10 ms·
In 2023, the number of people arrested for online comments: UK (12,183), Belarus (6,205), Germany (3,500), China (1,500). How do people in the UK defend this?
by yadaeno 10mo ago
In 2023, the number of people arrested for online comments: UK (12,183), Belarus (6,205), Germany (3,500), China (1,500).
How do people in the UK defend this? I consider myself a liberal and to defend this government is a level of hypocrisy so beyond the pale.
Am I being reactionary here? Are things actually not that bad in the UK?
- Maken 10mo agoGiven the election forecasts, people in the UK doesn't support at all the current government nor its policies. And the answer seems to be to suppress any criticism while waiting for the next election cycle.
- jansper39 10mo agoGiven that we have shows on the state broadcaster which criticise the government, there truly isn't a shadowy force supressing it amongst the population.
- inglor_cz 10mo agoHmm. Ironically, the party most likely to abolish such laws is probably Reform. Tories have done approximately nothing, Labour is an old mother lode of speech policing and the Greens with all their postmodern sensitivities plus deference to Islam don't look particularly promising as well. Once upon a time, Lib Dems were strong on civic freedoms... but I can't remember them doing anything in this regard during the Cameron coalition government.
- ben_w 10mo ago> but I can't remember them doing anything in this regard during the Cameron coalition government. Does anyone remember them doing anything other than apologising for going against their election pledge about tuition fees and losing the electoral reform referendum?
- inglor_cz 10mo agoYeah, that is the point. I would expect a party that gets into a government once in a blue moon to exploit that opportunity and show off that they can actually achieve something real. That wasn't the case.
- tonyedgecombe 10mo agoRaising the tax thresholds was a Lib Dem policy. They also stopped the introduction of compulsory id cards.
- dfawcus 10mo ago[flagged]
- ben_w 10mo agoMy actually-a-Communist former partner will take great exception to any description of the current UK politicians as "Marxist". Well, except perhaps Jeremy Corbyn.
- dfawcus 10mo agoLook up our current PMs history.
- ben_w 10mo agoMarxist definition: class struggle, abolition of capitalist property, collective ownership, systemic change. Starmer’s record: social-democrat, pragmatic, incremental reforms, accepts market economy. Why he's not Marxist: avoids ideological rigidity, no revolutionary agenda, shifted toward center-left, compromises for governance. I suggest reading the Communist Manifesto, so you know what to argue against if nothing else. It's, y'know, free.
- dfawcus 10mo agoGood for you. However many of us don't believe he has actually changed in his views since his days editing, and writing articles for Socialist Alternatives.
- mr_important 10mo ago[flagged]
- belorn 10mo agoAs with all statistics, one has to first define where the data source is from. In this case there is an news article for that (https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-claims-b1248644.html https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...). To summarize the article, the data is highly unreliable and aren't comparable, nor is it normalized to the population. A person in UK can be charged under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 if they voice a death threat over the phone, while the Belarus case can be a person criticizing the government on twitter. It can also be a person in the UK who sent a unsolicited sexual image. As a legal analyze of Section 127 frames it, most thing it makes illegal is already illegal under other laws which makes it difficult to analyze the scope. A person who sends a death threat is breaking the law both by sending a death threat, but also by using (abusing) a telecom service for the purpose of sending a death threat. It is a bit of an catch all clause. In the US it is currently very likely that every crime that involves money also involve wire fraud, unless people only use physical cash and never transfer them. They usually also involve tax fraud since illegal money is rarely declared. That makes statistics involving tax and wire fraud in the US a bit difficult to parse into meaningful data.
- EasyMark 10mo agoI don't believe for one second that only 1500 people in China were arrested for online comments any more than I would believe the same statistic from Russia