The Open Rights Group - https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/ - is probably a reasonable place to start.
Curious about what is scaring you btw.
Curious about what is scaring you btw.
The reality is that the UK's "Communications Act" [0] does allow prosecutions for electronic communications (email, forums, and social media). The number of arrests under this Act are in the thousands, but it covers a wide range of issues like grooming, stalking, and racially aggravated hate crimes.
Earlier this year there were a number of violent & destructive riots across the UK which happened in response to a stabbing of 3 kids in Southport [1]. The riots were whipped up by a number of far-right entities on social media - personalities such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Andrew Tate, and Katie Hopkins - as well as more nebulous entities such as Europe Invasion. A crucial aspect of the far-right narrative was a false claim that the perpetrator was a Muslim asylum seeker. Arrests were made for directly inciting violence [2] as well as for generating misinformation about the perpetrator [3].
The discussion around this is in the sensitive area of free speech vs hate speech. In the UK we are a little more nuanced about the absolute requirement for freedom of speech. While I do appreciate the argument that policing of speech can become dangerous depending on who does the policing, I think the case of the riots is a good example of where we may need to evolve our ideas about what it means to incite violence. This episode demonstrates social media's potency and the horrific potential of the deliberate spreading of misinformation.
[0] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_Kingdom_riots
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/article/2024/aug/09/two...
[3] https://metro.co.uk/2024/08/08/woman-first-shared-fake-south...
> After the recent riots, people were given prison sentences for posting words and images on social media. In some cases, the illegal incitement to violence was obvious [... But] Lee Dunn, fifty-one, on the other hand, got eight weeks for sharing three images of Asian-looking men with captions such as “Coming to a town near you”
Note that Lee Dunn pled guilty to the charges.
This did not strengthen your comment. You know many innocent people plead guilty all the time.
> This fuels the narrative of Asian/muslim asylum seekers being a violent threat to British society
Narrative? That almost seems to imply it is wholly false [0]
"Moroccan asylum seeker Ahmed Alid, 45, roamed the streets in Hartlepool looking for a victim to attack in "revenge" for the Israel-Hamas conflict in October" [0]
(You need not point out that the overwhelming of terrorist incidents are by British-born people. I am addressing what you meant to imply by "narrative")
It is worth noting that the leader of a left wing organisation, "Hope Not Hate" also spread an unfounded rumour on X that a fascist protestor had thrown acid on a muslim woman. This attempt to stir up counter protests was not prosecuted.
There are many examples of two tier policing and prosecution like this in the UK.
Won't deny it, but note that I thoroughly cited my post.
> It is worth noting that the leader of a left wing organisation, "Hope Not Hate" also spread an unfounded rumour on X that a fascist protestor had thrown acid on a muslim woman.
Won't deny this. Hard to argue that such a post stirs up racial hatred.
> two tier policing
This is laughable. The rioters threw petrol bombs at mosques, set fire to hotels and cars, attacked and injured police personnel, looted shops, and beat up bystanders. Counter-protests were generally peaceful with the exception of a couple of isolated incidents (which I hope are brought to justice).
You could also look at other examples - protestors against Israel's actions in Gaza doing nazi salutes, for instance, or singing anti-semitic songs.
The other canonnical example is during lockdown, the treatment given to women protesting the murder of Sarah Everard vs BLM protestors.
So in a riot of vastly smaller scale, there 27 arrests and 4 charged.
> protestors against Israel's actions in Gaza doing nazi salutes, for instance
In a protest that was overwhelmingly peaceful, there were 4 arrests, including of someone who did a nazi salute: https://www.mylondon.news/news/three-arrested-after-nazi-sal... . And if we compare it to the delightful things we're seeing in far-right protests:
- https://x.com/AntiRacismDay/status/1819790189369143691
- https://x.com/StanCollymore/status/1819451687566004237
The responses look proportionate to the behaviour.
The lies around this issue are really noticeable now. I used to believe that Yaxley-Lennon -- "Tommy Robinson" -- was a bigot, until I watched his Oxford union speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YQ94jFg_4A
All violence should be condemned and prosecuted. However when looking for the causes, what happened regarding the riots wasn't "whipped up" by online agitators. It was the result of failure of government policy.
Successive governments have lost control of the border, and there have been insane policies, such as putting a hotel of unvetted migrant men into a hotel in Rotherham, where immigration notoriously resulted in mass rape by grooming gangs. The authorities turned a blind eye to grooming gangs, worried about being accused of racism. [1]
"The report found: "Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so".
Furthermore, the rioting occurred after the government suggested that rioting works. In Harehills, Leeds, government social workers returned children after riots. [2]
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-289390... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Harehills_riot
- Spreading false claims that a stabbing in Stirling was carried out by a muslim
- Spreading false claims that a far-right protester in Stoke was stabbed by muslims
- Spreading the false rumour that the Southport attacker was muslim
- Claiming that the police were lying about the Southport attacker's identity
- Calling the Southport riots "justified"
- Describing Islam as a "mental health issue"
He's spent years crafting a narrative in which the once-glorious UK is being overrun by dirty foreigners who are changing its way of life and raping and pillaging its people. It's the quintessential archetype of far-right propaganda, so analogous to the kind of things Hitler said in the 1920s that I have to pinch myself. My belief is that he enjoys the idea of having an army of followers hanging off every word.
