11 ms·

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:

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

nomilk 10mo ago
I was also surprised the post focusses on Rus/Iran when Australia, UK, and many more countries (Malaysia, Thailand) have/are introducing laws to prevent large swaths of free speech (banning mediums by age, banning conversation by topic, or by making speaking one's mind online too risky, as almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech').
- Guestmodinfo 10mo ago
  India why forget us. Only thing is you may not find exact data.
- RobotToaster 10mo ago
  Tor is primarily funded by the US State department, that's why.
  - iamnothere 10mo ago
    Depends on what you mean by primarily. US government funding is still the largest single portion of their funding, but they are trying to diversify. Most funding comes from non-government sources: https://blog.torproject.org/financials-blog-post-2023-2024/ https://blog.torproject.org/financials-blog-post-2023-2024/
- aprilthird2021 10mo ago
  Yes. I think social media or app bans should count as well, as well as consequences for things posted on social media which are simply opinions. I think killing of journalists should count as well (so probably India, Israel, etc.) And I think also frivolous suits lodged by the govt at people for their speech. So that would include suing Twitter users for making jokes about the FBI director girlfriend, etc. One of the biggest things to censor speech the US is doing is forcing the sale of TikTok to government friendly group. There are many ways governments censor our speech, and they seem, sadly, to be increasing worldwide
- otabdeveloper4 10mo ago
  Iran is le bad. Oceania has always been at war with ~Venezuela~ Iran, citizen.
- wartywhoa23 10mo ago
  The neighbouring pot must always seem hotter to the frogs that are being boiled in their own one, that's a rule of the kitchen.
- widdershins 10mo ago
  > almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech' I only know about the UK, but this is not really true there. Your speech has to be obviously threatening or abusive, and obviously motivated by prejudice towards one of a few categories (disability, race, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation are the main ones). If you don't make threatening or abusive remarks towards these groups, you aren't breaking the law.
  - jmnicolas 10mo ago
    "Abusive" and "threatening" is "in the eye of the beholder".
    - kolektiv 10mo ago
      Well, no, more accurately, when it comes to it, it's in the eyes of a judge (or a jury in some cases). You can have all kinds of arguments about validity of arrests, of prosecutions, etc., but it's still fundamentally a system where you'll be charged with an offence and then either convicted or not. I don't know of a single case (and don't believe anyone can point to one) where people have been arrested for simply criticising politicians. Has the number of incidents risen over recent years? Yes, and while this might be partly explained by stricter legal approaches, I suspect it's much more to do with a drastic rise in far-right activity and a consequent feeling among many that they can now say/do whatever they like with impunity (including making threatening and inflammatory remarks about minorities, and so on).
      - hkt 10mo ago
        Not exactly a judge or jury. IIRC a common law assault can go on with only the subjective experience of threat. Hard to prove, but the bar is not objective. See: https://sentencingcouncil.org.uk/resources/common-offences/assault/ https://sentencingcouncil.org.uk/resources/common-offences/a... That is by no means the only crime that is committed subjectively.
        kolektiv 10mo ago
- lukan 10mo ago
  "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?
  - antonymoose 10mo ago
    In Germany you can receive a suspended sentence for raping a minor and then an actual jail sentence for insulting the rapist. I’ve seen similar outrageous arrests for mean tweets in the UK. Europe has lost its mind about right and wrong.
    - lukan 10mo ago
      I am german and live here, but am not aware of such rulings. Please provide sources.
      - aljgz 10mo ago
        As upvotes are not visible, I also ask for a few occurrences of this.
      - antonymoose 10mo ago
        The “Maja R” case would be a good start.
        lukan 10mo ago
        Threats of violence, not insults.
      - sanskritical 10mo ago
        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/elizabeth-kinney-the-mum-who-was-arrested-for-using-a-slur-word-in-private-text-/25218375061188976/ 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 time for beating her.
- blell 10mo ago
  It’s much simpler. The Tor project is politically biased in a way that they think the things the UK arrest people for should get people arrested.
  - berkes 10mo ago
    That's a very serious and bold accusation you make there. It's so serious, that you should really back it up with some evidence or at least some foundation. Got any?
    - blell 10mo ago
      What kind of evidence would you take? If it’s someone from the project openly saying what I imply, there obviously isn’t any. But if you are looking for evidence that the project took a politically biased turn to one side of the aisle, I’m sure you’ll find a lot on your own. And from there you can understand why there isn’t a single mention of what’s happening in the UK. In this very thread you can find lots of comments excusing the censorship because it’s being used to censor the “wrong ideas”.
      - fn-mote 10mo ago
        I would even accept hearsay as better than “you’ll find a lot on your own.” I totally agree these comments contain discussion of controversial cases, but your claim is surprising to the point of being unbelievable without any kind of support. To give the most optimistic take: Perhaps in your country, one political party is much more pro-censorship than another, so an anti-censorship stance seems aligned against that party? That’s believable; it happens in many countries (probably including mine; it can be hard to tell, since pro-censorship is a very common stance here).
      - berkes 9mo ago
        I'll take any of the lot that i could "find [..] on my own". Or hearsay. Or quotes from tinfoilhats or conspiracy nuts even. Without any of these, you are seriously discrediting people and projects. And without any of these, there's no way for me counter any. Or even authorize any (ie a random russian troll, vs a journalist with reputation to lose)
- berkes 10mo ago
