The United Kingdom hasn't quite developed the technology to police thought crimes as its son George Orwell described in 1984, but recent developments indicate they'd be doing that if they could.
In response to weeks of rioting in the country, the government is clamping down on free speech—particularly online—issuing a creepy X (formerly Twitter) warning threatening legal action against people for sharing false things online, the promise of a dedicated police force scouring social media for said wrong speech, and even the arrest of citizens for these speech crimes.
In the process, Elon Musk has come under fire in the British media for his refusal to mimic their government's tyrannical behavior on his platform, X.
The riots began after a mass stabbing occurred on July 29 in Southport, England, resulting in the deaths of three children. False rumors circulated on social media, claiming the attacker was a Muslim asylum seeker. This led to the first riot in Southport, which then sparked protests and riots across the country.
Following the outbreak, Musk tweeted that a "civil war" was an inevitability in the country and got into some testy exchanges with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer. But while some UK officials labeled Musk's speech as "deeply irresponsible," it seems the bulk of the criticism he is receiving has less to do with what he has said and a lot more to do with what he is allowing to be said on his platform.
A recent article, published in The Guardian, went so far as to argue that the billionaire should be put on trial for his "role" in the riots. What was that role exactly? Allowing provocateurs like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Tommy Robinson) and Andrew Tate to have accounts on his website
—personalities they claim instigated violence in the country by sharing the initial false claim.
The UK has never been considered a bastion of civil rights, and certainly not of free speech. We in America fought a war to get away from these people for good reason. But in recent years, their government has become particularly censorious and hostile to free speech, making these developments merely an escalation of a trend that was already advancing there.
And it does seem it might get much worse as officials report the government is looking to review their already problematic Online Safety Act to make it tougher on disinformation, hate speech and incitement to violence. As it stands, the law already makes the arduous demand that social media platforms actively identify, mitigate and manage the risks of harm from illegal material that appears on their platforms. (I'm sorry, isn't identifying and taking action against illegal things what police get paid to do?) Violations can result in fines of as much as 10 percent of a companies' global annual revenues.
There's a reason Europe's economy has no real tech sector to speak of, and that reason is a mix of regressive, anti-capitalist regulations, aggressive antitrust laws, and hostility to free speech. (A climate many populist Republicans and Democrats are eager to export here).
All tech companies are naturally incentivized to moderate content and remove or de-prioritize posts that are offensive, illegal, or violent. And they do a pretty decent job at that considering the millions of posts that are made every day.
But insisting that social media companies remove all false content is an impossible task—most importantly because what is true and what is false often takes time to sort out, and because that is only done through debate, fact-sharing, and comparisons. It's laughable to assert that there is any one person who is the arbitrator of absolute truth, and even if that person were to exist, it's even more audacious to suggest they would be a politician or government bureaucrat.
One need look no further than Americans' own experience with "experts" who tried to silence speech during the reign of COVID, Inc. Were our laws to have mimicked those in the UK, citizens could never have been able to push back on vaccine mandates, school closures, masking, or the virus' origins. Those who pushed back in these instances were ultimately right, but that could never have been proven without the ability to first say things that were labeled as incorrect by the government. Who decides what is true and what is false without a rigorous debate and a legal climate that fosters it?
That's why in the U.S. lying is mostly protected free speech. In the Supreme Court case United States v. Alvarez the court held that "some false statements are inevitable if there is to be an open and vigorous expression of views in public and private conversation, expression the First Amendment seeks to guarantee."
You can't even refer to the actions the UK government has taken or the criticisms against Musk as a slippery slope. Instead, the Brits are in a full-fledged free fall into oppression, where citizens will be terrified to push back, unable to meaningfully participate in their government or their society, where neighbors will turn on neighbors, and in the process, where ultimately more violence will certainly ensue.
Hannah Cox is the President and Co-Founder of BASEDPolitics. She works with Netchoice, a free-market trade organization for the tech industry.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
