single arrest on those grounds would be national news in the U.S. and quickly over turned by any circuit in the judiciary.

[Forgeties79]

I feel like we are talking at cross purposes here and this all feels very broad, so I’m still not entirely sure what you are driving at other than “in the UK people are being silenced and arrested for what I consider to be acceptable speech” in some general sense. I don’t know what the line is, I don’t know what the numbers are, I really don’t have any sense of the scale or specifics of your claim.

I was responding to the initial comment at first: that upwards of 10,000 people are being arrested annually now in the UK for irreverent posts online and the like. The sources that were shared do not show that. Now you’re saying it’s really about any single incident being unacceptable and how an American can’t fathom it.

Do you see why I’m having trouble following this conversation?

[piker]

Yes, I think we'll have continued difficulty reconciling this understanding.

It's almost impossible to get arrested for posting something that isn't CSAM or literal state secrets on Twitter in the US. Even so-called "hate speech" is broadly protected in the US by the First Amendment. In fact the American Civil Liberties Union (which is loathed by the American right) has gone to bat and litigated on behalf of the KKK of all organizations, for example, to protect those rights.

If you send "menacing" notes to someone, that can be a part of a larger crime like harassment, assault or stalking, but as noted in the chain, that's not what's being measured here.

So the fact that people are being arrested at all for tweets is not "what I consider to be acceptable speech" but in fact what the US generally considers to be protected speech. Any number above 0 that doesn't reference child porn is infinitely more than you'd expect to see in the US. That's the difficulty we're having.

[Edit: I understand US != UK. The American flag only flies in the embassy here. I just wanted to provide the context of those arrests and these numbers to US readers who will find them surprising.]

[fao_]

My wife in the USA had semi-anonymous texts send to her personal over a course of 2 years. They included her home address, her mother's home address with a picture of the home, and they stated that they would kill her and anyone she loved.

She never saw justice for it. The police said there was nothing they could do, despite having the phone number it came from, because it was across state lines.

The texts stop, and we suspect that it coincided with a specific person who went to jail for a year or so for unrelated offences around the time that the texts stopped.

That person is still out there.

[XorNot]

And in many other countries those would get you prosecuted for hate speech or incitement to violence.

The lie here is you've picked too examples of atrocious behavior, but you're trying to pretend that actually all the rest are just people posting dank memes and so "it could happen to you!!".

[istjohn]

Those examples are completely inoccuous to my sensibilities. Of course, there are plenty of countries that lack the broad speech protections Americans enjoy, but one doesn't expect such curtailments of personal liberty in a fellow English-speaking western "liberal" democracy.

[fao_]

The first example was "man arrested for wearing the exact same outfit as a man who intentionally blew himself up, killing 22 people". It's not "he was wearing the same chequered shirt!" either. As a UK citizen... I don't see how that fits under "free speech", lol

Even with "freedom of speech", you do not have "freedom from fascism" built into that, case in point, Wikipedia has multiple pages documenting both the current US administration's attitude towards trans people (that, in Charlie Kirk's words, we are "abominations unto god" that should be "taken care of" "as in the 50s/60s", which can only be taken to mean lynching), as well as the attitude of the US presidency towards democracy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_transgender_peo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeting_of_political_opponen...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_14290 (were PBS and NPR "biased"?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_backsliding_in_the_...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/25/transg...

[ipaddr]

Freedom to choose clothing wouldn't fall under any version of freedom of speech?

I would would work with your fellow citizens to change that.

[fao_]

I think the issue here isn't "freedom of speech", its that people who claim to want "freedom for speech" are either using it as a shield to say vile things to other people, or they feel that "freedom of speech" is the only thing one needs to guard against fascism.

The resulting difficulty is that the former is demonstrably true, and the former is demonstrably false.