by DocTomoe | 2025-07-28 13:02:48+00:00
The UK arrested around 12.5k people in 2023 over social media posts, according to the Times. Not all of them related to immigration at all (but I would wager: many are).

It is sufficient to 'cause distress' - against whom, or in what form, or what qualifies as 'distress' is deliberately kept vague to maximise persecution rates. Some cases saw a squad car with six Bobbies take the very average, middle-class parents of a teenage daughter to the precinct to question them on why their daughter has had strong opinions on the way her school's new head was chosen [1]. While - as so often - no-one was later sent to a court for sentencing, the chilling effects are there, and I'd say half a platoon of police officers descending on someone's front lawn is definitely "getting in trouble with the law".

[1] https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/police-s...

Money quote:

> More often than not, the police record these episodes as “non-crime hate incidents”, with over 13,200 recorded last year. What’s so extraordinary about the police’s zealous pursuit of these non-criminals is that the rate at which they’re catching actual criminals is falling. Fewer than seven in 100 crimes now lead to a charge or summons, down from 17 in 100 in 2015. In the year to September 2023, the total number of burglaries left unsolved stood at 213,814, a rise of 4 per cent on the previous year.

So ... police gets their numbers up persecuting people for wrong thought while they avoid having to deal with actual, real criminals which might fight back violently. And Whitehall is clapping to it.

Then there is the case of David Wootton - who is currently fighting against a verdict that declared him having a tasteless halloween costume in a social media post (dressing up as the Manhattan Area bomber, with an arab headscarf, an 'I love Ariana Grande' t-shirt, and a backpack that read 'boom') to be a count of 'hate crime'. He faces up to two years in prison over that. Deeply tasteless? Sure. A 'hate crime' worth of spending two years in prison over? Seriously?

Let's move away from the UK - to Germany, an actual EU state. Which reintroduced a lèse-majesté law that makes it more prosecutable - and carries harder sentencing - if you post something against a politician that they do not like. That law is used most happily especially by the Green Party, but they all are complicit. It led to early-morning Special Forces raids against the former flat of someone who called a politician '1 dick', and standard raid against someone who called a former minister of economics 'a doofus' in what could easily be understood as satirical use of a common brand name. Sometimes, quoting them with wrong interpunctation is reason for a raid, and sometimes just quoting them is enough. And the state prosecutors? Laugh on American TV about how they know they never get most of the cases through a proper court case, but 'the raid in itself is the punishment already' [2].

And, fun fact: Courts have decided that even stating the truth about a politician can qualify as a prosecutable insult ("Schmähkritik") if it is 'sufficient to negatively impact their future political work'. So better thing twice, and have an exit plan before you point out that Patrick O. Litican is a compulsive liar, with a list of deliberate lies told by Patrick in the past, and casting shadow over a bold claim he has just used to shoehorn another policy in.

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc

These aren't aberrations. They're stress-tests of the system’s tolerance for dissent. And it’s failing - gloriously, publicly, and with a press release. Europe is on a dark, dark trajectory, and it needs to be monitored very closely when they keep increasing policing powers.