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Comment by averysmallbird | Hacker News Reader

For whatever he did, he never needed to be the product of an international pile-on. Even having known and read about this feels like being a party to a tragedy.

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He did claim harassment with the police against the journalist who was initally investigating him: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0rd9y99grzo Now consider that this was in UK.

Uh, what about it being in the uk? I guess I've heard the press can be aggressive, but not sure if that's what you meant.

The UK has no legal freedom of speech protection. Which means you can use the courts to silence the press, as Russian oligarchs have been doing for many years:

> Government vows to stop Russian oligarchs ‘abusing’ British courts. Dominic Raab said the government was ‘taking action’ to end the ‘bullying’ to ‘protect our free press’

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/russia-ukrain...

> UK vows to stop the super-rich using courts to silence critics

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-60773942

> The UK has no legal freedom of speech protection.

This is completely untrue, as you can confirm by googling.

The UK has historically had a problem with overly restrictive libel laws and libel tourism, but that point can be made without making statements that are obviously false.

From an American viewpoint, no one else has “free speech”, UK included. The First Amendment is globally unique. So it’s a matter of definitions.

> The First Amendment to the US Constitution provides almost absolute protection to freedom of expression. By contrast, European and EU law curtails the right to freedom of expression. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2025/7728...

Yes, the First Amendment is unusually permissive. But the sentence "the UK has no legal freedom of speech protection" isn't sensible way to make that point. We're commenting on events which have received extensive (and probably disproportionate) coverage in the UK press, despite the best efforts of Arday and Cambridge. Clearly, their scheme to exploit UK law to silence the press didn't work out.

Also, on a minor note, this is an article about something that happened in the UK. An American viewpoint is as valid as any other, but it's not the most relevant here.

> From an American viewpoint, no one else has “free speech”, UK included.

That's funny as we see what happens regularly to people trying to exercise their free speech right against a small country in the middle east.

Had Cambridge applied the appropriate sanctions against Arday, the story would never have blown up like it did. Unfortunate

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