  > swaths of free speech Which is very cultural dependent as well. "Not being able to log in on TikTok if you are under 16" is not "preventing free speech". And "having no access to pornhub" is not preventing free speech either. Edit: TBC: this is not me defending these laws or rules. E.g. Freedom of speech in the US, is rather narrow. It merely states you may "speak, write, and print with freedom" but not that you may do so anywhere, on any platform, on private property. It doesn't state that such speech, writings or printings must reach everyone. The UNHCR article 19 goes further, though. But it doesn't automatically apply to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights#cite_note-:1-13 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human... It includes `... and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers`. And all these only apply to governments. Many of the examples you mention, aren't government-imposed but imposed by private entities (who, granted, often pre-emptively self-censor). E.g. certain words used on Instagram or in Yourube videos will hurt monetization, or will cause it's discovery or promotion to severely degrade; which is why people use phrases like "unalived". So let's not pretend the US is any good in this. Dutch culture used to be rather free with nudity in movies and on TV. Every Dutch movie from before the era of US streaming services had at least a pair of naked boobies bouncing around. But this, and in it's wake the entire culture has become more prude-ish. A form of cultural colonialism by the US. Not terrible, but a good example of private companies imposing self-censorship even in places where it really is not needed. IANAL, but I'm quite certain youtube would be allowed to run videos with nudity just fine in most of (nothern?) Europe. But they don't.
  - orbital-decay 10mo ago
    >"Not being able to log in on TikTok if you are under 16" is not "preventing free speech". And "having no access to pornhub" is not preventing free speech either. Right. It's having to profile yourself under the excuse of not letting kids use TikTok or PornHub.
  - lux-lux-lux 10mo ago
    Restrictions on adult websites are invariably extremely political. PornHub gets tailored bans while the Reddits and Twitters gleefully serve up gargantuan amounts of pornography; payment processors threaten to wreck Itch and Steam for including 18+ games while Ani is sexting with children.
vscode-rest 10mo ago
You must keep in mind TOR is funded in large part by the US government. It’s a bad look for them to put their allies in the same list as their enemies.
- danielbln 10mo ago
  Bad looks haven't really been a deterrent to much of anything in US politics for a while.
  - vscode-rest 10mo ago
    You misunderstand the game. It’s all about who considers what a bad look.
    - ben_w 10mo ago
      Yes, but in this context the US is very much putting European allies on various relevant naughty lists, in the name of "free speech" but unfortunately it does need the air-quotes.
earthnail 10mo ago
I’d much rather get arrested in Britain than Russia or Iran. And I certainly wouldn’t put the UK in the same bucket as Russia and Iran. Not even close. Hate speech is a problem. If it wasn’t, why are Russia and China spending so much on troll farms? It’s a direct attack on a democracy’s ability to form consensus. I don’t think we’ve found the right, effective way to deal with this problem yet, but I applaud any democratic country that tries sth in that area. I also think Tor is great, just for the record.
- throwfaraway135 10mo ago
  The problem is that it is really difficult to define what hate speech is, and more often than not it's used as a cudgel to silence the opposition. For Iran and Russia, it is what Khamenei and Putin don't want to hear, in the UK it's what Starmer doesn't want to hear.
  - delichon 10mo ago
    Apparently it isn't very hard to define as you just did so quite accurately. It's just whatever those who control the definition don't want to hear.
    - immibis 10mo ago
      Murder is just the killing of people who are liked by those who control the definition of murder. But everyone still agrees murder should be illegal.
      - delichon 10mo ago
        Murder is a far brighter line than hate, and therefore a law against it enables far less arbitrary power.
        immibis 10mo ago
        It means ICE officers can kill you but you can't kill ICE officers. This is arguably an even worse asymmetry than the one about speech.
meowmeowmeowa 10mo ago
[dead]
RobotToaster 10mo ago
To put that into perspective, the number arrested in Russia was 3,253 in 2023.
- mrtksn 10mo ago
  Sounds like Russians learned their lesson. There's similar phenomenon in safety stats. In the stats Istanbul appears to be vastly safer than London but having lived in both, I can tell you why Istanbul is safer: Because public spaces don't exist and private spaces are guarded with bars and steel doors. In London, there's pubs etc. everywhere, in Istanbul you are limited to few centers to be outside after 10. The places where people go are bustling because they serve a city of 16 million, so they are well lit and guarded. In London, there are parks and guard free public spaces everywhere. In istanbul there are very few such places. In London people mostly live in homes that don't have bars on the windows but in Istanbul there's bars on the first floor on every window on any building that's not a gated community. People with money live in gated communities or one of the very few upscale district. In London you can walk ro everywhere, it has wide sidewalks and not many hills. In Istanbul sidewalks are tiny and often interrupted and the city has hills, as a result very few people walk more than a few hundred meters and people with bicycles are rounding error level non existent. In Istanbul there's simply not many opportunities for crime, so when it happens it happens differently that the way it happens in London. No one ill grab your phone and run but if you wander in a non-commercial location or location that is not well lit after dark, you can be raped or stabbed just like that. You can't really compare the realities of these cities by simply looking at some numbers without proper context.
  - mlrtime 10mo ago
    I say the exact same thing about living in NYC. It is statistically safe if you look at murders per capita compared to a rural area. But that one statistic tells you nothing about what kind of random crap you have to put up with on a day to day basis taking a 45 minute subway commute daily that isn't collected in any statistic.
- chimprich 10mo ago
  That's a stupid perspective. That's presumably Russia's self-reported numbers, not the actual numbers of people who were detained for speech Putin's regime didn't like. For example, in 2023, Alexei Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in a special regime colony, his lawyers were arrested, and then Navalny was murdered in prison.
