I think we could have a more thoughtful discussion if people didn't start off with an assumption that the way the US manages free speech is unquestionably better than the rest of the world. Take a breath and think before you write.
It seems to me that what you are allowed to say in the US is very dependent on how much the person you are saying it about is able to spend on lawyers, for instance.
Considering the staggering number of arrest for online/offensive communications in England & Wales, we should add Britain to the list of Russia and Iran
I was also surprised the post focusses on Rus/Iran when Australia, UK, and many more countries (Malaysia, Thailand) have/are introducing laws to prevent large swaths of free speech (banning mediums by age, banning conversation by topic, or by making speaking one's mind online too risky, as almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech').
"as almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech'"
Are you serious here?
In russia you get problems for calling a war a war and worse problems if you say it is a bad war.
In UK you certainly can call a war a war and you can critize the government or other people all day long. What you cannot do is calling for violence against them. Or do you have counterexamples?
Because this thread started in a discussion about the United Kingdom, I think it is relevant to cite how this exact scenario did happen in the United Kingdom.
Elizabeth Kenney was arrested for a homophobic slur used privately in a text message to a third party -- not even a public comment -- against a man who physically beat her. The man served no jail time for beating her.
OBVIOUSLY there is a difference between Russia and the UK, obviously Russia is worse. But saying "the only thing you can't do is call for violence against them" is a completely dishonest characterisation of the situation, when we've seen documented cases of police overreach and people being arrested for thought crimes.
Ok, there's some context missing from those summaries though, no? In the first case it's not just "arrested for praying" it's "arrested for being in an exclusion zone specifically designated to try and stop you harassing people undertaking a lawful activity". They would have been arrested regardless of activity, it's effectively a restraining order and describing it as "for praying" is nonsense.
In the second case, it was not about misgendering someone - they were accused of a campaign of persistent harassment, something which the Daily Mail fails to mention except as a minor aside near the end of the article (not untypical of the Mail, naturally).
The Linehan case was debatable, and the approach taken probably wrong in some forms by the police (as admitted) but they were not arrested for simply voicing an opinion, but for behaviour which was sufficiently threatening and/or assaulting for the police to believe that a crime may have been committed and thus warrant further action.
There are cases of overreach, that applies outside of the speech issue as well - and indeed for any country with a reasonably effective policing system, it's never perfect. But these cases are not the simple slam-dunk that people will try and paint them as.
> What you cannot do is calling for violence against them.
This is blatantly disingenuous. The Public Order Act 1986, Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 all criminalize "insulting" and "abusive" words, or any public display of literature that is "insulting" or "abusive" -- much more than calls for violence:
> A person who uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting, is guilty of an offence if—
> (b) having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.
British jurisprudence has consistently put the likelihood of racial hatred being stirred up to the whims of the presiding judge. If the unaccountable bureaucrat feels like your comments could likely stir up racial hatred to even a single one of your cousins, even if there was no evidence of any stirred, then you are guilty.
What exactly constitutes "abusive" or "insulting" is not only vague but applied solely to white Christians. Certainly a document that says polytheists should be murdered (Quran 9:5) or one that says Hebrews should "completely consume" all the people that they get control of "with no pity" (Deuteronomy 7:16) could be considered not only insulting and abusive, but outright threatening. But these statutes are only used to attack people saying "I don't like how many foreigners are in my country and they should be rounded up and shipped back." Whatever your position on this kind of jingoistic nationalist sentiment, you should be able to recognize that the hypocrisy and lack of liberty is stupid and dangerous and is going to eventually result in genocide (either of the native Britons by the new arrivals, or the latter in the backlash).
Elizabeth Kinney certainly did not "call for violence" against the man who beat her. She simply, minutes after being physically beaten, used a slur in a private text message to a friend, and was arrested for it:
It is extremely suspect that every thread that Hacker News and other prominent and influential platforms has on these statutes gets flooded by people spreading deliberate pro-government misinformation, claiming that people are only being arrested for "calls for violence".
Threatening violence against parties is generally punished by a separate, far more severe statute (Serious Crime Act 2007, which replaced the traditional mechanism for incitement so that it could be vaguely applied to overeager online comments) that is virtually never invoked for Facebook posts, because none of elderly people arrested under this statute are threatening violence. They are posting something considered unacceptable by the powers that be, because limitless immigration was rammed down the throat of the English without any regard to democratic will or desires.
And the thing to stand out was the change of meaning when the full quote is provided:
____
Fear or provocation of violence.
