In the accelerating attack on free speech in Britain, a Facebook user has been arrested for displaying a captioned image of a burning poppy.
In the twentieth century comment was outlawed because it was subversive or indecent. Free speech finally won against those arguments. But today, there is a new threat: increasingly comment on the internet is threatened and prosecuted because it is allegedly offensive to someone.
Expanding the notion of offence is a great ruse for the state: government is not saying we are banning comment because it threatens us, but because it threatens “you the people” and to prove its point a lynch mob of people, spurred on by the gutter press, can always be found to demand judicial sanctions against the commentator. Yet the end result is the same as in the previous century: people fined or imprisoned for expressing their opinions.
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