With the rioting in England having, hopefully, died down, arrests and trials of those involved, including some whose alleged contribution to the unrest was online, are underway.
It seems that the next stage in the new Labour government’s response will be to clamp down further on what is posted online. Further?
Tom Slater, writing for Spiked Online:
In 2017, an investigation by The Times found that nine people a day were being arrested for ‘posting allegedly offensive messages online’ – with 3,395 arrested in 2016 alone. Even then, that investigation was limited to one piece of legislation – the Communications Act – and the real number is almost certainly higher, not least because many police forces didn’t respond to the survey. Greg Lukianoff, president of America’s estimable Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, argues that, on the basis of those partial numbers alone, Britain is comfortably locking up more people today for speech crimes than America did during the first Red Scare.
As Slater makes clear, it’s a long time since Britain has been a haven for free speech.
For those interested in the different ways that it can be eroded, one twist is described by Slater as follows:
Cops have also taken to quietly recording ‘non-crime hate incidents’ against citizens’ names, when the pesky law gets in the way of their authoritarianism.
It’s worth clicking on the link to see how this practice, which concerns speech that is not illegal, came into being (spoiler: not via Parliament). This happened, incidentally, under the Conservatives, who failed to rein it in, just another of the failures that marked their time in office. Suspicion of free speech in Britain is, sadly, shared by its two largest parties (and some of the smaller ones too), although it has deeper roots in Labour.
So, what’s next?
Tech companies will be forced to ban fake news from their platforms under plans being considered by the Government in the wake of the riots.
Sir Keir Starmer suggested on Friday that the Government would review social media laws as part of efforts to prevent further disorder.
And, as so often the case of laws such as these, a lot would hang on how “fake” is to be defined and determined. And as is the case of legislation in the EU and its various member states, there is also the question of how heavy the penalties would be for breaching this law.
As I noted in a recent post on the EU’s Digital Services Act, the potential fines have been set at a level so high (up to 6 percent of revenues), that they are clearly designed to muzzle more content than is provided for in the law:
Such fines go far beyond deterrence and are intended to terrorize. They are designed to ensure that social-media companies err very far on the side of caution when considering what content to ban, a de facto, but not de jure, extension of the restriction on free speech contained in social-media laws, which would, for all practical purposes, be very difficult to challenge.
X is already involved in a battle with the EU over content issues, and it’s not impossible (although highly unlikely) that the U.K. authorities might take a run at either Musk (because of a couple of his tweets) or other U.S.-based posters under existing U.K. law for what has already gone out online.
Anyone familiar with the extraordinarily heavy-handed British policing of the Covid lockdowns will not be surprised to hear that Mark Rowley, the commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, has been suggesting that the arm of British law can stretch a very long way.
London’s Metropolitan Police chief warned that officials will not only be cracking down on British citizens for commentary on the riots in the UK, but on American citizens as well.
“We will throw the full force of the law at people. And whether you’re in this country committing crimes on the streets or committing crimes from further afield online, we will come after you,” Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley told Sky News.
This was, uh, not well received by many online Americans.
A post by the Crown Prosecution Service was retweeted by the British government’s official X channel with the warning “think before you post” drew quite a response from people over here. Let’s just say it got ratioed, and the reply option has now been closed.
A day or so before, Rowley had been involved in an awkward incident involving a reporter with Sky TV.
The head of the Metropolitan Police has apologised after ripping a microphone cover from a reporter as they tried to ask him a question.
Met Police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley snatched the item from a Sky News reporter as he left the Cabinet Office in Westminster on Monday morning.
Sir Mark was asked if he was going to end “two-tier policing” when he picked the item up and appeared to walk off with it.
He later dropped it on the ground as he was followed by other journalists.
The Daily Telegraph also reported that Starmer might be considering another change to the policing of online content:
The Telegraph understands that ministers are looking at introducing a duty on social media companies to restrict “legal but harmful” content.
This is something that the Conservative government had (incredibly, but not) put forward as part of its Online Safety Act, but dropped because, The Telegraph reported, of free-speech concerns, “with critics warning it could allow a future Labour government to censor controversial material.”
Well, it may be that Labour goes ahead anyway. It has a large enough majority in Parliament to amend the law passed under the Tories in any way it wants. We’ll have to see.
There’s a lot more to say about what’s going on in Britain at the moment, but, whatever else is happening, another front in the fight over online content has clearly now opened up. And that raises an interesting quasi-jurisdictional issue. Will Americans posting on American social media, a private space for U.S. purposes and one that is, at the corporate level, quite rightly protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, find that their posts are being censored by the host companies in order to avoid those companies falling foul of illiberal standards set across the Atlantic?