(1)A person is guilty of an offence if he—
(a)uses towards another person threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or
(b)distributes or displays to another person any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,
with intent to cause that person to believe that immediate unlawful violence will be used against him or another by any person, or to provoke the immediate use of unlawful violence by that person or another, or whereby that person is likely to believe that such violence will be used or it is likely that such violence will be provoked.
____
If you have to rely on this kind of disingenuous trickery to make a point, then you don't have a point.
The GP is correct in their statement:
>> What you cannot do is calling for violence against them.
The statute says "or" and an a) b) c) bullet point listing in a statute also means "or". Maybe you are unfamiliar with boolean logic, but I was listing the relevant lines of the statute which allow someone who did not call for violence to be prosecuted, and the standard interpretation used by prosecutors to prosecute people for non-violent, non-threatening, insulting speech.
What about Elizabeth Kinney, arrested for a simple slur in a private text message to a friend about the man who assaulted her, minutes after being beaten? What about the tens of thousands of people arrested who did not threaten violence?
I was giving an example of the format. That you think that it is necessary for a c) to exist for the example to be valid belies your absurd lack of understanding of the subject matter, whether incidental or willful.
And that doesn't even matter, because the text of the a) part explicitly says or at the end:
> (a)he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or
It clearly is not disingenuous nor deceptive to clip out a) when I highlighted the b) part explicitly showing that it was merely one bullet point, and that a) contains or at the end (meaning that you do not have to commit the behavior described in a to be guilty under the statute). I was being helpful, showing only the relevant parts of the statute for readers that don't want to waste their time. You responded by posting more legalese not relevant to the point, potentially maliciously to try to complicate and confuse readers.
"Admitted" in journalist speak means he pled guilty. It doesn't lend credence to the idea this idea:
> "with intent to cause that person to believe that immediate unlawful violence will be used against him..."
There's no way to go from "they should not be allowed to live here" to the idea that he is making people subject to "immediate unlawful violence". I stand in awe that there is anyone that can argue that with a straight face. This thread is about whether the statute covers behavior that is violently threatening. Admitted spreading of "racial hatred" in the form of simple statements opposed to migrant presence is not violent or threatening. It is an inherently peaceful form of political lobbying.
I've been hearing lots of crazy things about people getting arrested in the UK for posting "memes" or things like that. So I decided to look for examples. All the examples I can find are clearly hate speech, policed more strongly than I would prefer but not that much more strongly, if I'm honest.
The most egregious case I could find was someone arrested for a meme of a pride flag morphing into a swastika. Probably not arrest worthy but perhaps it was the last straw for someone with a history of hate speech.
It's also hard to find examples because everyone writing about this has an agenda. So if anyone can find examples of people being arrested for things that are clearly jokes or memes rather than clearly hate speech, I'm curious to see them as well.
The flaw in your argument is that it assumes a clear and workable distinction between "a joke" and "obvious hate speech." Yet one of the strongest objections to the very concept of "hate speech" is precisely that we lack a reliable way to stop the term from expanding indefinitely.
The case of Count Dankula is a textbook example: it is plainly a joke, and interpreting it as Nazi promotion or hate speech requires an extraordinary degree of bad faith. And yet, that is exactly how it was treated.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/youtube-count-dankula-mark-m...
Which is very cultural dependent as well. "Not being able to log in on TikTok if you are under 16" is not "preventing free speech". And "having no access to pornhub" is not preventing free speech either. Edit: TBC: this is not me defending these laws or rules.
E.g. Freedom of speech in the US, is rather narrow. It merely states you may "speak, write, and print with freedom" but not that you may do so anywhere, on any platform, on private property. It doesn't state that such speech, writings or printings must reach everyone.
The UNHCR article 19 goes further, though. But it doesn't automatically apply to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...
It includes `... and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers`.
And all these only apply to governments. Many of the examples you mention, aren't government-imposed but imposed by private entities (who, granted, often pre-emptively self-censor). E.g. certain words used on Instagram or in Yourube videos will hurt monetization, or will cause it's discovery or promotion to severely degrade; which is why people use phrases like "unalived". So let's not pretend the US is any good in this.
Dutch culture used to be rather free with nudity in movies and on TV. Every Dutch movie from before the era of US streaming services had at least a pair of naked boobies bouncing around. But this, and in it's wake the entire culture has become more prude-ish. A form of cultural colonialism by the US. Not terrible, but a good example of private companies imposing self-censorship even in places where it really is not needed. IANAL, but I'm quite certain youtube would be allowed to run videos with nudity just fine in most of (nothern?) Europe. But they don't.
