Tag: free speech

British Law Enforcement No Longer Policing Social Media Posts Looking for ‘Non-Crime Hate Incidents’, as Commissioner Celebrates Increased Ability To Investigate Real Criminals

British police are back to investigating crime, not hurt feelings.

The United Kingdom is the leading country in incarcerating citizens for social media posts, and – what’s worse – police wasted time and resources with something called ‘non-crime hate incidents’.

You read it right: perfectly legal posts.

But now, the police are no longer involved in these internet arguments, and that has enabled officers to ‘solve more real crimes’.

The Telegraph reported:

“Sir Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, said the force had doubled the number of real hate crimes that it had solved since he announced in December last year that his force would no longer investigate non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs).

In an exclusive article for The Telegraph, he said this change had already saved officers ‘thousands of hours’, enabling them to devote more time to ‘preventing and solving crime, protecting vulnerable people, and responding to real risks of harm’.”

It’s been two days since Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced the abolition of NCHIs nationally.

“Sir Mark, whose force pre-empted the national move, said NCHIs had ‘eroded’ the public’s trust in the police because of ‘unclear guidance’ from policing bodies and the Government on how to apply them.

Officers had been knocking on people’s doors to deal with ‘online squabbles and everyday disagreements that never met the threshold of criminality’, he said.”

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The Free Speech Act: A Demolition Plan For Britain’s Speech Laws

The Adam Smith Institute has published the Free Speech Act 2026, a model bill that would dismantle virtually the entire legal architecture the British state uses to police speech.

Written by Preston Byrne, an Adam Smith Institute Senior Fellow, alongside co-authors Elijah Granet and Michael Reiners, the legislation runs to 32 sections and seven schedules.

It would repeal seven entire Acts of Parliament, create a statutory right to free expression, ban the state from censoring lawful speech directly or through third parties, and give citizens a private right of action to sue when their rights are violated.

Byrne, a dual-qualified English solicitor and US attorney, is best known as the lawyer who responds to Ofcom’s enforcement notices with cartoon hamsters.

He represents 4chan in its federal lawsuit against the UK’s speech regulator in Washington, D.C., and acts for every current US-based enforcement target of the Online Safety Act.

He is also the architect of the GRANITE Act, the first foreign censorship shield bill in American history, which passed the Wyoming House of Representatives 46-12 before running out of time in the state Senate.

All of that, Byrne writes, was prologue. “The big fight, the real fight, is to restore free speech in the UK. Publishing this Model Bill today, we mean to start it.”

The Bill’s stated purpose is to answer a single question: “If the UK wanted to enact something like the First Amendment, what would the resulting statute look like?”

The answer is a controlled demolition.

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US State Dept Settles Free Speech Suppression Lawsuit

The US State Department has settled a lawsuit brought by The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and the State of Texas, accepting a consent decree that bars it from using, financing, or promoting technology designed to suppress or “fact-check” the constitutionally protected speech of American citizens and domestic media outlets.

The settlement also prohibits the Department from working with foreign governments or NGOs for those purposes, whether through formal agreements or informal arrangements.

We obtained a copy of the joint motion for you here.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represented The Daily Wire and The Federalist, secured what amounts to a binding admission that the government had been doing exactly what it was accused of. The Department now acknowledges that its plaintiffs’ speech on COVID-19, sexual ethics, the biological nature of sex, and election integrity was constitutionally protected all along. It took three years of litigation to get the government to say that out loud.

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“No One Knows What Will Happen Now”: Justice Jackson Warns Against Unbridled Free Speech

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is again warning of a growing threat to the nation. In her lone dissent in Chiles v. Salazar, Jackson observed that “to be completely frank, no one knows what will happen now.” The ominous tone stemmed from the fact that free speech had prevailed over state-imposed orthodoxy in a Colorado case.

Eight justices, including her two liberal colleagues, ruled that Colorado could not prevent licensed counselors from “any practice or treatment” that “attempts or purports to change” a minor’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

The win for free speech was catastrophic for Jackson and many on the left. Allowing counselors to discuss the causes and basis for sexual orientation changes, Jackson maintained, would “open a can of worms.” It would be far better for the majority to simply silence such dissenting voices in the name of science.

The dissent in Chiles is only the latest example of the chilling jurisprudence of Justice Jackson, including a pronounced dismissal of free speech values. Consider the holding of her colleagues that Jackson finds so horrific.

Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that the First Amendment “reflects … a judgment that every American possesses an inalienable right to think and speak freely, and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for discovering truth … any law that suppresses speech based on viewpoint represents an ‘egregious’ assault on both of those commitments.”

What a nightmare.

Instead, Jackson would have declared the ban on anything deemed “conversion therapy” to be “conduct,” not speech.

It is that easy.

You simply impose an orthodoxy and then treat any dissenters as being regulated for their conduct, not their viewpoints.

Justice Elena Kagan could not withhold her frustration with her colleague, noting that “[b]ecause the State has suppressed one side of a debate, while aiding the other, the constitutional issue is straightforward.” She added that Jackson’s view “rests on reimagining—and in that way collapsing—the well-settled distinction between viewpoint-based and other content-based speech restrictions.”

Other countries have embraced Jackson’s permissive approach to speech curtailment.

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Canada’s House of Commons passes ‘anti-Christian’ bill that would criminalize quoting Bible

The majority of Canadian MPs have voted to pass a Liberal bill that will allow the criminalization of religious expression and belief when quoting parts of the Bible, including about homosexuality and gender.

Early Wednesday evening, MPs from the Liberal Party and the Bloc Québécois, in a 186–137 vote, passed Bill C-9, known as the “Combatting Hate Act.” Conservatives, NDP, and Green Party MPs voted against the bill in a rare form of unity among the usually opposing parties.

The bill now heads to Canada’s rubber-stamp Senate for review.

A last-minute effort by the Conservatives to change the wording of the bill failed to pass.

Earlier this week, Liberal MPs forced the bill through the report stage, after earlier, as reported by LifeSiteNews, shutting down all debate on the bill in the committee stage.

In comments sent to LifeSiteNews, Campaign Life Coalition (CLC) blasted the passage of Bill C-9 and called upon “Christians and pro-life advocates to prepare for increasing hostility.”

“With the passage of Bill C-9 in the House, Christians and pro-life advocates will almost certainly face an entirely new level of hostility, as the door swings open to actual persecution under a cloak of supposed legality,” said CLC’s Campaigns Manager David Cooke, who is also a Christian pastor.

Cooke said the Bill C-9 was framed as a law going after “hate,” but, in reality, it is a bill that religious leaders from various faith communities “say could lead to hate-related charges against believers – empowers ideologically-driven police officers and judges to target, for the first time, the very word of God on matters of life, family, and faith.”

“We must prepare for the battle ahead,” said Cooke, adding Canadians must “commit” to the “One who has won the ultimate victory over every foe, demonstrated by His resurrection on that first Easter morning.”

CLC Director of Political Operations Jack Fonseca noted that Bill C-9 must be stopped in its tracks in the Senate, but admitted it will be a hard battle, as most of the senators were appointed by former Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

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Settlement Stops Government From Using Social Media As ‘Speech Police’

The government censorship machine took a huge hit Tuesday in a historic win for First Amendment rights. 

What is being billed as an “unprecedented” agreement will bar the three government agencies central to killing speech the Biden administration didn’t like from pressuring social media platforms from doing so in the future. 

“This case began with a suspicion, that blossomed into fact, that led to Congressional hearings and an Executive Order that government censorship of Americans’ social media posts should end,” said John Vecchione, Senior Litigation Counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), the nonprofit civil rights group that has battled in courts for years to bring justice to victims of government-led speech suppression. 

Also celebrating, Sen. Eric Schmitt, who, as Missouri’s attorney general, sued the Biden administration for “brazenly colluding with Big Tech to silence Missourians.” 

“This is a massive win for the First Amendment and for every American who believes in free speech,” the Missouri Republican said in a press release, adding that President Biden’s tenure in office brought “the most aggressively liberal and antiliberty excesses of government that America has ever seen.”

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Court Backs First-Grader in Suit Over School Reaction to ‘Any Life’ Matters Drawing

Can a “schoolyard dispute” warrant federal court intervention? Do first-graders have First Amendment rights? The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit just gave a resounding yes to both questions.

The case centers on a first-grader identified in court documents as B.B. After her teacher read a story about Martin Luther King Jr., B.B. drew a picture of her and her multiracial friend group. “Black Lives Mater [sic] any life,” it said. Sweet, right?

Apparently not to the administrators at Viejo Elementary School in California’s Capistrano Unified School District. The school’s principal, Jesus Becerra, spoke with B.B. about her drawing, allegedly telling her that it was inappropriate. According to B.B., she was also barred from recess for two weeks.

