“It’s absolutely ridiculous. Don’t protect the mosques. Blow the mosques up with the adults in it,” 53-year-old Julie Sweeney posted in response to a photo showing people cleaning up in the aftermath of the Southport rioting in a local Cheshire Facebook group. She later deleted her account in shame. Nevertheless, three police cars soon showed up at Sweeney’s home to arrest her. Within days, she was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment after pleading guilty to sending communications threatening death or serious harm, an offence under the U.K.’s 2023 Online Safety Act.
Besides Sweeney, at least 29 people have been charged with online speech offences since the outbreak of the riots throughout the U.K. this summer. The unrest targeting mostly Muslims followed the stabbing deaths of three children by a U.K.-born boy who was wrongly identified online as a Muslim refugee. The riots are a useful real-life lesson in what happens when online speech and real-life disorder collide, and how speech laws are at risk of being selectively applied.
They also are a useful foreshadowing of how online speech laws might be applied here in Canada under the widened ambit of the proposed Online Harms Act.
Take Sweeney’s Facebook posting. As odious as it was, it stands to reason that it was an intemperate spur-of-the-moment outburst rather than an actual call to arson and violence. It was certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt—the criminal standard—that Sweeney truly wanted other people to go out and burn down mosques.
People say all kinds of things that, while awful, ought not to land a person in prison. I’m reminded of a certain progressive Canadian academic who tweeted about “burning down Congress” following the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 2020, and the loathsome pearl-clutching that ensued amongst conservatives. I’m also reminded of when the former head of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association tweeted “burn it all down” in response to arsons of Catholic churches. That comment was offensive and she rightly lost her job as a result but no sane person would think she should go to jail. The ambiguity inherent in such conduct is the reason why criminalizing it is a flawed endeavour from the outset.
To this point, online speech laws are frustratingly vague.
