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UK free speech crackdown sees up to 30 people a day arrested for petty offenses such as retweets and cartoons
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Post
Posted: September 27th, 2025
https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...
Bernadette Spofforth [was] detained for 36 hours in July 2024. Three girls had just been murdered in Southport, England, at a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. But Spofforth was not under suspicion for the crime. Instead, horrified, and in the fog of a developing tragedy, she’d reposted on X another user’s content blaming newly arrived migrants for the ghastly crime — clarifying in her retweet, “If this is true.” Hours later she realized she may have received bad information and deleted the post — but it had already been seen thousands of times. The murders resulted in widespread civil unrest in the UK, where mass migration is a central issue for citizens. Four police vehicles arrived at her home days later. Spofforth, 56, a successful businesswoman from Chester, was placed under arrest. Her story is one repeated almost hourly in the UK, where data suggests over 30 people a day are arrested for speech crimes, about 12,000 a year, under laws written well before the age of social media that make crimes of sending “grossly offensive” messages or sharing content of an “indecent, obscene or menacing character.” Social media continues to be flooded with videos of British cops banging on doors in the middle of the night and hauling parents off to jail—all over mean Facebook posts. On Tuesday, the US State Department’s annual Human Rights Report slammed British authorities’ “serious restrictions on freedom of expression.”
Note: For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on government corruption and censorship.
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