One of the more egregious cases of denial of freedom of speech was the case of Paul Chambers in the infamous "Twitter Joke Trial". He tweeted
Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your s**t together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!
...and was convicted at Doncaster Crown Court, fined £385 and ordered to pay £600 in costs. His appeal to the Crown Court failed. So he had to take it to the High Courts, where, thankfully, the conviction was overturned. Because it was a joke.
Thanks to the ruling, something meant as a joke cannot reasonably be criminal if no one was actually frightened and the CPS issued new guidleines. And there's now a requirement to consider free speech protections under the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 10).
False equivalence is the blight of free speech. Giving equal time to views that are not based in any science or evidence base is a consequence of the enormous amount of false information out there and now widely believed by millions of people. Having conspiracy theorists and deniers on tv isn’t free speech. It’s perpetuating nonsense and is frankly dangerous.
False equivalence is the blight of free speech. Giving equal time to views that are not based in any science or evidence base is a consequence of the enormous amount of false information out there and now widely believed by millions of people. Having conspiracy theorists and deniers on tv isn’t free speech. It’s perpetuating nonsense and is frankly dangerous.
Again, who determines what is a conspiracy theory?
At one point in time, the Hunter Biden laptop story, the Wuhan lab story, and Joe Biden being senile were all examples of conspiracy theories. Not any more.
Should people promoting those stories have been banned from being on TV?
I'm sort of with the OP here. I miss the politics discussions and it irks me that we can't discuss, like adults, many of the pressing issues facing us right now. For many of us, this site is a primary social media outlet and a connection to what a lot of people experience and think, and I've certainly found it valuable in shaping my own attitudes. For example, I could have been a right old Remoaner if I didn't post here, but although I still consider Brexit a work of transatlanticist opportunism by those with Yank interests, I fully get why it was voted for and bear no animosity towards its proponents. However, as a Reform government potentially looms, I think it's useful to explore what they're offering (both on the surface and in actuality), just so we're all aware what we might be marching into. I will admit that I feel extremely negatively about many of the party's leadership, as I think they're essentially selfish demagogues willing to exploit grains of truth to construct divisive and dangerous narratives, but I also once again entirely understand the motive to vote for them in the context of what the other parties are or aren't offering. Ultimately, we need to swap notes to have this discussion properly. We need fuller information.
I think the issue with the contemporary discourse is that freedom of speech comes with deeply imperfect information. Individuals echo-chamber themselves into hives of the like-minded who can cultivate their media consumption choices to suit existing narratives. And usually when someone points this out, it's to impose the counter-narrative. Existing in a world where every hot-button issue is presented as a polar dichotomy is exhausting and it's the reason I quit Twitter even before Musk took it over.
What we need to be able to do is listen to each other and try to be receptive to each other's lived experiences. Call me old-fashioned, but online discussion is so much more fruitful when it isn't about what happens online
And, y'know, I say this as someone who used to adopt extremely unhelpful argument tactics on here. Calling people bigots doesn't really solve anything, or win arguments.
That said, online politics discussion does require active moderation, because it's very easy for someone with a narrative to entirely wreck a conversation with bad faith insistence and a total refusal to engage with what others are saying (as I say, I've been guilty of this myself in the past), so I get why it's been quasi-banned here - it's a big workload for a small moderation staff. But I think that bad faith is also quite easy to detect and even easier to remove from a discussion
Didn’t she plead guilty, and then the legal tariffs were applied?
Without knowing her or her legal representation I'd hazard a guess it went something like this
"Look, the evidence is inarguable, its there in black and white, plead guilty, take your medicine of a slap on the wrist and get on with your life"
People plead guilty to loads of things if they had time and resources to spare they never would plead guilty to.
I have been looking at the reporting of this case on the Sky, Guardian, New Statesman and BBC sites, especially looking at what the judgement said, and it does not come across as a ‘let’s get this over with’ guilty plea. There is a lot of context.
I think where I disagree is the definition of inciting violence.