phkx 10mo ago
Maybe [the UK is not on the list] because this article focuses on technical aspects of overcoming blocking of the global internet in those countries that benefit from improvements to the TOR infrastructure. Maybe there are no problems circumventing DNS-level blocking with TOR in the countries which you mentioned. Maybe those people arrested (source?) were actually able to technically access the platforms on which they raised whatever they had to say. So maybe, the post is simply about a completely different topic.
- phkx 10mo ago
  Looking into the situation in the UK specifically, I found a description of the potentially underlying issues [1] and those are indeed worrisome. I still fail to see why one would raise it in the way GP did to comment on the TOR post. Others have pointed at the funding of TOR through the US. If there is actual evidence that this impacts the stated purpose of TOR (non-discriminating access to the internet, I‘d say), please share. Otherwise, my impression is still that TOR works as advertised and is working on solutions where it is not. [1]: https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police-are-restricting-speech-in-worrying-ways https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police...
  - n4r9 10mo ago
    > I still fail to see why one would raise it in the way GP did to comment on the TOR post. It's started cropping up in almost any thread related to free speech or censorship, and comes directly from the mouth of right-wing darling Tommy Robinson [0]. [0] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-claims-b1248644.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...
    - phkx 10mo ago
      I‘m acting a bit naïve of course ;) The comments are simply dominated by the root comment, which does not even try to put it into context of the linked post. On top, it‘s a comment riding the outrage wave. There’s no contextualization (a number is only the beginning of a story, not the end). Not a substantiated starting point for an exchange on the matter. I‘d just like to see better on HN.
thelamest 10mo ago
Florida, 2020: 63,217 domestic violence arrests The British arrest stats subsume DV harassment cases, and the original Times reporting quoted a police officer stating that they are the bulk of these numbers. I haven’t found an apples-to-apples comparison in the US, but the FL number gives a point of reference.
ben_w 10mo ago
Much as I take a dim view of the laws and politics of England & Wales*, those numbers include "indecent" and "obscene" messages, i.e. dick picks could be mixed up in these totals. I suspect the actual number of un-asked-for dick picks sent each year is significantly (multiple orders of magnitude) higher than that, while also suspecting that most of those pics don't lead to arrests and what people are arrested for is in fact hate speech or threats that at first glance seem like they might be terrorist in nature, but so far as I can tell this distinction is not actually recorded in any official statistics so we just don't know. * I left the UK in 2018 due to the overreach and incompetence shown in the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, plus the people in charge during Brexit all hating on international human rights obligations; I would've left a year sooner but for family stuff.
- n4r9 10mo ago
  I'm getting fed up of people posting these figures. Especially with a misleading description like "arrests for comments on social media". They cover a very broad range of offences, many of which the public would want to keep as an offence. It includes cases like pedophiles grooming and blackmailing children, stalking, harrassment, even people emailing photos of aborted foetuses to pharmacies.
  - ben_w 10mo ago
    > I'm getting fed up of people posting these figures. Only way around that would be to get a breakdown of the specific details of the arrests. If sufficient details of those records are publicly available, I don't think anyone has actually categorised them into convenient headline figures as yet. As I said, we just don't know the breakdown, so this could be anything from 0% to 100% of the arrests are things almost everyone agrees with, or (by necessity of those numbers) disagrees with.
- like_any_other 10mo ago
  > those numbers include "indecent" and "obscene" messages Should we be worried that the government doesn't even bother to track how many people are arrested/jailed/convicted of non-true-threat/sexual harassment speech? Well surely then one of the many NGOs fighting tyranny is trying to keep track of the numbers, right?
onion2k 10mo ago
There is no central aggregated place for data about US citizens arrested for the sort of things the UK's Malicious Communications Act covers. There is no reason to assume that the US is more free. It could be much worse.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
hdgvhicv 10mo ago
American views on “free speech” are not global, both in terms of what’s banned and in terms of what’s not banned.
- asacrowflies 10mo ago
  This has been a long held "western" value. Especially in the context of West vs Russia Iran North Korea etc. this rapid increase over the past few years in draconian enforcement of absurd thought control can not be explained away by such a shallow statement. ESPECIALLY the uk. Most of the American bill of rights and early constitutional amendment where based on centurys old English common law values just as much as they took inspiration from the Roman republics.
  - hdgvhicv 10mo ago
    Hate speech has not been tolerated in the U.K. for many years. Other subversive speech hasn’t been tolerated in many counties, from nazi worship to glorifying terror, from obscenity to copyright. America bans Harry Potter, in the past The U.K. banned Lady Chatterly, Germany bans nazi worship but America is quite happy with it. Just because an american view on what is and isn’t acceptable exists doesn’t mean others have that same view.
    - asacrowflies 10mo ago
      Too much to address here and I don't have the time. But you are jumping around a lot and conflating culture war nonsense with legal enforcement. While also implying huge swaths of people are right wing nazis.... Harry potter has never EVER been banned in the USA and to say that with a straight face means we are in completely different universes and further engagement is pointless. Many groups may have lobbied a retailer or a local school or library to voluntarily remove it. Even just to avoid drama/pr. I personally vehemently disagree with this type of censorship... But it is absolutely not what we see in the UK. The US equivalent would be federal terrorism charges for having harry potter. Absurd.
      - 10mo ago