I've skipped through the Oxford union address. It looks like the same tired story he peddles about how he saw some bad things growing up in Luton while the al-Muhajiroun were active. I will concede that he is a good speaker, he caters to his audience, and is mostly smart about sticking to dogwhistles and cherry-picked datapoints, stopping short of directly inciting violence.
He explained the riots within the context.
Not once did he say violence was justified.
In comparison, Nick Lowles, leader of a far-left organisation, claimed falsely that Muslims had been attacked with acid to inflame tensions.
I would encourage anyone to watch the Oxford union address. That you haven't seen it means that you are uninformed.
I would recommend anyone else watch it:
"Oh, but they are not human that can have any rights. Of course they can be killed and expelled."
Just as easily as upstanding citizens today consider the unborn to be subhuman, just as easy has it been in the past (and in the future) for upstanding citizens to consider certain groups of people as subhuman. It only depends on what the rulers consider convenient at the moment, and 90% of the population are ready to adopt any opinion at the drop of a hat if instructed so by their rulers. Especially intelligent people, who can take pleasure in mental games to justify following orders.
The fetus is not to blame for being within the womb. Yet the fetus should be without the right to life, because they are an inconvenience to the mother. What rights does the asylum seeker get, in comparison? They are quite extensive.
Within our life time, the practice of killing newborns and infants will return and will be celebrated by upstanding citizens as a natural and moral thing. People opposing it will be shunned as dangerous and ignorant brutes – a threat to society.
Not quite. I'm saying that the right to life does not imply the right to use another's body. The same reason we don't make organ or blood donation enforceable by law even if it would save a life.
> A newborn is also completely dependent on other people for survival.
True, but not any one specific person. The parents can put a newborn up for adoption. The difference with an early stage pregnancy is that there is no way for the foetus to survive when removed from the womb.
> Within our life time, the practice of killing newborns and infants will return and will be celebrated by upstanding citizens as a natural and moral thing.
Definitely don't think this will happen.
If a pregnant woman that you know in real life would come to you and say that she's deciding to abort her baby because she thinks it has no right to use her body to live, how would you feel in that situation? My guess is that your first instinct would be to think she's a psychopath or going through a nervous-psychotic breakdown.
But it is normalized, just with other arguments than are used in these online debates. The arguments are probably not even verbalized, because people doing abortions would rather not think about what they are truly doing and just get over with it.
Now think if a person you know in real life would come to you and say that they're going to start killing people of a certain group. My strong guess is that you would think they are a psychopath or going through psychosis. Probably you'd call the police.
Yet, this is also normalized whenever the rulers want war. Look at how both sides are dehumanizing each other in the Ukraine conflict, in the most disgusting ways imaginable.
If that was the only reason she was aborting - and there were no mitigating factors such as early-stage accidental pregnancy or difficult life circumstances - then I might think that person selfish. But that's not what actually happens. Abortions by and large are wanted because a woman does not think they are in a good position to bring up a child in the world. Perhaps she had a one-night stand and the contraception failed. Perhaps there are abnormalities that will make the baby's life full of suffering and difficulty. The "no right to use her body" bit is not usually the sole reason for wanting the abortion, but it's the part that makes it ethically justifiable.
Exactly, because that argument is so far-fetched and cruel, that it's rarely seen outside of online debates. Having an abortion is still cruel, but there are always ways for people to do shameful things while putting their consciousness aside. It's probably rather easy for most.
I think your argument on the health of the baby (or mother) is more ethical than any "no right to use her body" argument. She was the person who decided to put the fetus in that situation.
To make a comparison, there are people arguing that the fate of prisoners in the German death camps during WWII was not really the Germans' fault because they didn't have enough food to feed themselves, much less war prisoners and other detainees. Which is inching quite close to the abortion arguments, especially if you reduce the victim to subhuman status. Hoping to show that this way of reasoning is misguided.
I don't find the German death camp analogy accurate or compelling; the Germans actively and deliberately herded up the Jews (and others) locked them up. This conscious intervention in the course of a living human being's life rendered responsibiloty onto the German state.
Have you heard of Judith Thompson's "famous violinist" thought experiment? [0] It neatly captures the idea of how a right to life oughtn't extend heavy legal responsibilities onto an individual. At least, most people would say that the main character has the right to say "no" to the situation.
[0] https://ethics.org.au/thought-experiment-the-famous-violinis...
# Free speech is dying in Britain - https://thespectator.com/topic/free-speech-died-britain/
Everything should be verified, but the article mentions cases that can be of concern.