“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.
The U.K.’s Online Safety Act created a new criminal offence of “sending false information intended to cause non-trivial harm.” What harms will count? Hurt feelings? Alleged emotional pain?
Apparently, the mere act of unknowingly spreading false information about the identity of the Southport killer is enough. Bernadette Spofforth, a 55-year-old mother of three was arrested after tweeting a rumour she’d heard that the suspect was a man called Ali Al-Shakati who was on an MI6 watchlist and had arrived in the U.K. by boat last year, with the caveat “if this is true, then all hell is about to break loose.” She was arrested for “false communications” under the Online Safety Act.
But false information is being spread from all corners, and others with a different politics seem to get off with just a warning. Nick Lowles, who runs an anti-racist organization called Hope Not Hate tweeted to his 42,000 followers a claim that a Muslim woman had been attacked with acid. The claim was later shown to be false. Lowles was not cautioned or charged for this.
As Douglas Murray wrote last week, online speech laws seem to be enforced depending on the person’s proximity to and alignment with the values of the regime, like the dystopia depicted in V for Vendetta where those who are deemed undesirable by the regime are arrested and made an example of.
And even worse, while criminal culpability is supposed to depend solely on the individual moral responsibility of an offender, judges sentencing the riots’ “keyboard warriors” explicitly named the “social climate” as an aggravating factor. For example, the sentencing reasons for a 26-year-old man who posted on X calling for “mass deportation now,” and wrote “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care,” declared that an immediate jail sentence is necessary due to “the sensitive social climate.”
The harsh sentences for speech should give Canadians pause before they accept the Liberal government’s proposed Online Harms Act, which includes a standalone hate crime offence that is punishable by a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, creates an offence for future hate crimes, and raises the penalty for the crime of advocating genocide from five years to life imprisonment.
A woman gets arrested ahead of a far-right anti-immigration protest in Newcastle, England, Saturday, Aug. 10, 2024. Scott Heppell/AP Photo.
If the bill passes, so-called keyboard warriors like Julie Sweeney, whose conduct would likely be caught by one of these offences, would be subject to a sentencing range up to and including life. Even judicial moderation might land on a fit and mid-range sentence of ten to twelve years.
Government spokespeople have responded to the volley of criticism lobbed at the Online Harms Act by alleging “rage-farming” and claiming that social context, institutions, and judicial discretion will serve as protective speed bumps against the most draconian responses to speech made available by the bill. In real life, the bill’s defenders say, cooler heads will prevail.
But the U.K. riots and their aftermath show that exactly the opposite is true during social panics. Judges, bureaucrats, prosecutors, and police all swim in the same water as the media and the public and are liable to the same ideological distortions which lead to a selective view of messy and complex social movements.
Progressives tend to romanticize left-wing protests like the pro-Palestine movement, so much that they evade acknowledging the antisemitic and pro-Hamas elements plainly on display. At the same time, they vilify right-wing social movements, like their collective delusion that the Freedom Convoy was a gang of neo-Nazis.
Conservatives, for their part, have their own fatal blind spots which wax and wane according to a group’s ideological affinities with their own. For example, there’s no excuse for throwing bricks at a mosque or storming refugee housing. The same distortions are mobilized by the state and its agents.
The selective application of online speech laws reveals a troubling bias, where the rule of law is overshadowed by ideological leanings, leaving us all vulnerable to the whims of subjective enforcement.
Joanna Baron is Executive Director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, a legal charity that protects constitutional freedoms in courts of law and…
