Anyone with access to the internet will be aware of the recent social unrest in Britain. Uncontroversially, individuals who rioted have found themselves on the receiving end of a harsh and swift law enforcement response. Controversially, individuals speaking about the riots — both at the protests and online — have found themselves in trouble as well.

In the United States, citizens are free to nonviolently express any opinion, in more or less any form. We can offend, insult, shock, even verbally abuse. We can express support for groups that commit, or have committed, violence. We can even say “hateful” things, because, as the U.S. Supreme Court said in Matal v. Tam (2017), “the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”

Critics of American-style free speech describe it as “free speech absolutism,” but consistently misunderstand, and often misrepresent, what American free speech really entails. It doesn’t mean allowing threats, direct incitements, or solicitations to commit a crime — these are illegal. “Free speech” means simply that there’s a powerful legal presumption that the government cannot police nonviolently expressed opinions, even in extreme cases where those opinions advocate for or express support for violence, but only to the extent that the expression of those opinions does not constitute active participation in a criminal act. No more, no less.

In the UK, however, expressing views controversial enough to cause a fuss on Reddit is increasingly likely to result in someone you’ve never met reporting you to the police. This isn’t new: the publication of controversial speech in England has for decades, even centuries, been enough to get you fined, imprisoned, or worse. The apparent new reality of media and speech regulation in the UK is really quite an old state of affairs, but one made far worse by a new Labour government flexing its muscles after a decade and a half out of power, during which time the internet grew exponentially, and British control over the internet didn’t.

When out of power, Labour and its adjacent media organs recoiled in horror at Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the blossoming of dissident opinion the acquisition enabled. Now vested with absolute power, and wielding existing overbroad speech laws, Labour has wasted no time using them in new and inventive ways to assert control over public discourse that appears — suddenly and for the first time in years — hostile to its policy goals and political philosophy.

The Labour government and its agents have thus responded to the riots by threatening social media users around the world with censorship. Public officials have threatened to extradite Americans for UK speech code violations, and dissident scientist Robert Malone claims a Member of Parliament told him “even a stopover through Heathrow isn’t safe for Americans who have spoken out about immigration issues.”

In the UK, political speech that’s allowed in the US is either banned or, more often, bannable. This is largely because the country’s speech laws place the determination of what speech is permitted in the hands of the hearer, not an objective legal standard. For example, per the UK’s Public Order Act 1986, “abusive or insulting” words, writing, or behavior “likely” to cause someone to feel harassed, distressed, or alarmed can result in a jail sentence of up to seven years. What constitutes “abusive” speech depends entirely on the political orientation of the hearer. In the past, these laws have been used to justify the arrest of street preachers expressing traditional notions of Christian morality, Iraq war protestors, protestors objecting to disability benefit cuts, and people putting signs in their windows opposing UK migration policy. Where the police refuse to act, private groups are allowed to fund their own private criminal prosecutions against political enemies.

On the internet, a provision in Section 127 of the UK’s Communications Act 2003 makes it a crime for a person to “[send] by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene, or menacing character.” Whether the opinion expressed is honestly held or a joke, or even true, is of no concern to the law; determining the message’s “gross offensiveness,” and nothing more, is enough.

The textbook example of Section 127 enforcement is the case of Director of Public Prosecutions v Collins (2006), where the defendant “made a number of telephone calls” to his local MP and left voicemails about immigration policy using various slurs. The lower courts held that while offensive, the language wasn’t grossly offensive, so a conviction couldn’t be sustained. But the House of Lords, then the UK’s highest court, disagreed. Finding the language “grossly offensive,” the court — by its own admission — declined to articulate any objective principle by which speech might be determined to fall within the range of acceptable conduct. Instead, the court essentially argued that judges should just guess what an indeterminate number of other people in “society” — who were not witnesses or parties to the case, and whose views were not in evidence — were likely to think about the speech in question:

Justices must apply the standards of an open and just multi-racial society, [and the] words must be judged taking account of their context and all relevant circumstances… Usages and sensitivities may change over time… There can be no yardstick of gross offensiveness otherwise than by the application of reasonably, but not perfectionist, contemporary standards to the particular message sent in its particular context. The test is whether a message is couched in terms liable to cause gross offence to those to whom it relates.” (Emphasis added.)

Put another way, the UK precedents on Section 127 unequivocally state that the standard against which “offensive” online speech must be judged is imperfect, inconstant, uncertain, and subjective. Such a “yardstick” is anything but, and it’s uniquely inappropriate online, where short-form messages can be distributed to millions of people in minutes, each with his or her own conception of what’s offensive. The English system nonetheless believes that lower court judges will fairly measure the thread of freedom to which defendants are entitled, despite having no uniform measuring rod.