lugu 10mo ago
Am I living in a parallel universe or are you just a troll. In Iran you criticize the government on social media and you get arrested. In the UK you promote Nazi ideology and you get arrested. Is that really the same thing for you? Are you not seeing it?
- XorNot 10mo ago
  He's a troll because those also aren't the real numbers. The UK law categorizes arrests under this category in the same bucket as domestic violence arrests. The people talking about this never make the distinction.
- kubb 10mo ago
  He has a throwaway account just for this occasion. Probably not acting in good faith.
OtherShrezzing 10mo ago
>2023: ~12,183 arrests These numbers are for _all_ arrests under the Malicious Communications Act in that year. So while that category includes arrests for tweets, it also includes all arrests for any offensive communications via an internet-enabled device. So it'd include arrests for domestic abuse where at least one component of the abuse was through WhatsApp. Similarly, it can include just about any arrest where the crime was planned on an internet enabled device.
- simonjgreen 10mo ago
  I’m not sure why you are being downvoted, this is a critically important point. Context is king, numbers alone are unhelpful
- Havoc 10mo ago
  We’re the rules changed are this between those years though? Cause if not a more than doubling is alarming regardless of how exactly the composition is sliced by online vs WhatsApp or whatever.
- drnick1 10mo ago
  The point is, communications should not be surveilled at all by the state. It shouldn't matter that the Internet is sometimes used to commit crimes, the bigger issue is that the vast majority of non-criminal traffic is subject to snooping.
  - TrackerFF 10mo ago
    Do we know that was the case, for in those instances? Could be that some guy threatened to kill someone over FB, someone saw that, and reported it.
  - jimnotgym 10mo ago
    Were they surveilled? Or simply read on someone's device after they were lawfully arrested, or sent to the police by the victim? You seem to be making a bit of a jump there
  - 10mo ago
vbezhenar 10mo ago
What are numbers for Russia and Iran?
immibis 10mo ago
What are people saying that gets them arrested? This important question, whose answer is for some reason never specified in complaints about UK censorship, is crucial to evaluating the severity of the UK's censorship regime.
ajuc 10mo ago
When a dictatorship uses police to imprison innocent people the correct response isn't to say "but in Sweden there is police as well, see how many people they imprison a year". Details matter. Media laws already penalize traditional media for lying about various subjects in most democracies (see libel laws, etc.). And it's good that they do. The alternative of unchecked lies spreading everywhere is worse. Why should the internet be exempt from media laws? The problem with dictatorships isn't that fake news is prohibited. It's that the people who decide what is fake news and what isn't have bad intentions and can't be challenged.
systemtest 10mo ago
The Netherlands in the recent past has detained journalists on multiple occasions but you never read about that. Absolute horrible for a “free” country.
- vaylian 10mo ago
  Is there no online source at all?
  - systemtest 10mo ago
    Plenty of sources, it is not being suppressed. We even had a journalist shot and killed. Look up Robert Bas, Bart Mos, Joost de Haas, Bas van Hout, Koen Voskuil, Peter R de Vries. Yet The Netherlands is in third place for World Press Freedom Index. How is that even possible.
    - lurk2 10mo ago
      He’s asking you to provide sources.
      - systemtest 10mo ago
        An article about it: https://www.villamedia.nl/artikel/deze-journalisten-werden-eerder-gegijzeld https://www.villamedia.nl/artikel/deze-journalisten-werden-e...
jimnotgym 10mo ago
Yet I have only ever personally been prevented from speaking in the UK by Xitter, with that great champion of Free Speech at the helm. I was given a the spurious reason of 'impersonation' for my ban.
squidbeak 10mo ago
Are you proposing we ignore communications threatening violence or inciting harm? For instance Lucy Connolly's tweet urging people to set fire to mosques?
lenkite 10mo ago
Why has Europe gone nutso ? They were the ones who kept lecturing us (Global South) about "freedom of speech and media is critical to democracy", yadda-yadda at every global conference. Now many of their laws are even worse than much of the third world and people are getting arrested for saying banal stuff online. Why did this happen ? What changed ?
- logicchains 10mo ago
  Economies failing due to bad economic management but the people in charge don't want to lose power so they're resorting to silencing criticism to stay in office.
  - graemep 10mo ago
    It think its not thought through, but a lot of people benefit from these sorts of "culture war" issues deflecting attention from elsewhere. Its not the silencing that benefits them, its the controversy.
- zingababba 10mo ago
  In the absence of god suicide is the highest form of self-expression.
- graemep 10mo ago
  Because they only suppress "bad" speech, where as we (identifying with one of my two nationalities, for those looking at my other comments which may seem contradictory) are suppressing "good" speech. Nothing subjective of culturally specific about any of that!
- immibis 10mo ago
  What were people arrested for saying?
  - DANmode 10mo ago
    This is a fun one, because Americans only read headlines, and the UK people can’t write the comments.
darubedarob 10mo ago
And the partialness of arrests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaa_Abd_El-Fattah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaa_Abd_El-Fattah comes to mind whose tweets..
- TacticalCoder 10mo ago
  [flagged]
observationist 10mo ago
Imagine being at the legal mercy of terminally online reddit mods who can deploy police to arrest you, and the police strategy is to roll up on you between 1 and 5 AM at night, to catch you vulnerable and off-guard. If they don't like a comment you make, or if your face isn't sufficiently supportive in a picture taken of you, or if you downvote the wrong post, all someone has to do is claim they are offended, and you can get taken to jail. Oi! You gotta loicense for that smirk? They're still in the civilized phase of this, with people being politely disturbed but still playing along with authority. I can't imagine this ends well, however - I think they're gonna get riots in Guy Fawkes masks, widespread mayhem, and murder before it's over.
- DANmode 10mo ago
  Why would they start fighting now? This is the place where they force themselves into your home to check if you have a television, in some cases, right?