For me, to incite violence, there has to be some element of organisation behind it - perhaps a time or place. Lucy Connolly, when writing that post, was just shouting at the wind.
It is an embarrasing thing to post, and I cringe when I read it, but she shouldn't be in prison for it.
She's in prison because she admitted to breaking the law.
The police thought she broke the law. She agreed with them. You might not agree with the definition of inciting violence.
If not inciting violence, what other way is there of interpreting the phrase she used, which was "set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b*******"?
False equivalence is the blight of free speech. Giving equal time to views that are not based in any science or evidence base is a consequence of the enormous amount of false information out there and now widely believed by millions of people. Having conspiracy theorists and deniers on tv isn’t free speech. It’s perpetuating nonsense and is frankly dangerous.
Again, who determines what is a conspiracy theory?
At one point in time, the Hunter Biden laptop story, the Wuhan lab story, and Joe Biden being senile were all examples of conspiracy theories. Not any more.
Should people promoting those stories have been banned from being on TV?
I don’t think that the examples you cite equate to conspiracy theories. There is no unequivocal body of evidence to suggest that they are undoubtedly wrong. There may be some degree of evidence that might lead one to think that those theories carry weight and some evidence to the contrary. Having people citing climate change is not real or that vaccines are dangerous or we’re all being sprayed by chem trails is very different to wondering whether Joe Biden is clinically senile.
a) officers are investigating social media posts from people of no influence when they won't even show up to a burglary (i.e. an actual crime) b) Judges are handing out inappropriately long prison sentences to people who present no danger to society and wouldn't even have been investigated in other western countries.
@cafcnick1992 can you give any examples of (b) where judges are handing out inappropriately long prison sentences to people who present no danger to society and who would not have been investigated in "other western countries"?
I think where I disagree is the definition of inciting violence.
For me, to incite violence, there has to be some element of organisation behind it - perhaps a time or place. Lucy Connolly, when writing that post, was just shouting at the wind.
It is an embarrasing thing to post, and I cringe when I read it, but she shouldn't be in prison for it.
This is kind of the problem with commentary of these sorts of things though. Ultimately it's just someone's personal threshold for what a complex legal issue is and key context is left out for why a decision was made. Your threshold for incitement isn't the one that the law uses, and with good reason. If someone writes on a public forum 'we should kill all the people with green eyes because they are destroying the purity of our people and you're not a real human if you don't you're a traitor. We should kill all of them and I don't care how you do it' at a time where there's a lot of unrest and anger towards people with green eyes stoked by the press then there's no time or place or organisation behind it but you can bet the people with green eyes are going to start feeling pretty nervous if that comment gets viewed and reposted thousands of times, and it's pretty hard to argue there's not an inciting nature to it.
Connolly encouraged setting fire to hotels housing asylum seekers and her comments were viewed 310,000 times and reposted 940 times in 3.5 hours before the tweet was removed. That's not shouting at the wind, that's shouting at a platform where hundreds of thousands of people managed to see what she said and then spread it further. This was in response to the Southport killings where there was a false rumour going round that the murderer was an illegal immigrant. Connolly posted this on 29th July 2024 incidentally, and on 4th August 2024 in Rotherham a mob attacked a hotel housing asylum seekers, smashed the windows and set the fire escape on fire in an attempt to burn down a building with people inside and give them no means to escape. Now obviously I'm not saying that Connolly's tweet directly influenced those individuals, but it's not hard to see how posting the inflammatory sort of rhetoric she did and it being spread contributed to the atmosphere where days later exactly the thing she suggested was attempted. She was a recipient of that kind of rhetoric herself when she fell for the disinformation that the likes of Tommy Robinson posted about the background of the Southport murderer. The context is key because your actions are far more likely to fall into the threshold of incitement if there is already a powder keg atmosphere and you're adding fuel to it rather than posting it at a less fractious time. She had also been posting racist comments towards Somalians days before and more comments days after about asylum seekers.
