{"id":103576,"date":"2024-08-10T12:19:27","date_gmt":"2024-08-10T17:19:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=103576"},"modified":"2024-08-10T12:24:48","modified_gmt":"2024-08-10T17:24:48","slug":"103576","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=103576","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to know.<\/em><\/p>\n

This sacred Privilege is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom of Speech always go together; and in those wretched Countries where a Man cannot call his Tongue his own, he can scarce call any Thing else his own. Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech; a Thing terrible to Publick Traytors.<\/strong><\/em>
\n\u2013 Benjamin Franklin<\/p>\n

BLUF
\nThe U.K. government must crack down on lawless riots in its streets. But in the long run, its creep into truly Orwellian levels of censorship poses a far bigger threat to its citizens\u2019 freedom than any riot ever could. And this whole saga serves as a reminder to Americans as to why we should cherish our First Amendment because without strict legal protections for free speech, even a Western nation can quickly descend into dystopia<\/p>\n

The UK descends into dystopian levels of censorship<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThink before you post.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the\u00a0chilling message<\/a>\u00a0that was just posted from social media accounts affiliated with the\u00a0United Kingdom\u2019s<\/a>\u00a0government. Amid the\u00a0riots<\/a>\u00a0and civil unrest in the streets of Britain that were initially sparked by anti-immigration protesters, the posts warned citizens not directly involved in the uprisings that they too could face arrest even just for their\u00a0speech<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cContent that incites violence or hatred isn\u2019t just harmful \u2014 it can be illegal,\u201d the Crown Prosecution Service\u00a0tweeted<\/a>. \u201cThe CPS takes online violence seriously and will prosecute when the legal test is met. Remind those close to you to share responsibly or face the consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n

These aren\u2019t just idle threats, either.<\/p>\n

Stephen Parkinson, the director of public prosecutions of England and Wales,\u00a0warned<\/a> that there are \u201cdedicated police officers\u201d tasked with \u201cscouring social media\u201d to \u201cfollow up with identification [and] arrests\u201d when people \u201cpublish or distribute material which is insulting or abusive which is intended to or likely to start racial hatred.\u201d<\/p>\n

This censorious effort is coming from the top levels of government. In an\u00a0interview<\/a>\u00a0with Sky News, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said social media is \u201cnot a law-free zone\u201d and that he wanted to issue \u201ca reminder to everyone that whether you\u2019re directly involved or whether you\u2019re remotely involved, you\u2019re culpable, and you will be put before the courts if you\u2019ve broken the law.\u201d<\/p>\n

The arrests have already begun.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As Sky News\u00a0reports<\/a>, one 28-year-old man, Jordan Parlour, has been sentenced to 20 months in prison after writing on Facebook that \u201cevery man and his dog should smash [the] f*** out of Britannia hotel (in Leeds),\u201d even though his post only received six likes and there\u2019s no direct evidence that any of the people who went on to attack the hotel did so because of his post. (The hotel was targeted for housing refugees at taxpayer expense.)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, according to the\u00a0Guardian,<\/em>\u00a0a 55-year-old woman was\u00a0arrested<\/a> simply for sharing inaccurate information about the suspect involved in the horrific stabbing attack that led to the uprisings. More arrests are sure to follow.<\/p>\n

There is no word for this other than \u201cdystopian.\u201d The U.K. government is going full speech police and arresting and imprisoning people simply for the words they say.<\/p>\n

Of course, anyone who has actually participated in the riots and crimes, such as mob beatings, looting, and vandalism, should be arrested and subjected to full legal consequences. Whether it\u2019s Black Lives Matter activists in the United States in 2020 or anti-immigration agitators in these current U.K. riots, violence and victimizing the innocent are never acceptable forms of protest. But going beyond that and arresting people simply for their words is beyond the pale.<\/p>\n

For one, you are quite literally punishing people for the actions of others who are not in their control. That alone makes these arrests unjust.<\/p>\n

Even in the more extreme cases, such as that of Jordan Parlour, who did explicitly encourage violence with his words, he did so while sitting at home. He didn\u2019t throw a single brick or smash a single window. No one was compelled to do anything simply because he posted something idiotic on Facebook. To punish him so severely because of the decisions other people made is to assign to him responsibility he does not bear \u2014 and take the blame off the shoulders of the people who actually committed the violent acts.<\/p>\n

And to arrest people simply for spreading inaccurate information is incredibly dangerous. (In this case, the riots were, in part, motivated by false rumors that the man who committed a stabbing attack was an illegal immigrant.) Yes, people have a responsibility to be careful with their words and not spread fake information, but that should be considered a civic and moral responsibility, not a legal one.<\/p>\n

Crossing into the alarming territory of arresting people after sharing \u201cfalse\u201d information requires making the government the ultimate arbiter of truth. What could possibly go wrong?<\/p>\n

Of course, as we\u2019ve been repeatedly reminded in recent years, the government is not all-knowing and often gets things wrong. Just ask the many people who challenged the U.S. government\u2019s claims on everything from the lab leak theory of COVID-19\u2019s origins to the efficacy of mask mandates and beyond, who were initially labeled as purveyors of \u201cmisinformation\u201d but, as time went on, were revealed to be correct or, at least, not necessarily incorrect.<\/p>\n

Government officials are only human and are not capable of accurately determining one \u201ctruth\u201d to anywhere near the degree of certainty required to punish people justly for spreading \u201cfalsehoods.\u201d Granting any government this power is also dangerous because it\u2019s so ripe for abuse.<\/p>\n

The government often seeks to obfuscate or cover up facts that are harmful to its public perception, which it regularly labels \u201cfalse\u201d during initial media reports only to admit later it was wrong. See the\u00a0Washington Post\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0Afghanistan papers<\/a>, for example, which extensively document how U.S. officials misled the public about the status of the war in Afghanistan to burnish their image.<\/p>\n

Even if the government were somehow able to separate fact from fiction with a reasonable degree of accuracy and never abused this power, engaging in this kind of censorship would nevertheless have a chilling effect.<\/p>\n

People would, quite understandably, be afraid to speak their minds openly or challenge a consensus, and they would engage in self-censorship as a result. This kind of repressed society is incompatible with the basic principles of democracy, where good ideas are supposed to win out over time through the open exchange of arguments, and such repression endangers everything from scientific progress to entrepreneurial innovation, which both require the freedom to risk being wrong.<\/p>\n

The conclusion here is inescapable.<\/p>\n

The U.K. government must crack down on lawless riots in its streets. But in the long run, its creep into truly Orwellian levels of censorship poses a far bigger threat to its citizens\u2019 freedom than any riot ever could. And this whole saga serves as a reminder to Americans as to why we should cherish our First Amendment because without strict legal protections for free speech, even a Western nation can quickly descend into dystopia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it, he does not hurt or controul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=103576"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103579,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103576\/revisions\/103579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=103576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=103576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=103576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}