241–250 of 349 posts
Considering the staggering number of arrest for online/offensive communications in England & Wales, we should add Britain to the list of Russia and Iran 2017: ~5,500 arrests 2019: ~7,734 arrests 2023: ~12,183 arrests
And the partialness of arrests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaa_Abd_El-Fattah comes to mind whose tweets..
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"as almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech'" Are you serious here? In russia you get problems for calling a war a war and worse problems if you say it is a bad war. In UK you certainly can call a war a war and you can critize the government or other people all day long. What you cannot do is calling for violence against them. Or do you have counterexamples?
I've been hearing lots of crazy things about people getting arrested in the UK for posting "memes" or things like that. So I decided to look for examples. All the examples I can find are clearly hate speech, policed more strongly than I would prefer but not that much more strongly, if I'm honest. The most egregious case I could find was someone arrested for a meme of a pride flag morphing into a swastika. Probably no…
Several (christians) people in the UK have been arrested for "praying in their heads" outside of an abortion facility.
I don't find it classy to go pray for unborn babies that are getting "killed" but that's being arrested for a thought crime and it's not OK.
But then hundreds of muslims regularly openly praying in the streets even though the country is covered with mosques: not an issue. Nothing to see here. All perfectly normal.
The pro-muslim / anti-christian two-tier policy in the UK is just wild.
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Currently in China (as a visitor). Wireguard literally just works (to a VPS). Mullvad works as a commercial provider, just slower. Xray-core (vless, Trojan) if you're paranoid. I have my own proxy over syncthing relays https://github.com/acheong08/syndicate which I use to proxy to my home in the UK (residential IP) without exposing any ports. I get rate limited to around 10mbps in Chongqing. Was slightly higher in Be…
Does this offer any benefits over Tailscale and having an exit node at home?
Kind of a best case, worst case scenario thing such that I can switch between as necessary. WireGuard best case, Xray-core fallback, syncthing worst case
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Probably the most high-profile case was the Lucy Connolly one, where she posted: > "Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it” For additional context (which was relevant during the…
So explicitly calling for violence, not just "posting a political opinion" like so many people are claiming.
I think we could have a more thoughtful discussion if people didn't start off with an assumption that the way the US manages free speech is unquestionably better than the rest of the world. Take a breath and think before you write. It seems to me that what you are allowed to say in the US is very dependent on how much the person you are saying it about is able to spend on lawyers, for instance.
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So explicitly calling for violence, not just "posting a political opinion" like so many people are claiming.
If that comment meets the bar for "explicitly calling for violence", tens of Hackernews posters would be getting arrested daily for how they talk about billionaires. AOC should avoid travel to the UK because her "eat the rich" rhetoric is an explicit call for violence under this standard. Etc etc.
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Firstly, IB Times is one of the biggest news sources in existence. They own Newsweek. They do not pay for stories, and they do confirm sources, as they are an institutional capitalized outlet operating out of the UK (the friendliest jurisdiction for libel litigation in the world) that does not want to be sued out of existence. They are not a politicized outlet and generally swing left-wing, in contrast to some of the…
Maybe next time just look one one more click into the ownership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBT_Media IBT Media was owned by the parent company of Newsweek for 5 years 2013-2018. It is now owned by followers of this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Jang So... Yeah.
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"as almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech'" Are you serious here? In russia you get problems for calling a war a war and worse problems if you say it is a bad war. In UK you certainly can call a war a war and you can critize the government or other people all day long. What you cannot do is calling for violence against them. Or do you have counterexamples?
South Korea had ID-based web for two decades, everything you say is recorded and tied to your identity, forever. Please do educate yourself about the state of the political speech in the Korean part of the web.
In 2012, South Korean judges found the following to be unconstitutional [0], e.g. based on the person who complained about not being allowed to comment anonymously on YouTube and other sites (since Korean YouTube and other sites needed them to identify their real identity first):
1. Act to Promote Use of Communications Network and to Protect Information (as amended by Act No. 9119 of 13 June 2008)
2. Article 29 and Article 30, Paragraph 1 of the Enforcement Decree of the said Act (as amended by the Presidential Decree No 21278 of 28 January 2009)
Also, the Korean "Real Name" requirement was "rolled back", as reported at [1], which describes that "Article 44-5 of the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Data Protection, etc. (the 'ICN Act') was enacted in 2007... It required large-scale portal sites with more than 100,000 visitors on average a day to record the real name identities of visitors posting comments, usually via the poster's resident registration number (RRN).".
[0] "Constitutional Court of Korea, 2010 Heon Ma 47, 252 (consolidated), Re: Confirmation of unconstitutionality", https://www.opennetkorea.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Korean-real-name-law-decision-english.pdf
[1] "Korea Rolls Back ‘Real Name’ and ID Number Surveillance" (2012), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2187232Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am german and live here, but am not aware of such rulings. Please provide sources.
Because this thread started in a discussion about the United Kingdom, I think it is relevant to cite how this exact scenario did happen in the United Kingdom. https://www.facebook.com/piersmorganuncensored/videos/elizab... Elizabeth Kinney was arrested for a homophobic slur used privately in a text message to a third party -- not even a public comment -- against a man who physically beat her. The man served no jail t…
"The defendant and the victim in this matter had been friends but had a falling out which resulted in an incident on the October 27, 2024 whereby abusive and homophobic text messages were sent to the victim causing her alarm and distress."
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Do you have a credible source?
IBTimes: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/terrified-naked-mum-four-arrested-... Daily Mail: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15302729/Assault-vi... The Sun: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/37356128/mum-convicted-hate-cr... MSN: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/crime/general/terrified-and-naked-... Inkl: https://www.inkl.com/news/terrified-and-naked-mum-of-four-ar... Revolver News: https://revolver.news/2025/12/uk-mother-arre…
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/nasa-lies-claims-spark-fury-public...