You've hand-waved away her admission of guilt earlier up the thread but both the prosecution and her own barrister agreed she "intended to incite serious violence". The appeal judge stated that 'Her acceptance that she read and was content with Mr Muir’s sentencing note, which includes references to the sentencing guideline and to the aggravating feature specifically mentioned in the guideline, clearly shows that she was well aware of what she was admitting.' No-one involved in this case at any point has argued that this wasn't incitement and sentencing guidelines for the offence say a starting point of 3 years. So if anything she's had a bit of leniency based on the usual process of the courts. I'm also slightly confused about why anyone is worried this sentence is too long compared to other offences; surely in that case people should be campaigning for longer sentences for the other apparently worse crimes than wanting to cut less headline crimes' sentences down? Don't worry about her getting less time, focus on the worse offenders getting more instead.
I think where I disagree is the definition of inciting violence.
For me, to incite violence, there has to be some element of organisation behind it - perhaps a time or place. Lucy Connolly, when writing that post, was just shouting at the wind.
It is an embarrasing thing to post, and I cringe when I read it, but she shouldn't be in prison for it.
She's in prison because she admitted to breaking the law.
The police thought she broke the law. She agreed with them. You might not agree with the definition of inciting violence.
If not inciting violence, what other way is there of interpreting the phrase she used, which was "set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b*******"?
I think i've made my reasons for not believing it was inciting violence pretty clear. You disagree and you're welcome to disagree. Lucy Connolly was not a person of influence, she was not addressing anyone, not identifying a time or place. She really was just shouting into the wind, and had the clarify 4 hours later to delete the post.
I think her imprisonment has set a poor precedent, especially during a time when Starmer is releasing people who genuinely pose a threat to society.
False equivalence is the blight of free speech. Giving equal time to views that are not based in any science or evidence base is a consequence of the enormous amount of false information out there and now widely believed by millions of people. Having conspiracy theorists and deniers on tv isn’t free speech. It’s perpetuating nonsense and is frankly dangerous.
Again, who determines what is a conspiracy theory?
At one point in time, the Hunter Biden laptop story, the Wuhan lab story, and Joe Biden being senile were all examples of conspiracy theories. Not any more.
Should people promoting those stories have been banned from being on TV?
I don’t think that the examples you cite equate to conspiracy theories. There is no unequivocal body of evidence to suggest that they are undoubtedly wrong. There may be some degree of evidence that might lead one to think that those theories carry weight and some evidence to the contrary. Having people citing climate change is not real or that vaccines are dangerous or we’re all being sprayed by chem trails is very different to wondering whether Joe Biden is clinically senile.
I think that's a bit disingenous. People promoting those stories I listed were identified as right-wing conspiracy theorists. I'm actually reading Jake Tapper's 'Original Sin' book at the moment and it was a deliberate tactic of white house staff to smear people who challenged Biden's cognitive function as conspiracy theorists. I'm just making the broader point that it's difficult to judge what is a conspiracy theory and what isn't.
Beautifully put Leuth, your extensive vocabulary is impressive and even more so when used in a context that means I dont have to look up what the word means!
You are so right, most of the topics that are prevalent at the moment become polarised in an instant when the truth normally sits somewhere in the middle where a civil discourse can take place. Delete as applicable immigration/politics/music/tv and film
a) officers are investigating social media posts from people of no influence when they won't even show up to a burglary (i.e. an actual crime) b) Judges are handing out inappropriately long prison sentences to people who present no danger to society and wouldn't even have been investigated in other western countries.
@cafcnick1992 can you give any examples of (b) where judges are handing out inappropriately long prison sentences to people who present no danger to society and who would not have been investigated in "other western countries"?
Well no I'm not a legal expert in all countries within the G7. That comment was a nod to the USA which has protections under the First Amendment, and very narrow hate speech laws.
I think where I disagree is the definition of inciting violence.
For me, to incite violence, there has to be some element of organisation behind it - perhaps a time or place. Lucy Connolly, when writing that post, was just shouting at the wind.
It is an embarrasing thing to post, and I cringe when I read it, but she shouldn't be in prison for it.
She's in prison because she admitted to breaking the law.