Depends on what you mean by primarily. US government funding is still the largest single portion of their funding, but they are trying to diversify. Most funding comes from non-government sources: https://blog.torproject.org/financials-blog-post-2023-2024/
> almost anything now can be interpreted as 'offensive' or 'hate speech'
I only know about the UK, but this is not really true there.
Your speech has to be obviously threatening or abusive, and obviously motivated by prejudice towards one of a few categories (disability, race, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation are the main ones).
If you don't make threatening or abusive remarks towards these groups, you aren't breaking the law.
Well, no, more accurately, when it comes to it, it's in the eyes of a judge (or a jury in some cases). You can have all kinds of arguments about validity of arrests, of prosecutions, etc., but it's still fundamentally a system where you'll be charged with an offence and then either convicted or not.
I don't know of a single case (and don't believe anyone can point to one) where people have been arrested for simply criticising politicians. Has the number of incidents risen over recent years? Yes, and while this might be partly explained by stricter legal approaches, I suspect it's much more to do with a drastic rise in far-right activity and a consequent feeling among many that they can now say/do whatever they like with impunity (including making threatening and inflammatory remarks about minorities, and so on).
Not exactly a judge or jury. IIRC a common law assault can go on with only the subjective experience of threat. Hard to prove, but the bar is not objective. See:
True, although even those crimes (take common law assault) will still be heard in front of a magistrate - there's a process, there are processes for appealing, and it's not just some random police officer with the ability to jail you without process.
I agree that the UK has far too many laws that are more subjective than they ideally should be, but they do at least attach some level of observable and knowable process.
That would require the police to believe that an offence is likely to have been committed. While I am more than ready to criticise the police for many, many things, I'm not sure they're likely to just take that at face value... (As you've specified first contact, etc., that seems likely - of course there could be situations where such a communication would be an offence, such as in the context of a restraining/exclusion order, etc., but not in this case).
What kind of evidence would you take? If it’s someone from the project openly saying what I imply, there obviously isn’t any. But if you are looking for evidence that the project took a politically biased turn to one side of the aisle, I’m sure you’ll find a lot on your own. And from there you can understand why there isn’t a single mention of what’s happening in the UK.
In this very thread you can find lots of comments excusing the censorship because it’s being used to censor the “wrong ideas”.
Yes. I think social media or app bans should count as well, as well as consequences for things posted on social media which are simply opinions. I think killing of journalists should count as well (so probably India, Israel, etc.)
And I think also frivolous suits lodged by the govt at people for their speech. So that would include suing Twitter users for making jokes about the FBI director girlfriend, etc. One of the biggest things to censor speech the US is doing is forcing the sale of TikTok to government friendly group. There are many ways governments censor our speech, and they seem, sadly, to be increasing worldwide
These numbers are for _all_ arrests under the Malicious Communications Act in that year. So while that category includes arrests for tweets, it also includes all arrests for any offensive communications via an internet-enabled device. So it'd include arrests for domestic abuse where at least one component of the abuse was through WhatsApp. Similarly, it can include just about any arrest where the crime was planned on an internet enabled device.
The point is, communications should not be surveilled at all by the state. It shouldn't matter that the Internet is sometimes used to commit crimes, the bigger issue is that the vast majority of non-criminal traffic is subject to snooping.
Were they surveilled? Or simply read on someone's device after they were lawfully arrested, or sent to the police by the victim? You seem to be making a bit of a jump there
I’d much rather get arrested in Britain than Russia or Iran. And I certainly wouldn’t put the UK in the same bucket as Russia and Iran. Not even close.
Hate speech is a problem. If it wasn’t, why are Russia and China spending so much on troll farms? It’s a direct attack on a democracy’s ability to form consensus. I don’t think we’ve found the right, effective way to deal with this problem yet, but I applaud any democratic country that tries sth in that area.
So to be clear, your sole expectation of a liberal democracy is that it have a better judicial system than Russia or Iran.
And beyond that, you applaud any democratic country's efforts to reign in speech by arresting their own citizens in order to combat foreign influence operations?
And the fulcrum of this argument is that we believe that Russia and China have uniquely pernicious influence operations and there are no other state-level actors domestically or semi-domestically whose intelligence services also exert influence through the passage of laws restricting speech?
