Free speech...only for the approved

Criminal cases for online political speech are now commonplace in the UK. As The Independent‘s James Bloodworth reported, “around 20,000 people in Britain have been investigated in the past three years for comments made online.”

But it is by no means neutral. To put it mildly, not all online “hate speech” or advocacy of violence is treated equally. It is, for instance, extremely difficult to imagine that Facebook users who sanction violence by the UK in Iraq and Afghanistan, or who spew anti-Muslim slurs, or who call for and celebrate the deaths of Gazans, would be similarly prosecuted. In both the UK and Europe generally, cases are occasionally brought for right-wing “hate speech”. But the proposed punishments for such advocacy are rarely more than symbolic: trivial fines and the like. The real punishment is meted out overwhelmingly against dissidents and critics of the establishment view.

You’re allowed, by our generousity of liberty, to privately harbour opinions. But if you try to publicly advocate them on Facebook or Twitter, convince others to believe them, or teach them to your children, then you are a dangerous criminal who belongs in prison. Needless to say, no judge would lecture, let alone sentence, anyone for “holding to an ideology” that advocates violence by the British government in foreign countries, nor parents who indoctrinate their children to join the British military, nor those who led that country to invade and destroy Iraq in an aggressive war. The point is that this is the state punishing expression of some viewpoints while sanctioning others. This is about criminalising specific views anathema to the government’s policies and outlawing particular contrary value systems.

This eagerness to criminalise political speech becomes more compelling as social media vests ordinary individuals with greater autonomy to disseminate news as well as their views. We longer dependent on corporate media institutions acting as “responsible gatekeepers” of public opinion. Individuals all over the world are now able to collate their own news and circulate their own information via the internet. Many ordinary people now have video cameras on their mobiles and a Twitter account, which meant they were regularly uploading video which prevents journalists from ignoring or diluting events.

This democratising effect of political discourse have long been heralded as a future potential of the internet, but it is now a promise finally being fulfilled, and it is scaring the entrenched elite all over the world. Many westerners received news about daily developments in the “Arab Spring” from previously unknown Arab citizens using Twitter and Facebook rather than from Reuters or AP media outlets. That significantly increased sympathy for the protesters, now more humanised than ever before, at the expense of the Western-supported tyrannies (long protected by the media) which they were attempting to uproot.

Adapted from this article