I'm trying to give this comment a gracious reading. You can find videos on YouTube from the last couple months of police talking to people about comments they left online, and tweets, and FB posts, etc. So saying that practice "was put to an end a couple of years ago" is a complete fiction.
The freedom/security quote, why should that be uniquely American? Human rights are human rights, and if something infringes on them what does it matter whether or not a particular government acknowledges it? It's still an infringement and should be fought.
> It is much harder to make glib assertions that principles are more important than physical safety when the violence happens in your city.
Or maybe that's exactly the time you should make those assertions all the more loudly. Principles don't mean anything if you only hold them when it's easy, and we should all stop treating people who drop their principles at the slightest road bump as some kind of warrior for safety or whatever they'd like to frame it as, and treat them as they are - cowards and authoritarians.
This is the first I've heard about the Forbidden Meatballs, thank you for the chuckle.
> For those who are concerned that they will have to engage a solicitor to write reams of policies for their small Mastodon instance, need I remind you how utterly half-arsed everything in this country is?
Oh so the hope is just that the government is too ineffectual to prosecute something they're completely within their rights to prosecute? How is that not absolute madness?
Why in the world would you trust a government to enforce this fairly? What's to say your Conservative Party doesn't use this to target prominent supporters of Labour, or vice versa?
> The Act requires protections for free speech
As an American (the horror, I know, that I deign to comment on something British), I'd love to know where your freedom of speech is codified and what a government would have to do if they wanted to change what counts as speech, what doesn't, and what's protected and what isn't. I suspect that you and I have very different definitions of what qualifies as free speech.
At the end this seems like the same thing we see in the US a lot - this is something my side of the political divide supports, so I should support it, so I'm going to twist myself into a mental pretzel to support it, even if it solves no real problem, opens up a huge door for future government abuse, and further erodes the rights of everyone.