U.S. free speech jurisprudence recognizes, correctly, that approaches like the UK’s replace legal certainty — a constitutional virtue — with the personal politics and preferences of paid agents of the state, and the state’s institutional priorities — a constitutional vice. Democracy is meaningless if you’re not allowed to offend the state. Nevertheless, UK speech laws install those who would take offense or cast themselves as victims of ideas as the ultimate arbiters of acceptable speech, rather than an objective, viewpoint-neutral standard that’s knowable in advance. This is why getting arrested for expressing support for the UK government-backed Free Syrian Army is virtually unheard of, for example, but getting arrested for expressing support for Islamist groups like ISIL or the Al-Nusra Front is extremely common. Even though every belligerent in the Syria conflict, including the Syrian government itself, engages in the statutory definition of “terrorism” under Section 1 of the Terrorism Act 2000, one viewpoint is officially tolerated, and the others aren’t.

The British state is, thankfully, squandering its power, visibly panicking and trying to censor and arrest its way out of criticism of its response to the rioting. But in light of the clear precedents set over the last few weeks, we’re unable to tell the truth about the riots here without risking getting arrested, given that we’re in Britain as of the time of writing. It’s not worth the hassle, so we can’t write it, and you can’t read it.

But since every possible opinion on the riots is being openly debated on X — where it’s beamed to the UK at the speed of light, like a Radio Free Europe for the internet age — the fact that we can't write honestly about the riots doesn't really matter. And this is the crux of the issue: whether or not the British state and courts value truth doesn’t change its fundamental importance. The state can criminalize truth-telling, even mandate lying, but it can’t legislate the truth itself. Thanks to X, truth-seeking isn't subject to the whims of the British state. Unfortunately, this dynamic has led to widespread calls from the British chattering classes for X to be shut down, and triggered a poorly scripted hysteria over “disinformation,” “safety,” “hate,” and the like, all terribly clichéd and banal at this point.

But the propaganda isn’t working. When the UK government tweeted “Think before you post,” it got ratio'd into oblivion. When the Guardian posted that “two-tier policing” is a myth, X users responded with multiple Guardian stories about two-tier policing, which Musk boosted. And rather than addressing legitimate concerns about two-tier policing — concerns directly related to the structure of British law and the manner in which it’s been enforced for decades — the British regime’s immune response has been to trot out a procession of toadies, including a former UK-resident Twitter VP who left the company two years before Musk acquired it, to imply that Musk ought to be extradited to the UK to stand trial for hate crimes. Due to the extradition treaty between the US and the UK, and the fact that Musk’s activity on and management of the platform is protected by both the Constitution and 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1) in the United States, this will never happen.

This would all be hilarious, if it weren’t so tragic. After the internet’s laughter dies down, the British people will still have a government that’s waging an open war on free expression without regard for its own legitimacy, which is degrading with alarming speed.

To borrow from Andrew Breitbart’s best-known aphorism, law is downstream of politics. The original, politics is downstream of culture, is often followed with and culture is downstream of technology. We suspect something similar applies here. Across political systems, legal systems, and cultures, the state is at existential odds with the internet, terrified of regular people communicating beyond its control. It’s been drunk on the power afforded by the centralizing tendencies of radio and television, where communication flows in one direction only. And, in its final throes, the state’s response is to lash out with decreasing coherence, but increasing aggression, as the balance of power flows back to individuals.

Today’s statist propaganda, which holds a monopoly on conversation seemingly everywhere except X, wants to convince you free speech is the aberration, and narrative control is the norm. But technologically-based narrative control is, in the first place and in the broad sweep of recent history, the aberration. Free speech is a philosophical primitive worth fighting for, and we seem to be in the early innings of a return to a saner, safer, and freer paradigm.

Can technology help the UK — and the world — find a way through this censorship crisis? Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has suggested “there are only three censorship resistant technologies at scale today: tor, bitcoin, and nostr.” The first two are relatively well-known, but the third, nostr, is a relatively newer and smaller phenomenon. Flourishing primarily within and adjacent to the Bitcoin ecosystem, and backed publicly by Dorsey, nostr gives users uncensorable and potentially anonymous identity tools in the form of content signed by public and private key pairs, rather than accounts controlled by centralized social media entities. We admit to being fans of all three, but the particulars don’t matter so much as our general thesis: the more that freedom can be embedded in the technology we use as an intrinsic property — rather than as a circumstantial feature — the better. We mention these at all to give the interested reader some idea of where to look and what to do next.

Freedom of speech is incredibly lucky to have Elon as its patron, with other, much smaller censorship-resistant social media companies like Gab and Rumble also refusing to bend to content policing by foreign states despite years of formal and informal pressure. But ultimately, relying on uncensorable technology is better than relying on mere mortals. It’s all but inevitable that as various states’ grasp on centralized media apparatuses slip even further, they will become even more dangerous, and freedom of speech more imperiled (see: the EU’s Thierry Breton threatening Musk with regulatory enforcement for daring to interview Donald Trump). Musk’s benefaction is a welcome intervention, but not a sustainable one.

We fear we are unprepared. Until we advance to a less easily censorable information environment, or there are fundamental changes in the law, the UK can't be said to have freedom of speech in any way, shape, or form. Regardless, Radio Free Britain has been an amazing experience — even if we can’t speak, only listen.

— Allen Farrington and Preston Byrne