The scale of arrests linked to comments made on the internet, highlighted by Big Brother Watch in The Mail on Sunday, should trouble anyone who cares about civil liberties.
Britain, after all, is the country that gave the world parliamentary democracy and has long prided itself on a culture of free expression stretching back to Magna Carta.
But the latest figures suggest that proud inheritance is in serious danger. Unless ministers move quickly to defend free speech in the UK, we risk drifting toward something far more authoritarian — a North Korea of the North Sea.
Why, at a time of mounting concern about crime, are police forces devoting so much energy to monitoring tweets instead of making our streets safer?
Shoplifting, mobile phone robberies and sexual offences are all increasing, yet the authorities appear ever more preoccupied with pursuing people for what amounts to online wrongthink.
One explanation is that this kind of policing offers an easier path.
The number of people being arrested over remarks made online, exposed by Big Brother Watch in The Mail on Sunday, is profoundly worrying, writes Toby Young, director of the Free Speech Union. Pictured: Mr Young at the Conservative Party Conference in 2025
It is, of course, far simpler — and far less risky — to turn up at the door of a teenager or an elderly person over an allegedly offensive social media post than to confront a violent criminal in the act.
But most ordinary coppers I speak to would much prefer to be catching proper criminals.
The obsession with policing social media comes from the top, which is why the number of people arrested for online offences varies so much from region to region.
According to Big Brother Watch’s report, some police forces made 14 times the number of arrests per capita than their neighbours did.
The problem stems from a new generation of chief constables, marinated in the social sciences departments of red brick universities, who think the role of the police ‘service’ (never ‘force’) is to protect designated victim groups from ‘hate’.
They believe that complaining on social media about the number of people crossing the Channel on small boats, or the phalanxes of semi-naked men on Pride marches, or the conversion of a beloved local pub into a mosque, contributes to ‘community tensions’ and if left unchecked they will inevitably boil over into civil disorder.
That’s also the view of Labour ministers, Whitehall mandarins and senior judges, who regard platforms like X, YouTube and Facebook as a grave threat to the social order.
Graham Linehan thanks the Free Speech Union in a new video message released today
Linehan was arrested in relation to three tweets which police deemed to warrant an arrest
In their view, everyone in our multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, polyamorous society would be getting along just fine if it wasn’t for that pesky Elon Musk encouraging people to spread mis- and disinformation about minorities on his toxic platform.
According to these public sector panjandrums, the way to tackle rising resentment about illegal immigration, two-tier justice and Islamification is not to defend their record in the public square, but to stop people talking about these issues on social media.
In the new commissariat of woke chief constables, they’ve found willing enforcers of this policy.
As the director of the Free Speech Union, I’ve witnessed this ‘be kind’ authoritarianism first hand.
We’ve defended over 6,500 people since 2020, many of them arrested for social media posts.
By far the biggest category in our case database is labelled ‘sex and gender’ – people who’ve got into trouble for criticising the excesses of the trans rights movement.
We often win these cases, as we did when we helped Graham Linehan secure £25,000 in compensation from the Met Police following his arrest by five armed officers for a single tweet urging women confronted by trans activists in ladies’ toilets to punch them in the balls.
But the sheer number of people being arrested for online offences, even though only one in five end up being convicted, cannot help but have a chilling effect on free speech.
People daren’t say what they think for fear they’ll get a knock on their door by a couple of plainclothes officers wearing rainbow lanyards.
Nigel Farage called for Zack Polanski to be arrested after the Green Party leader shared a photograph of a man wearing a T-shirt ‘planning his decapitation’
Big Brother Watch is calling for an independent review of Britain’s free speech crisis and I endorse that proposal. Not only is the explosion of online censorship bad for democracy, but public confidence in the police is plummeting.
There’s also the problem that cancel culture is spreading to the Right.
In the summer, Nigel Farage reported Green leader Zack Polanski to the police for reposting a picture of a man wearing an offensive T-shirt (the Met took no further action), while Reform banned three journalists from attending its party conference.
The Right should always champion free speech, not just when it suits them.
When then Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer was challenged by J D Vance last year about his government’s failure to uphold one of Western civilisation’s most important values, he became defensive and said Britain had a ‘proud record’ of defending free speech.
Not recently we don’t, as this report lays bare. We need to restore it to its rightful place at the heart of our society before it’s too late.