nomilk 10mo ago

I was also surprised the post focusses on Rus/Iran when Australia, UK, and many more countries (Malaysia, Thailand) have/are introducing laws to prevent large swaths of free speech (banning mediums by age, banning conversation by topic, or by making speaking one's mind online too risky, as almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech').

Guestmodinfo 10mo ago
India why forget us. Only thing is you may not find exact data.
RobotToaster 10mo ago
Tor is primarily funded by the US State department, that's why.
- iamnothere 10mo ago
  Depends on what you mean by primarily. US government funding is still the largest single portion of their funding, but they are trying to diversify. Most funding comes from non-government sources: https://blog.torproject.org/financials-blog-post-2023-2024/ https://blog.torproject.org/financials-blog-post-2023-2024/
aprilthird2021 10mo ago
Yes. I think social media or app bans should count as well, as well as consequences for things posted on social media which are simply opinions. I think killing of journalists should count as well (so probably India, Israel, etc.) And I think also frivolous suits lodged by the govt at people for their speech. So that would include suing Twitter users for making jokes about the FBI director girlfriend, etc. One of the biggest things to censor speech the US is doing is forcing the sale of TikTok to government friendly group. There are many ways governments censor our speech, and they seem, sadly, to be increasing worldwide
otabdeveloper4 10mo ago
Iran is le bad. Oceania has always been at war with ~Venezuela~ Iran, citizen.
wartywhoa23 10mo ago
The neighbouring pot must always seem hotter to the frogs that are being boiled in their own one, that's a rule of the kitchen.
widdershins 10mo ago
> almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech' I only know about the UK, but this is not really true there. Your speech has to be obviously threatening or abusive, and obviously motivated by prejudice towards one of a few categories (disability, race, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation are the main ones). If you don't make threatening or abusive remarks towards these groups, you aren't breaking the law.
- jmnicolas 10mo ago
  "Abusive" and "threatening" is "in the eye of the beholder".
  - kolektiv 10mo ago
    Well, no, more accurately, when it comes to it, it's in the eyes of a judge (or a jury in some cases). You can have all kinds of arguments about validity of arrests, of prosecutions, etc., but it's still fundamentally a system where you'll be charged with an offence and then either convicted or not. I don't know of a single case (and don't believe anyone can point to one) where people have been arrested for simply criticising politicians. Has the number of incidents risen over recent years? Yes, and while this might be partly explained by stricter legal approaches, I suspect it's much more to do with a drastic rise in far-right activity and a consequent feeling among many that they can now say/do whatever they like with impunity (including making threatening and inflammatory remarks about minorities, and so on).
    - hkt 10mo ago
      Not exactly a judge or jury. IIRC a common law assault can go on with only the subjective experience of threat. Hard to prove, but the bar is not objective. See: https://sentencingcouncil.org.uk/resources/common-offences/assault/ https://sentencingcouncil.org.uk/resources/common-offences/a... That is by no means the only crime that is committed subjectively.
      - kolektiv 10mo ago
lukan 10mo ago
"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?
- antonymoose 10mo ago
  In Germany you can receive a suspended sentence for raping a minor and then an actual jail sentence for insulting the rapist. I’ve seen similar outrageous arrests for mean tweets in the UK. Europe has lost its mind about right and wrong.
  - lukan 10mo ago
    I am german and live here, but am not aware of such rulings. Please provide sources.
    - aljgz 10mo ago
      As upvotes are not visible, I also ask for a few occurrences of this.
    - antonymoose 10mo ago
      The “Maja R” case would be a good start.
      - lukan 10mo ago
        Threats of violence, not insults.
    - sanskritical 10mo ago
      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/elizabeth-kinney-the-mum-who-was-arrested-for-using-a-slur-word-in-private-text-/25218375061188976/ 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 time for beating her.
blell 10mo ago
It’s much simpler. The Tor project is politically biased in a way that they think the things the UK arrest people for should get people arrested.
- berkes 10mo ago
  That's a very serious and bold accusation you make there. It's so serious, that you should really back it up with some evidence or at least some foundation. Got any?
  - blell 10mo ago
    What kind of evidence would you take? If it’s someone from the project openly saying what I imply, there obviously isn’t any. But if you are looking for evidence that the project took a politically biased turn to one side of the aisle, I’m sure you’ll find a lot on your own. And from there you can understand why there isn’t a single mention of what’s happening in the UK. In this very thread you can find lots of comments excusing the censorship because it’s being used to censor the “wrong ideas”.
    - fn-mote 10mo ago
      I would even accept hearsay as better than “you’ll find a lot on your own.” I totally agree these comments contain discussion of controversial cases, but your claim is surprising to the point of being unbelievable without any kind of support. To give the most optimistic take: Perhaps in your country, one political party is much more pro-censorship than another, so an anti-censorship stance seems aligned against that party? That’s believable; it happens in many countries (probably including mine; it can be hard to tell, since pro-censorship is a very common stance here).
    - berkes 9mo ago
      I'll take any of the lot that i could "find [..] on my own". Or hearsay. Or quotes from tinfoilhats or conspiracy nuts even. Without any of these, you are seriously discrediting people and projects. And without any of these, there's no way for me counter any. Or even authorize any (ie a random russian troll, vs a journalist with reputation to lose)
berkes 10mo ago
> swaths of free speech Which is very cultural dependent as well. "Not being able to log in on TikTok if you are under 16" is not "preventing free speech". And "having no access to pornhub" is not preventing free speech either. Edit: TBC: this is not me defending these laws or rules. E.g. Freedom of speech in the US, is rather narrow. It merely states you may "speak, write, and print with freedom" but not that you may do so anywhere, on any platform, on private property. It doesn't state that such speech, writings or printings must reach everyone. The UNHCR article 19 goes further, though. But it doesn't automatically apply to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights#cite_note-:1-13 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human... It includes `... and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers`. And all these only apply to governments. Many of the examples you mention, aren't government-imposed but imposed by private entities (who, granted, often pre-emptively self-censor). E.g. certain words used on Instagram or in Yourube videos will hurt monetization, or will cause it's discovery or promotion to severely degrade; which is why people use phrases like "unalived". So let's not pretend the US is any good in this. Dutch culture used to be rather free with nudity in movies and on TV. Every Dutch movie from before the era of US streaming services had at least a pair of naked boobies bouncing around. But this, and in it's wake the entire culture has become more prude-ish. A form of cultural colonialism by the US. Not terrible, but a good example of private companies imposing self-censorship even in places where it really is not needed. IANAL, but I'm quite certain youtube would be allowed to run videos with nudity just fine in most of (nothern?) Europe. But they don't.
- orbital-decay 10mo ago
  >"Not being able to log in on TikTok if you are under 16" is not "preventing free speech". And "having no access to pornhub" is not preventing free speech either. Right. It's having to profile yourself under the excuse of not letting kids use TikTok or PornHub.
- lux-lux-lux 10mo ago
  Restrictions on adult websites are invariably extremely political. PornHub gets tailored bans while the Reddits and Twitters gleefully serve up gargantuan amounts of pornography; payment processors threaten to wreck Itch and Steam for including 18+ games while Ani is sexting with children.