The police thought she broke the law. She agreed with them. You might not agree with the definition of inciting violence.
If not inciting violence, what other way is there of interpreting the phrase she used, which was "set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b*******"?
I think i've made my reasons for not believing it was inciting violence pretty clear. You disagree and you're welcome to disagree. Lucy Connolly was not a person of influence, she was not addressing anyone, not identifying a time or place. She really was just shouting into the wind, and had the clarify 4 hours later to delete the post.
I think her imprisonment has set a poor precedent, especially during a time when Starmer is releasing people who genuinely pose a threat to society.
I disagree with your assertion that she wasn't inciting violence simply because she was. The fact your wrong about this, however, does not mean you don't have the freedom to post your wrong opinion. That's what freedom of speech provides.
However many times you say she was "just shouting into the wind" doesn't counter the fact that she posted something to her thousands of followers - that was viewed by nearly a third of a million people - which was shown to be against the law. You can argue whether there was correlation or causation between her incitement to burning down asylum hotels and an asylum hotel being burned; but what you can't argue - successfully - is that she didn't break the law. Because she did.
The fact she's languishing in jail for years is a very good thing. Because, hopefully, it might make some people think again when they consider posting similar calls for violence. If she also learns to differentiate between "mere" racism and illegal calls for violence, then that's probably a good thing too.
We have laws protecting ourselves from the consequences of overstepping our perceived "right" to say whatever we like. Those who protest against the right of the government to protect us from these consequences risk those laws being tightened further. She shouldn't have posted it, because first it was dangerous and second it was against the law.
There's usually a good and bad side to everything but people should be able to voice their opinion.
I know there are Internet trolls and there are people who just want to cause harm.
It's just strange these days how relatively normal people get arrested based on what they write on the Internet.
Let's agree to disagree....
Actions speak louder than words....
Can you show me an actual case where someone has been arrested for writing something on the Internet that wasn't actually committing a crime such as hate speech or inciting violence?
It's not expressing controversial opinions that gets people arrested (as much as the media might lead you to thay conclusion) it's using those opinions to direct hate at or incite violence towards actual people
There's usually a good and bad side to everything but people should be able to voice their opinion.
I know there are Internet trolls and there are people who just want to cause harm.
It's just strange these days how relatively normal people get arrested based on what they write on the Internet.
Let's agree to disagree....
Actions speak louder than words....
Can you show me an actual case where someone has been arrested for writing something on the Internet that wasn't actually committing a crime such as hate speech or inciting violence?
It's not expressing controversial opinions that gets people arrested (as much as the media might lead you to thay conclusion) it's using those opinions to direct hate at or incite violence towards actual people
To be fair Chizz, i'm not arguing that she didn't break the law; i'm arguing that the law doesn't set the bar high enough for incitement of violence. You might disagree, that's fine.
I just worry about the longer term picture - the net closing in on people who write stupid things online, but who don't ever intend to cause any harm.
I'm a massive believer in free speech. It should separate us from dictatorships.
Hate speech is a different thing
I think what's going back and forth is speech is free until the wrong person doesn't like it, twitter is a swirling abyss of people second guessing, guessing and then a lot of hop, skips and jumps.
Some people get put in prison for exposing truths, some people don't, especially if they are a councillor in the greater London area.
I don't like what a fair chunk of prominent speakers in the media have to say, I'm glad they can say it thoigh and I dont have to agree with it, like it or even listen to it, thats a good system and that system should be protected. The less the government interferes in lives the better.
Edward Snowden, Tommy Robinson, Julian Assange all have been jailed for non-violent offences in high category prisons and whatever i personally think of them I do not agree with them being jailed for speaking about things politicians don't like
Robinson was jailed for, I believe, repeating something he was found guilty of slander/libel over.
And that's just it. I've said things about one of our previous owners that could be taken as an incitement to violence depending on how someone looks at it
Lucy Connolly is guilty of being an idiot, I don't believe anyone, hand on heart believes posting unpleasant things that she did is worthy of a prison sentence. I say that as someone who regularly talks about publicly flogging people who use their phones in cinemas, planes or in public generally.
