As it is, we can't judge for ourselves whether the arrest is warranted or not, which is kind of a big deal when the arrest is used by robswc to illustrate how the UK is approaching authoritarianism.
> the only good Brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella, buuuuurn
in relation to Tom Moore’s death. He deleted the tweet after 20 minutes. He was convicted of grossly offensive communications under the Communications Act, and was sentenced to 18 month’s probation and 150 hours of unpaid work.
If people don't want to support their country's military and servicemen, that should be their business; it's a legitimate political position to take. Not least because all British soldiers are volunteers, and most of what British soldiers have been doing for the past generation is tagging along with American imperial military adventurism.
When the reasons are "being critical of the monarchy" or "causing anxiety" I think "for a tweet" can only make things look less ridiculous, lol.
Fundamentally, all speech should be legal, barring very special circumstances. That's freedom of expression.
This is not unheard of in the US either. So what is the distinction being made here?
And for the record the UK and Australia are generally higher up on the various freedom lists that rank countries. I don't know that there is much of an argument that their stricter speech restrictions have them any closer to authoritarianism than the various problems in the US have us.
Do you have a source for the ones you are referencing?
I looked a few and they track things like "whether both men and women feel comfortable expressing themselves in public"
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
And very few seem to give proper weight to objective measurements like laws and actual consequences of speech.
Funny enough, downloading an actual report (https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index/2021), the UK scores almost perfect (9.8) on "Freedom of internet Expression." The country where you can quite literally be arrested for making an offensive tweet (not a threat), scores just shy of 10/10 on internet freedom? Are the arrests the reason for losing 0.2? I would _love_ to see the methodology behind that score.
Germany, the country where you can have your house literally raided over calling a politician a "dick", scores 9.36 "Internet Expression." 9's are some of the highest scores you can get.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-g...
The institutions that put these together have 0 skin in the game. I have tried to find how they create their "indicators" but haven't found anything. I honestly just cannot take these reports seriously unless someone has an answer for how countries that can arrest citizens over offensive tweets could score so high on this particular metric.
I would assume this means the experts have concluded that the right to be rude to a politician on Twitter is not a particularly important right and its removal doesn't have much impact on the overall freedom of that society. That seems more likely than a diverse group of think tanks, academic institutions, journalistic outlets, and NGOs have all either joined a conspiracy or randomly acted in concert to misrepresent the relative freedom of the US in comparison to our peers.
All of the ones I have looked through have that. Every single one.
We're looking at just one metric though. Freedom to express ideas on the internet. Countries where you can get arrested for "offensive" tweets or get your house raided for calling a politician a dick score a few 0.1s away from the maximum of 10. We don't know how, because AFAIK, they do not go into specifics about why they give the UK/Germany a 9.x/10 on "Internet Freedom."
>I would assume this means the experts have concluded that the right to be rude to a politician on Twitter is not a particularly important right
Then I, along with most people, would conclude that their metric (and possibly by extension, their entire index) is useless. Not having your house raided for calling a politician a dick is exactly what most people would consider a particularly important "right."