On July 29 2024, a teenager walked into a children’s Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, England, and murdered three young girls with a knife. He injured ten others.
It was, by any measure, one of the most horrifying attacks on British soil in recent memory, and what followed should have been a reckoning with the catastrophic state failures that let it happen.
Instead, the British government looked at the smoldering aftermath and decided the real enemy was the internet, and the solution just so happens to be the mass surveillance censorship proposals the government is already working on.
After the attack, outrage on social media turned to protests. Protests became riots. And the state’s response landed with a speed and ferocity that it had never managed to direct at, say, the agencies that let a known danger walk free for years.
A former childcarer named Lucy Connolly was jailed for 31 months for a single post on X. That is three months longer than the sentence given to a man who physically attacked a mosque during the same period of unrest.
The UK was already a country where arrests for “offensive” social media posts had nearly doubled in seven years, climbing from 5,502 in 2017 to 12,183 in 2023. The overall conviction rate for those arrests was falling at the same time. Police were locking people up for what they typed at a rate that was going up, while the number of convictions that actually stuck was going down.
The Southport riots became the accelerant. A House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report used the unrest to call for a “new national system for policing” with enhanced capabilities to surveil social media activity, framing public anger as a problem of online “misinformation” rather than a consequence of the state’s own failures.
The state was dodging accountability by demanding censorship and surveillance and blaming the internet for unrest.
Hellbound and Down 