Comment by brigandish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brigandish | Hacker News Reader

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> they do not arrest thousands of people a year for being mean on twitter, no.

It doesn't need to be thousands for it to be worrying.

From [1]:

> The Metropolitan Police has awarded Father Ted creator and Irish comedian Graham Linehan £25,000 and an unreserved apology after they arrested him last year as his plane touched down at Heathrow airport.

> Last year, Graham Linehan — who now lives in Arizona, United States of America — was arrested by five armed police officers as he landed at Heathrow airport in one of the most shocking incidents we have seen in years.

> What was Graham's supposed crime? Three gender-critical posts on X. This is despite the fact that gender-critical beliefs are protected under the Equality Act 2010 and were reaffirmed by last year's landmark Supreme Court ruling, which settled that "sex" is defined by biology, not gender identity.

Armed police for 3 tweets on a political topic, seems like overkill in an unfortunately possible literal use of the word. It also seems that it is far more than one, too:

> General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, Lord Young, said: "I'm beginning to lose count of the number of cases we've fought in which the police have arrested someone for a tweet, decided to take no further action and then had to pay them substantial compensation for wrongful arrest.

[1] https://freespeechunion.org/news/met-police-apologises-and-p...

> It doesn't need to be thousands for it to be worrying.

I very much agree, which is another reason I think facts are important. There are real issues and discussing them using real data is great, productive etc.

But instead of rational debate what I see time and again is spurious figures like these thrown around by talking heads, repeated by posters like those above, trying to ... well I don't know, I don't fully understand why the US right wing thinks it's a smart move to demonise its allies at the moment, but here we are.

> Armed police for 3 tweets on a political topic, seems like overkill in an unfortunately possible literal use of the word.

Yeah, it's a gross abuse of police power. Linehan seems like he's a bit of a nob, but being a bit of a nob in public shouldn't attract anything like this sort of attention. The police need to be reined in seriously, and to have pointed questions put to them about what they think is their damn job and where the money is going. At least it looks like he won the day in court, and the policy has changed - https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/jul/09/graham-lineh... - but IMHO heads should be rolling over this.

The facts are:

- people are being arrested, charged, and prosecuted, for opinions

- that number is greater than 1

- the number of people being arrested under speech laws, per year, is reportedly[0] over 12,000

- some substantial number of those are for opinions, some are not but we don't know how many either way [0] (and considering the government were attempting to delete the Courtdesk archive[1], I'd say that's by design)

- "convictions and sentencings for the relevant offences had decreased dramatically" [0]

This points to overzealous policing and vague laws.

The criticisms by Americans, who are surely aghast at this state of affairs given their founding principles, cannot be dismissed until better numbers are available, but while the number we do know is > 1, the criticisms are valid if not entirely sound (but may be entirely sound).

[0] https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...

[1] https://www.legalcheek.com/2026/02/ministry-of-justice-order...

I agree there is a problem if even 1 person is treated like this.

I disagree that the American commentary on it is well informed, motivated by anything approaching principle, or really anything other than a desire to paint the UK in the worst possible light. Such figures being bandied around form part of a larger narrative along with false claims about "no-go" areas and hysteria about London having a Muslim mayor.

It's effectively rage-porn for the US right wing. We can see this in the continued framing as "12000 people arrested for inappropriate speech", when that number includes death threats as part of (for example) domestic violence cases.

Meanwhile, of course, let's ignore that the US President is weaponising the civil justice system in the US to silence critics and journalism he finds unfavourable.

> (but may be entirely sound)

We know they're not entirely sound, because the category of offences is wide enough that the number of these offences which are not, in fact, related to expressing one's opinion on social media is substantial. The arrests cover stalking and harassment, making death threats and threats of violence, racial abuse, intimidation, and inciting hatred via any form of communication down to and including snail mail.

So if there's one thing we do know, it's that the actual number arrested for "posts they make online" that should really be considered free speech is unlikely to be anywhere near that, and as such the statistic itself is useless. It's like looking at the overall death rate for the US (approximately 3 million) and proclaiming to be shocked at the results of gun ownership. But it will continue to be thrown around because it fits a specific narrative.

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