Tom Slater
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This is an offence so broad that it has caught much less objectionable individuals in its net. In 2018, a Liverpool teenager was given a curfew for quoting rap lyrics on Instagram. That same year, Scottish YouTuber Mark Meechan was convicted under Section 127 and subsequently fined for a skit in which he taught his pug to do a Nazi salute.
The thing about offensive, even ‘grossly offensive’, speech is that what constitutes it is entirely subjective. One man’s sick joke is another man’s blasphemy. That the person responsible for the Captain Tom tweet said something most will find disgusting doesn’t make this case any less dangerous: in the end, he has been arrested for saying something nasty on the internet.
What’s more, a moral panic about ‘trolling’ could lead to the internet becoming a less free place for all of us. The government is talking about potentially fining social-media firms for failing to remove abusive content. When this was tried in Germany, it incentivised hasty moderation decisions that led to satirists being censored.
In any case, the idea that the internet is some Wild West now is patently untrue. The law and Big Tech’s own policies are already far too restrictive. A 2017 Times investigation found that nine people a day were being arrested for offensive posts. And Silicon Valley, lest we forget, recently deplatformed a sitting president on spurious grounds.
We seem to be incapable as a society of condemning speech we find objectionable without also demanding it be made illegal. Don’t go out of your way to upset people, treat others as you’d like to be treated, don’t speak ill of the dead: these are all perfectly good rules to live by, but they needn’t be enforced by law.
Another old adage we’d do well to remember is ‘sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me’. We used to teach that to small children. Now it is apparently a callous denial of a serious problem, a trolls’ charter. But if we only tried sticking to it for a while, we’d be in a much healthier place as a society.
Because you read about captain tom
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