It was hateful speech however I'd hope some intelligence was to be applied to someone of her pedigree posting stupid shit. She doesn't have an audience of willing participants to rouse to my knowledge anyway.
She was quite literally suggesting setting human beings on fire.
a) officers are investigating social media posts from people of no influence when they won't even show up to a burglary (i.e. an actual crime) b) Judges are handing out inappropriately long prison sentences to people who present no danger to society and wouldn't even have been investigated in other western countries.
@cafcnick1992 can you give any examples of (b) where judges are handing out inappropriately long prison sentences to people who present no danger to society and who would not have been investigated in "other western countries"?
Well no I'm not a legal expert in all countries within the G7. That comment was a nod to the USA which has protections under the First Amendment, and very narrow hate speech laws.
I don't think there are any examples. If that really is one of your two concerns, then I think you can be assured you don't need to worry about that one.
I'll put it another way, I don't agree with the amount being spent to keep this woman in jail, without knowing if she has a career or whatever, the subsequent derailing of that and supporting of her on welfare as it is very hard for released prisoners to get work that covers household outgoings.
I don't have sympathy for her, she is not my cup of tea at all but she is guilty of being a thicko in my humble opinion.
That woman who posted a picture of her grumble on a under 10s football WhatsApp group got as much mileage on twitter and from what I've seen people seem to want to give oxygen to bollocks like what she posted as if to go "look, look at what the people of the UK think" when its one pissed up molisher who possibly spends their life saying and doing stupid things and not in anyway representative. I don't believe its a genuine incitement to violence and she shouldn't be in prison. I'm not on her side, and I think she should be made to pick up litter every Sunday for the foreseeable at worst
Thats not how I understand it but we will start arguing getting into the weeds and i dont suppose either of us can be bothered with that. I could well be wrong and so could you. My point was regarding him as well as the other two is I think people have done worse things and were not sent to prison, Huw Edwards off the top of my head as one. Maybe the ones who don't seem to get punished have better briefs or maybe telling truths, and for the sake of an argument I'm talking about Assange and Snowden here, upset people who dont like being upset or shown up. Assange is someone I really dont like the feel of however I equally don't like how he is being treated or Snowden
The courts tend to come down quite heavily on people who break an agreement with the courts. That’s what Robinson went inside for. I don’t know of any other way of understanding it.
Comments
as for the why's and wherefores of the case, here they are, instead of nonsense read on social media
https://davidallengreen.com/2025/05/explaining-a-31-month-sentence-for-a-tweet/
At one point in time, the Hunter Biden laptop story, the Wuhan lab story, and Joe Biden being senile were all examples of conspiracy theories. Not any more.
Should people promoting those stories have been banned from being on TV?
I think the issue with the contemporary discourse is that freedom of speech comes with deeply imperfect information. Individuals echo-chamber themselves into hives of the like-minded who can cultivate their media consumption choices to suit existing narratives. And usually when someone points this out, it's to impose the counter-narrative. Existing in a world where every hot-button issue is presented as a polar dichotomy is exhausting and it's the reason I quit Twitter even before Musk took it over.
What we need to be able to do is listen to each other and try to be receptive to each other's lived experiences. Call me old-fashioned, but online discussion is so much more fruitful when it isn't about what happens online
Will be interesting to see if they use this as a guideline for Ricky Jones.
"Most recent by Leuth" .... here we go!
Nearly wet myself with excitement clicking on the thread expecting an all timer.
Bollocks, agree with him.
If he broke a court order to say he must stop, should he not go to prison
That said, online politics discussion does require active moderation, because it's very easy for someone with a narrative to entirely wreck a conversation with bad faith insistence and a total refusal to engage with what others are saying (as I say, I've been guilty of this myself in the past), so I get why it's been quasi-banned here - it's a big workload for a small moderation staff. But I think that bad faith is also quite easy to detect and even easier to remove from a discussion
There is a lot of context.