B.B.’s mother, Chelsea Boyle, sued, alleging that her daughter’s First Amendment rights had been violated.

A federal district court sided with the school and Becerra, holding that B.B.’s drawing was not protected by the First Amendment. “This schoolyard dispute—like most—does not warrant federal court intervention,” wrote U.S. District Judge David O. Carter in the court’s 2024 opinion.

Now, the 9th Circuit has weighed in and reversed course. “We hold that elementary students’ speech is protected by the First Amendment,” the appeals court ruled, vacating the lower court’s decision and sending the case back for reconsideration.

“Schools may restrict students’ speech only when the restriction is reasonably necessary to protect the safety and well-being of its students,” the 9th Circuit judges wrote.

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TDF sounds alarm over imminent passage of Bill C-9

Proposed “Combatting Hate Act” expands the legal definition of hatred and removes key free expression safeguards in the Criminal Code.

The House of Commons has closed debate on Bill C-9, the “Combatting Hate Act.” The Bill expands and codifies the definition of “hatred,” departing from the Supreme Court’s strict requirement of “vilification and detestation.” It removes the longstanding good faith religious speech protections for sincerely held religious opinions and expressions based on religious texts in the Criminal Code and eliminates the requirement for Attorney General consent before charging individuals with certain hate crime offences. The Bill also creates a new offence that applies when an underlying offence—even a non-criminal one—is motivated by hatred, potentially doubling the penalties for the underlying act.

The Bill has faced opposition from civil liberties groups and religious organizations. TDF was invited to testify before the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights and filed a brief outlining its serious misgivings. 

“Ironically, the government has moved to end debate on issues of public concern for a bill that would end debate on issues of public concern. The Bill empowers prosecutors to bring charges based on the merest suggestion that the impugned conduct is motivated by an ill-defined concept of “hatred,” massively increasing potential jail time and legal jeopardy for defendants. In our experience, these types of offences tend to be laid against marginalized and working-class people rather than powerful elites and political insiders. However, all Canadians can expect greater digital censorship and increased online police surveillance if the Bill becomes law. We only have to look at the UK example, where police make approximately 12,000 annual arrests for online “hate incidents” under similar legislation.” 

The Bill now moves to a vote at the justice committee. After that, it will proceed to the report stage and third reading before advancing to the Senate.

TDF will continue to oppose the Bill and all attempts by the government to censor Canadians.

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Critics Say New Definition of Anti-Muslim Hostility Is ‘Assault’ on Free Speech

Critics have said that a new UK government definition of anti-Muslim hostility is an “assault” on free speech.

On March 10, the Labour government adopted a new non-statutory definition of anti-Muslim hostility as part of its “Social Cohesion” strategy, aimed at tackling hate crime and strengthening community relations.

The guidance, titled “Protecting What Matters,” sets out a definition intended to help institutions identify and respond what they call to anti-Muslim hatred and discrimination.

The Free Speech Union (FSU) said the initiative could represent an attempt to revive blasphemy-style laws in Britain. The FSU offers legal help to people disciplined or arrested for lawful expression.

“What we are seeing is an attempt to reintroduce Britain’s blasphemy laws, 18 years after they were abolished by Parliament, and the biggest assault on English liberty, particularly free speech, in over 800 years,” it said in a March 10 post on X.

According to the document, the definition, laid out over three paragraphs, says anti-Muslim hostility includes “intentionally engaging in, assisting or encouraging criminal acts—including acts of violence, vandalism, harassment, or intimidation, whether physical, verbal, written or electronically communicated, that are directed at Muslims because of their religion or at those who are perceived to be Muslim, including where that perception is based on assumptions about ethnicity, race or appearance.”

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Are We in a Free Speech Recession?

For years, debates over hate speech laws have been framed as moral disputes about civility and protection. Increasingly, however, they are becoming legal and political battles over the limits of “free” expression in democratic societies. 

A report by the Future of Free Speech project, titled The Free Speech Recession Hits Home, argues that established democracies are experiencing measurable declines in protections for speech once considered firmly safeguarded. The report contends that restrictions once associated primarily with authoritarian regimes are now expanding across Western countries under the banner of combating hate, misinformation, and extremism. 

Hate speech laws are being broadly interpreted all over the Western world, and their continued expansion is reshaping the boundaries of lawful expression. 

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