vscode-rest 10mo ago

You must keep in mind TOR is funded in large part by the US government. It’s a bad look for them to put their allies in the same list as their enemies.

danielbln 10mo ago
Bad looks haven't really been a deterrent to much of anything in US politics for a while.
- vscode-rest 10mo ago
  You misunderstand the game. It’s all about who considers what a bad look.
  - ben_w 10mo ago
    Yes, but in this context the US is very much putting European allies on various relevant naughty lists, in the name of "free speech" but unfortunately it does need the air-quotes.

earthnail 10mo ago

I’d much rather get arrested in Britain than Russia or Iran. And I certainly wouldn’t put the UK in the same bucket as Russia and Iran. Not even close. Hate speech is a problem. If it wasn’t, why are Russia and China spending so much on troll farms? It’s a direct attack on a democracy’s ability to form consensus. I don’t think we’ve found the right, effective way to deal with this problem yet, but I applaud any democratic country that tries sth in that area. I also think Tor is great, just for the record.

throwfaraway135 10mo ago
The problem is that it is really difficult to define what hate speech is, and more often than not it's used as a cudgel to silence the opposition. For Iran and Russia, it is what Khamenei and Putin don't want to hear, in the UK it's what Starmer doesn't want to hear.
- delichon 10mo ago
  Apparently it isn't very hard to define as you just did so quite accurately. It's just whatever those who control the definition don't want to hear.
  - immibis 10mo ago
    Murder is just the killing of people who are liked by those who control the definition of murder. But everyone still agrees murder should be illegal.
    - delichon 10mo ago
      Murder is a far brighter line than hate, and therefore a law against it enables far less arbitrary power.
      - immibis 10mo ago
        It means ICE officers can kill you but you can't kill ICE officers. This is arguably an even worse asymmetry than the one about speech.

meowmeowmeowa 10mo ago

[dead]

RobotToaster 10mo ago

To put that into perspective, the number arrested in Russia was 3,253 in 2023.

mrtksn 10mo ago
Sounds like Russians learned their lesson. There's similar phenomenon in safety stats. In the stats Istanbul appears to be vastly safer than London but having lived in both, I can tell you why Istanbul is safer: Because public spaces don't exist and private spaces are guarded with bars and steel doors. In London, there's pubs etc. everywhere, in Istanbul you are limited to few centers to be outside after 10. The places where people go are bustling because they serve a city of 16 million, so they are well lit and guarded. In London, there are parks and guard free public spaces everywhere. In istanbul there are very few such places. In London people mostly live in homes that don't have bars on the windows but in Istanbul there's bars on the first floor on every window on any building that's not a gated community. People with money live in gated communities or one of the very few upscale district. In London you can walk ro everywhere, it has wide sidewalks and not many hills. In Istanbul sidewalks are tiny and often interrupted and the city has hills, as a result very few people walk more than a few hundred meters and people with bicycles are rounding error level non existent. In Istanbul there's simply not many opportunities for crime, so when it happens it happens differently that the way it happens in London. No one ill grab your phone and run but if you wander in a non-commercial location or location that is not well lit after dark, you can be raped or stabbed just like that. You can't really compare the realities of these cities by simply looking at some numbers without proper context.
- mlrtime 10mo ago
  I say the exact same thing about living in NYC. It is statistically safe if you look at murders per capita compared to a rural area. But that one statistic tells you nothing about what kind of random crap you have to put up with on a day to day basis taking a 45 minute subway commute daily that isn't collected in any statistic.
chimprich 10mo ago
That's a stupid perspective. That's presumably Russia's self-reported numbers, not the actual numbers of people who were detained for speech Putin's regime didn't like. For example, in 2023, Alexei Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in a special regime colony, his lawyers were arrested, and then Navalny was murdered in prison.

