At first glance, you might think Emily Darlington, Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, had simply woken up on the wrong side of a particularly Orwellian bed. During a recent parliamentary inquisition — sorry, hearing — on social media, misinformation, and algorithms, Darlington floated an idea so alarmingly daft that even the Ministry of Truth would have blushed.

Her proposal? That public criticism of the UK’s speech laws by Elon Musk and US Vice President JD Vance might amount to “foreign interference.” That’s right. According to Darlington’s logic, if an American so much as questions the Online Safety Act, they might as well be stuffing ballot boxes or hacking government servers.

“Should we consider the current JD Vance, Elon Musk campaign against the UK — particularly against the government and the Prime Minister — and this push about free speech and the misrepresentation of our free speech laws as foreign interference?” she asked, in a sentence so brazenly bonkers it should come with its own government warning label.

This wasn’t a discussion about cyberattacks or deepfake election manipulation. No, Darlington was talking about speech. Dissent. Opinions. The sort of thing democracies used to be quite fond of.

Now, under the UK’s freshly unwrapped National Security Act 2023, “foreign interference” can land you 14 years in prison and an unlimited fine. It used to be that such punishments were reserved for actual enemies of the state — spies, saboteurs. Now, apparently, tweeting that Britain’s Online Safety Act is a bad idea could get you tossed into the Tower.

One would expect a room full of educated adults to respond to this with a firm, resounding no. Instead, we got caution, hedging, and a heavy whiff of complicity.

Dr. Eirliani Abdul Rahman, a Senior Fellow at Georgetown and one-time Twitter Trust and Safety Council member, refused to outright dismiss the idea that Musk or Vance might be causing harm.

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