What If the U.K. Had Free Speech Like the U.S.?
The U.K. said it would stop investigating "legal" social media posts, but free speech advocates demand more change.
After years of prosecuting people for their social media activity, the U.K. government says it will stop wasting time "investigating legal social media posts."
This policy change, which the U.K. Home Office announced on Tuesday, was greeted as a free speech victory (even if the move is long overdue). However, without further reforms, censorship in the U.K. will continue, warns Preston Byrne, a senior fellow at the London-based Adam Smith Institute. That's because the U.K. still has a "legal regime that allows the state to police opinions it deems contrary to its interests," he wrote on X.
To fix this problem, Byrne, along with Michael Reiners and Elijah Granet, published the "Free Speech Bill" on Wednesday to protect freedom of expression in the U.K.
This model legislation seeks to "restore the ancient liberty of free speech" in the U.K. and take a "wrecking ball" to the laws used to censor Brits. Notably, it would repeal the 2023 U.K. Online Safety Act, a regulation that has effectively censored a wide array of online content under the guise of protecting children. As Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown has noted, the bill has "[put] up roadblocks for people who want to read about world news, view classic art, listen to music on Spotify, chat with friends on Discord, play video games, find information about quitting smoking, or join antimasturbation groups." With the Online Safety Act struck down, the bill proposes regulating online speech similar to how the U.S. does. Under American law, namely Section 230 of the Communications Act, online platforms are not held liable for the speech and content of their users.
The Free Speech Bill would also repeal or amend laws that send Brits to jail for speech crimes, including the Communications Act of 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act 1988. These laws criminalize sending "grossly offensive" and "indecent" messages, and they have been used to arrest thousands of people. According to The Times, approximately 12,000 people were arrested under these acts in 2023 for posting offensive messages online. That's about 33 people each day. Also on the chopping block are parts of the U.K.'s terrorism laws, which have been used to arrest nonviolent pro-Palestinian protesters. The model bill also describes what is not protected speech, and it adopts a Brandenburg test for incitement, which allows the government to prosecute speech only if it is "directed" at inciting "imminent lawless action" and "likely" to have that effect.
"In a free society, fools, bigots, and assholes get to speak and remain free men," Byrne wrote in a press release. "That is not the price of liberty. It is liberty, and the rest of us get it too."
As a lawyer, Byrne has challenged the U.K.'s censorship complex before. When the U.K.'s online regulator, Ofcom, pressured 4chan and other U.S. companies that Byrne represents to comply with the Online Safety Act, he fought their demands by refusing to pay fines and threatening to turn their warnings into bedding for his pet hamster. In January, he told Reason that countering British censorship from the U.S. is relatively easy because the First Amendment allows U.S. companies to simply say no to U.K. regulators' unlawful demands.
But he tells Reason that being on the defensive is not enough.
"We can't win this fight by just defending our borders. We have to deal with the problem at its source, and that means translating the First Amendment to a UK context - something which, as far as I am aware, has never been done - and deploying that tooling to civil society for debate, modification, and, hopefully, one day, enactment," Byrne says.
"The Free Speech Act is perfectly aligned with Britain's liberal history and traditional British values," he added in the press release. The values "are sane and just, and values which the UK's current speech rules do not align with."
The model bill has yet to be introduced as a formal piece of legislation by a U.K. lawmaker. Byrne says his strategy is to "go straight to the grassroots," and he hopes government support will follow.