phkx 10mo ago

Maybe [the UK is not on the list] because this article focuses on technical aspects of overcoming blocking of the global internet in those countries that benefit from improvements to the TOR infrastructure. Maybe there are no problems circumventing DNS-level blocking with TOR in the countries which you mentioned. Maybe those people arrested (source?) were actually able to technically access the platforms on which they raised whatever they had to say. So maybe, the post is simply about a completely different topic.

phkx 10mo ago
Looking into the situation in the UK specifically, I found a description of the potentially underlying issues [1] and those are indeed worrisome. I still fail to see why one would raise it in the way GP did to comment on the TOR post. Others have pointed at the funding of TOR through the US. If there is actual evidence that this impacts the stated purpose of TOR (non-discriminating access to the internet, I‘d say), please share. Otherwise, my impression is still that TOR works as advertised and is working on solutions where it is not. [1]: https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police-are-restricting-speech-in-worrying-ways https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police...
- n4r9 10mo ago
  > I still fail to see why one would raise it in the way GP did to comment on the TOR post. It's started cropping up in almost any thread related to free speech or censorship, and comes directly from the mouth of right-wing darling Tommy Robinson [0]. [0] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-claims-b1248644.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...
  - phkx 10mo ago
    I‘m acting a bit naïve of course ;) The comments are simply dominated by the root comment, which does not even try to put it into context of the linked post. On top, it‘s a comment riding the outrage wave. There’s no contextualization (a number is only the beginning of a story, not the end). Not a substantiated starting point for an exchange on the matter. I‘d just like to see better on HN.

thelamest 10mo ago

Florida, 2020: 63,217 domestic violence arrests The British arrest stats subsume DV harassment cases, and the original Times reporting quoted a police officer stating that they are the bulk of these numbers. I haven’t found an apples-to-apples comparison in the US, but the FL number gives a point of reference.

ben_w 10mo ago

Much as I take a dim view of the laws and politics of England & Wales*, those numbers include "indecent" and "obscene" messages, i.e. dick picks could be mixed up in these totals. I suspect the actual number of un-asked-for dick picks sent each year is significantly (multiple orders of magnitude) higher than that, while also suspecting that most of those pics don't lead to arrests and what people are arrested for is in fact hate speech or threats that at first glance seem like they might be terrorist in nature, but so far as I can tell this distinction is not actually recorded in any official statistics so we just don't know. * I left the UK in 2018 due to the overreach and incompetence shown in the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, plus the people in charge during Brexit all hating on international human rights obligations; I would've left a year sooner but for family stuff.

n4r9 10mo ago
I'm getting fed up of people posting these figures. Especially with a misleading description like "arrests for comments on social media". They cover a very broad range of offences, many of which the public would want to keep as an offence. It includes cases like pedophiles grooming and blackmailing children, stalking, harrassment, even people emailing photos of aborted foetuses to pharmacies.
- ben_w 10mo ago
  > I'm getting fed up of people posting these figures. Only way around that would be to get a breakdown of the specific details of the arrests. If sufficient details of those records are publicly available, I don't think anyone has actually categorised them into convenient headline figures as yet. As I said, we just don't know the breakdown, so this could be anything from 0% to 100% of the arrests are things almost everyone agrees with, or (by necessity of those numbers) disagrees with.
like_any_other 10mo ago
> those numbers include "indecent" and "obscene" messages Should we be worried that the government doesn't even bother to track how many people are arrested/jailed/convicted of non-true-threat/sexual harassment speech? Well surely then one of the many NGOs fighting tyranny is trying to keep track of the numbers, right?

onion2k 10mo ago

There is no central aggregated place for data about US citizens arrested for the sort of things the UK's Malicious Communications Act covers. There is no reason to assume that the US is more free. It could be much worse.

deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

hdgvhicv 10mo ago

American views on “free speech” are not global, both in terms of what’s banned and in terms of what’s not banned.

asacrowflies 10mo ago
This has been a long held "western" value. Especially in the context of West vs Russia Iran North Korea etc. this rapid increase over the past few years in draconian enforcement of absurd thought control can not be explained away by such a shallow statement. ESPECIALLY the uk. Most of the American bill of rights and early constitutional amendment where based on centurys old English common law values just as much as they took inspiration from the Roman republics.
- hdgvhicv 10mo ago
  Hate speech has not been tolerated in the U.K. for many years. Other subversive speech hasn’t been tolerated in many counties, from nazi worship to glorifying terror, from obscenity to copyright. America bans Harry Potter, in the past The U.K. banned Lady Chatterly, Germany bans nazi worship but America is quite happy with it. Just because an american view on what is and isn’t acceptable exists doesn’t mean others have that same view.
  - asacrowflies 10mo ago
    Too much to address here and I don't have the time. But you are jumping around a lot and conflating culture war nonsense with legal enforcement. While also implying huge swaths of people are right wing nazis.... Harry potter has never EVER been banned in the USA and to say that with a straight face means we are in completely different universes and further engagement is pointless. Many groups may have lobbied a retailer or a local school or library to voluntarily remove it. Even just to avoid drama/pr. I personally vehemently disagree with this type of censorship... But it is absolutely not what we see in the UK. The US equivalent would be federal terrorism charges for having harry potter. Absurd.
    - 10mo ago

lugu 10mo ago

Am I living in a parallel universe or are you just a troll. In Iran you criticize the government on social media and you get arrested. In the UK you promote Nazi ideology and you get arrested. Is that really the same thing for you? Are you not seeing it?