The police thought she broke the law. She agreed with them. You might not agree with the definition of inciting violence.
If not inciting violence, what other way is there of interpreting the phrase she used, which was "set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b*******"?
this is what he does nowadays by the way (no, I'm not joking, go and look)
Connolly encouraged setting fire to hotels housing asylum seekers and her comments were viewed 310,000 times and reposted 940 times in 3.5 hours before the tweet was removed. That's not shouting at the wind, that's shouting at a platform where hundreds of thousands of people managed to see what she said and then spread it further. This was in response to the Southport killings where there was a false rumour going round that the murderer was an illegal immigrant. Connolly posted this on 29th July 2024 incidentally, and on 4th August 2024 in Rotherham a mob attacked a hotel housing asylum seekers, smashed the windows and set the fire escape on fire in an attempt to burn down a building with people inside and give them no means to escape. Now obviously I'm not saying that Connolly's tweet directly influenced those individuals, but it's not hard to see how posting the inflammatory sort of rhetoric she did and it being spread contributed to the atmosphere where days later exactly the thing she suggested was attempted. She was a recipient of that kind of rhetoric herself when she fell for the disinformation that the likes of Tommy Robinson posted about the background of the Southport murderer. The context is key because your actions are far more likely to fall into the threshold of incitement if there is already a powder keg atmosphere and you're adding fuel to it rather than posting it at a less fractious time. She had also been posting racist comments towards Somalians days before and more comments days after about asylum seekers.
You've hand-waved away her admission of guilt earlier up the thread but both the prosecution and her own barrister agreed she "intended to incite serious violence". The appeal judge stated that 'Her acceptance that she read and was content with Mr Muir’s sentencing note, which includes references to the sentencing guideline and to the aggravating feature specifically mentioned in the guideline, clearly shows that she was well aware of what she was admitting.' No-one involved in this case at any point has argued that this wasn't incitement and sentencing guidelines for the offence say a starting point of 3 years. So if anything she's had a bit of leniency based on the usual process of the courts. I'm also slightly confused about why anyone is worried this sentence is too long compared to other offences; surely in that case people should be campaigning for longer sentences for the other apparently worse crimes than wanting to cut less headline crimes' sentences down? Don't worry about her getting less time, focus on the worse offenders getting more instead.
I think her imprisonment has set a poor precedent, especially during a time when Starmer is releasing people who genuinely pose a threat to society.
You are so right, most of the topics that are prevalent at the moment become polarised in an instant when the truth normally sits somewhere in the middle where a civil discourse can take place. Delete as applicable immigration/politics/music/tv and film
However many times you say she was "just shouting into the wind" doesn't counter the fact that she posted something to her thousands of followers - that was viewed by nearly a third of a million people - which was shown to be against the law. You can argue whether there was correlation or causation between her incitement to burning down asylum hotels and an asylum hotel being burned; but what you can't argue - successfully - is that she didn't break the law. Because she did.
The fact she's languishing in jail for years is a very good thing. Because, hopefully, it might make some people think again when they consider posting similar calls for violence. If she also learns to differentiate between "mere" racism and illegal calls for violence, then that's probably a good thing too.
We have laws protecting ourselves from the consequences of overstepping our perceived "right" to say whatever we like. Those who protest against the right of the government to protect us from these consequences risk those laws being tightened further. She shouldn't have posted it, because first it was dangerous and second it was against the law.
I just worry about the longer term picture - the net closing in on people who write stupid things online, but who don't ever intend to cause any harm.
I don't have sympathy for her, she is not my cup of tea at all but she is guilty of being a thicko in my humble opinion.
That woman who posted a picture of her grumble on a under 10s football WhatsApp group got as much mileage on twitter and from what I've seen people seem to want to give oxygen to bollocks like what she posted as if to go "look, look at what the people of the UK think" when its one pissed up molisher who possibly spends their life saying and doing stupid things and not in anyway representative. I don't believe its a genuine incitement to violence and she shouldn't be in prison. I'm not on her side, and I think she should be made to pick up litter every Sunday for the foreseeable at worst