Why I’m setting up a new free speech campaign (and how you can help!)

Dear readers,

Today, a few dedicated volunteers and I are launching a new campaign for free speech in the UK. It’s called SPEAK, and you can check out our launch video here:

https://x.com/speakukorg/status/1996217869307199527

I would very much appreciate it if you could go and watch the video, and retweet it (or at least like it) now if you agree with the thrust of our argument. Please do this, or at least leave a reply to the tweet with your thoughts on the video. I’ll still be here when you come back. If you don’t already agree that free speech is an important issue, read on! Then, if you want to, you can check out our website at speakuk.org, and make a donation or join our mailing list if you’re so inclined (or maybe wait until after reading this piece, and see if you’re convinced).

…

Okay, now that you’re back, I think it’s worth spelling out a few reasons why I think this issue is important. After all, there are lots of things to work on, so why free speech in particular? Why not animal welfare, or global health, or preventing nuclear war, or whatever else?

The most important point from an impact perspective is that this is much more tractable than most issues I’ve come across, and if you care about doing good, I think tractability is often quite underrated. I first started taking a serious interest in starting a British free speech campaign earlier this year, when I read this piece in the Economist. It gave a few examples of people who had been arrested: some parents who had criticised their kids’ school in a WhatsApp group, some police officers who posted some racist messages in a group chat, someone who wore an offensive costume to a Halloween party, and so on.

I found the piece interesting, and sent it on to a few group chats that I was in, sending a message along the lines of ‘someone should do something about this’. The reaction I got was unlike the reaction to anything I’ve ever shared before: dozens of people messaging me offering to help out, connect me with people they knew, give hours of their time, donate small amounts of money if I set something up, and more. It became apparent that there is a huge pent-up demand for a non-partisan free speech campaign in the UK, and someone should do something about it. So, I thought, why not me?

This seems like an extremely good time to set up a non-partisan free speech campaign. For the first time in a while, people on the left are being arrested for their opinions. Last month, hundreds of Palestine Action protestors were arrested for holding up signs that said “I support Palestine Action” on them. Police assessed whether to investigate Gary Lineker (a popular football pundit in the UK) for posting an allegedly antisemitic meme on Twitter. A member of the band Kneecap, an edgy left-winger, was charged under terrorism legislation (!) for waving around a Hezbollah flag at a gig.

Now, obviously I think waving a Hezbollah flag is very silly, and almost certainly counterproductive in terms of achieving the goals that these people are trying to achieve. But I don’t think you should be charged under terrorism law for your political opinions (or, perhaps more accurately, your edgy stunt). Nor do I think you should be arrested for holding up a placard that says you support a proscribed organisation. Nor do I think memes that people are offended by should warrant police looking into you, even if your posts are genuinely offensive.

So, given free speech is often thought of as a right-wing issue (and so as not to give the wrong impression, I should also be clear that I do not think that right-wing people should be arrested for their opinions or offensive posts either), getting left-wing and politically moderate people on board seems like a real possibility over the course of the next year. It’s not just the Toby Youngs and the JD Vances of the world who should care about free speech!

But why is this actually important? Firstly, I am quite worried about tail risk if we don’t change these laws. It wouldn’t be that difficult for some authoritarian government to take advantage of the UK’s speech laws to crack down on political dissent in a much more serious way than we’re currently seeing. Proscribing political groups you disagree with as terrorists is not particularly difficult with a government majority, although it can be challenged in court. Other laws, like the Public Order Act, also seem fairly ripe for abuse.

I think adding friction to future governments who may want to crack down on free speech is extremely valuable, even if it would be difficult to get First Amendment-like protections. Making it politically costly to crack down on free speech is a good start. Tail risk is serious, and there’s lots of value in defending against worst outcomes.

I’ve also been looking at some of the empirical evidence around the laws that exist in Europe, and it doesn’t seem particularly clear to me that prosecuting people for hate speech even has the effect that its advocates believe it to have. One study with good causal identification found that when politicians give hateful speeches, hate crimes did not go up. But when they were prosecuted for that hate speech, crime did go up. When it comes to speech, the “cure” may be worse than the disease. I accept that a single study is not dispositive for a question like this (and remember to beware the man of one study, or indeed, one meta-analysis), but I can assure you that this is not a case of me selecting the most favourable study for my cause - my impression is that there isn’t a huge literature here, and the studies that do exist broadly corroborate this story of hate speech laws being relatively ineffectual or counterproductive.

This seems to align with what I’ve actually observed happen after noteworthy speech-related arrests/convictions. When Lucy Connolly was imprisoned for her awful tweets, far-right and fascist groups raised a lot of money (pocketing some of it themselves), and Connolly’s platform clearly got larger. The Guardian wrote: “The failure last week of her attempt to appeal against the sentence has only reinforced her standing as a martyr among far-right activists who have raised thousands through fundraising campaigns.” I just don’t think Connolly’s conviction achieved any of the aims it was presumably intended to, and counterspeech would’ve been more effective than legal consequences.

But maybe the most important reason I care strongly about free speech is not pure consequentialism (even though I am a consequentialist), it’s just that I think that it’s wrong to arrest people or to put them in prison because they have offensive opinions or because they tell stupid jokes. A friend of mine, when he was a teenager, tweeted a joke that was very, very dumb, and very offensive. People on Twitter piled on him, and he faced some social consequences. This seems to me to be a much better outcome for him and for society than if he had been arrested and charged, which he could have easily been under the Section 127 of the Communications Act, 2003 (which makes it illegal to be “grossly offensive”).

Anyone who meets him will attest to the fact that he is clearly a good person, and people are very surprised to hear he got into this trouble when he was a teenager I think ruining his life with a criminal record would have been a serious societal mistake, just as it is when we ruin the lives of people who post silly, offensive, or genuinely hateful things today. While I have some mixed thoughts on cancel culture, I do at least think that social consequences make significantly more sense than legal consequences. Before social media, someone in the pub saying something objectionable may have been told off, or have been ostracised by other pubgoers. But because people now put many of their objectionable thoughts out on social media, they risk being arrested and charged. I think this is a serious mistake, and that society works better when you don’t face legal penalties for saying something you probably shouldn’t have said.

I think the best way to think about free speech in the UK is that the line has swung too far in one direction. You don’t have to be a “free speech absolutist” to take this view (and I would not refer to myself as one; I don’t really think anyone is). Thousands of people are being arrested each year for online posts, there are many examples of people being arrested or having “non-crime hate incidents” recorded for speech that seems very innocuous (see: Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine), and there are so many examples of speech cases in the UK that seem to make people who are sceptical of permissive speech norms think that we’ve gone too far. Reforms could be fairly simple, like defaulting to a voluntary interview for speech offenses rather than beginning with arrest (and only arresting people where there is some real urgency). We’re also pushing for a Free Speech Act, to repeal and amend a number of speech-related laws, but getting started on reducing the number of arrests seems like a straightforward win.

I have much more to say on free speech, but I don’t want to bore you with point after point about why I think it’s important. If you want to chat about this, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I’ll ask again that you PLEASE retweet or like our launch video (or reply to the tweet with your thoughts), and check out our website at speakuk.org. Thank you! We intend to campaign, make videos, lobby, and generally do all we can to boost the salience of free speech in the UK.

https://x.com/speakukorg/status/1996217869307199527

Best,

Sam