XorNot 10mo ago
He's a troll because those also aren't the real numbers. The UK law categorizes arrests under this category in the same bucket as domestic violence arrests. The people talking about this never make the distinction.
kubb 10mo ago
He has a throwaway account just for this occasion. Probably not acting in good faith.

OtherShrezzing 10mo ago

>2023: ~12,183 arrests These numbers are for _all_ arrests under the Malicious Communications Act in that year. So while that category includes arrests for tweets, it also includes all arrests for any offensive communications via an internet-enabled device. So it'd include arrests for domestic abuse where at least one component of the abuse was through WhatsApp. Similarly, it can include just about any arrest where the crime was planned on an internet enabled device.

simonjgreen 10mo ago
I’m not sure why you are being downvoted, this is a critically important point. Context is king, numbers alone are unhelpful
Havoc 10mo ago
We’re the rules changed are this between those years though? Cause if not a more than doubling is alarming regardless of how exactly the composition is sliced by online vs WhatsApp or whatever.
drnick1 10mo ago
The point is, communications should not be surveilled at all by the state. It shouldn't matter that the Internet is sometimes used to commit crimes, the bigger issue is that the vast majority of non-criminal traffic is subject to snooping.
- TrackerFF 10mo ago
  Do we know that was the case, for in those instances? Could be that some guy threatened to kill someone over FB, someone saw that, and reported it.
- jimnotgym 10mo ago
  Were they surveilled? Or simply read on someone's device after they were lawfully arrested, or sent to the police by the victim? You seem to be making a bit of a jump there
- 10mo ago

vbezhenar 10mo ago

What are numbers for Russia and Iran?

immibis 10mo ago

What are people saying that gets them arrested? This important question, whose answer is for some reason never specified in complaints about UK censorship, is crucial to evaluating the severity of the UK's censorship regime.

ajuc 10mo ago

When a dictatorship uses police to imprison innocent people the correct response isn't to say "but in Sweden there is police as well, see how many people they imprison a year". Details matter. Media laws already penalize traditional media for lying about various subjects in most democracies (see libel laws, etc.). And it's good that they do. The alternative of unchecked lies spreading everywhere is worse. Why should the internet be exempt from media laws? The problem with dictatorships isn't that fake news is prohibited. It's that the people who decide what is fake news and what isn't have bad intentions and can't be challenged.

systemtest 10mo ago

The Netherlands in the recent past has detained journalists on multiple occasions but you never read about that. Absolute horrible for a “free” country.

vaylian 10mo ago
Is there no online source at all?
- systemtest 10mo ago
  Plenty of sources, it is not being suppressed. We even had a journalist shot and killed. Look up Robert Bas, Bart Mos, Joost de Haas, Bas van Hout, Koen Voskuil, Peter R de Vries. Yet The Netherlands is in third place for World Press Freedom Index. How is that even possible.
  - lurk2 10mo ago
    He’s asking you to provide sources.
    - systemtest 10mo ago
      An article about it: https://www.villamedia.nl/artikel/deze-journalisten-werden-eerder-gegijzeld https://www.villamedia.nl/artikel/deze-journalisten-werden-e...

jimnotgym 10mo ago

Yet I have only ever personally been prevented from speaking in the UK by Xitter, with that great champion of Free Speech at the helm. I was given a the spurious reason of 'impersonation' for my ban.

squidbeak 10mo ago

Are you proposing we ignore communications threatening violence or inciting harm? For instance Lucy Connolly's tweet urging people to set fire to mosques?

lenkite 10mo ago

Why has Europe gone nutso ? They were the ones who kept lecturing us (Global South) about "freedom of speech and media is critical to democracy", yadda-yadda at every global conference. Now many of their laws are even worse than much of the third world and people are getting arrested for saying banal stuff online. Why did this happen ? What changed ?

logicchains 10mo ago
Economies failing due to bad economic management but the people in charge don't want to lose power so they're resorting to silencing criticism to stay in office.
- graemep 10mo ago
  It think its not thought through, but a lot of people benefit from these sorts of "culture war" issues deflecting attention from elsewhere. Its not the silencing that benefits them, its the controversy.
zingababba 10mo ago
In the absence of god suicide is the highest form of self-expression.
graemep 10mo ago
Because they only suppress "bad" speech, where as we (identifying with one of my two nationalities, for those looking at my other comments which may seem contradictory) are suppressing "good" speech. Nothing subjective of culturally specific about any of that!
immibis 10mo ago
What were people arrested for saying?
- DANmode 10mo ago
  This is a fun one, because Americans only read headlines, and the UK people can’t write the comments.

darubedarob 10mo ago

And the partialness of arrests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaa_Abd_El-Fattah https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaa_Abd_El-Fattah comes to mind whose tweets..

TacticalCoder 10mo ago
[flagged]

observationist 10mo ago

Imagine being at the legal mercy of terminally online reddit mods who can deploy police to arrest you, and the police strategy is to roll up on you between 1 and 5 AM at night, to catch you vulnerable and off-guard. If they don't like a comment you make, or if your face isn't sufficiently supportive in a picture taken of you, or if you downvote the wrong post, all someone has to do is claim they are offended, and you can get taken to jail. Oi! You gotta loicense for that smirk? They're still in the civilized phase of this, with people being politely disturbed but still playing along with authority. I can't imagine this ends well, however - I think they're gonna get riots in Guy Fawkes masks, widespread mayhem, and murder before it's over.

DANmode 10mo ago
Why would they start fighting now? This is the place where they force themselves into your home to check if you have a television, in some cases, right?