Having seen the last two years of politics in the UK and the US, your impression is that there is an overwhelming Chinese-Russian troll farm operation which self-evidently justifies rolling back the last two centuries worth of hard-fought and incremental precedents won for free speech and free press.
And again, the water-line we need to stay above is merely "this is still better than being arrested in Russia or Iran", keeping in mind that many countries we would not consider to be democracies at all also meet this bar.
If you live anywhere in the west, you should be more concerned by being arrested by your own government then by some government in the other part of the world.
I'd rather get arrested in the UK too, but that's completely irrelevant.
> Hate speech is a problem. If it wasn’t, why are Russia and China spending so much on troll farms?
Non-sequitur. The existence of troll farms doesn’t mean it's such a big problem that we should give up our rights surrounding speech and communication that we fought hard for.
I don't think it's completely irrelevant. Can we admit some nuance where the UK's fast ramp up of arrests for previously legal speech is genuinely concerning, but also that raw number of arrests (not even convictions!) is not the only basis for comparison?
What are people saying that gets them arrested? This important but as-yet-unanswered question is crucial to evaluating the severity of the UK's censorship regime.
Probably the most high-profile case was the Lucy Connolly one, where she posted:
> "Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the
bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government
and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these
families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it”
For additional context (which was relevant during the prosecution and sentencing) this was posted during a time of riots and arson attacks centred on asylum accommodations, and very shortly following a highly publicised mass-murder of children which was (entirely wrongly) being blamed on asylum seekers.
She also pleaded guilty to the charged offence, rather than contesting the charge, for clarity. While not all cases will be quite like this, it is definitely not the case that - as some parties of the right have claimed - she is a free-speech martyr, a political prisoner, and so on.
> following a highly publicised mass-murder of children which was (entirely wrongly) being blamed on asylum seekers.
The mass-murder was a consequence of the asylum system. Given what is publicly known, parents of Axel Rudakubana were overwhelmingly likely to have been asylum seekers.
No there is a thing call the law, those are passed by elected people and applied by a judicial system that is not the executive branch. Hope that helps.
> The problem is that it is really difficult to define what hate speech is
It can be, but free speech types like to pretend it's nigh impossible. The UK has had modern hate-speech laws (for want of a better term) since the Public Order Act 1986, which made it an offence to stir up or incite racial hatred. Amendments in 2006 and 2008 expanded that to religious and homophobic hatred respectively. This exists in stark contrast to the common strawman touted by freeze peach types of "are you just going to compile a list of 'bad words'?!" Hate speech is not magic: you're not casting the self-incriminatus spell by saying the bad word.
That said, I wont pretend like that aren't misuses of police powers in regard to speech, and expression more generally. We've seen a crackdown on protests over the past few years which is more than a little frightening. That said, it's become a pattern that anytime I encounter a discussion online about the UK trampling on freedom of speech or whatever, it always comes back to hate speech. It's almost never about protest or expression. I think that's interesting.
EDIT: Correction, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 did not make stirring up or inciting "homophobic" hatred an offence, but rather hatred on the basis of sexual orientation. So one could get prosecuted for being inciting anti-straight hatred.
Do you not think that trying to malign your opposition by putting a comical misspelling in their mouths is a bit infantile as a rhetorical tactic? The same thing being done to you would look something like an insinuation that what is being banned is "hurting someone's widdle fee-fees"; surely the discussion here would not benefit if everyone stooped down to that level.
In the UK the arrests are mostly about "grossly offensive" speech. That's more of a grey area than the clearly defined hate speech. Often there are arrests and investigations but convictions on these are less. Convictions of hate speech also occur but are not news worthy and no one objects. The two different offenses are being confused and so it becomes news. In the US they don't have the grossly offensive category.
It's an issue because people are being investigated because people are offended by some things while others are not, and others (like comments here) see the difference between offensive speech and outright calls for violence. The police in some areas are encouraged to actively investigate reports of offensiveness whether or not they seem to them serious. It's a good idea on paper but the ambiguities and unequal application of their policy is newsworthy. It leads to conspiratorial and political theories.
There is also a related newsworthy issue of the widening of what hate speech means to encompass forms of offensiveness. So some may say it's a direct call to violence to say some things but others may say it's not. This ambiguity leads to an effect and discussions.
"Silence is violence" and "From the river to the sea" are topical example quotes used in this debate.
Yeaaaah, the Communications Act 2003 is not fit for purpose in the modern information age where [seemingly] the vast majority of conversation is taking place in digital spaces. Sidenote, I do think it's amusing how, prior to the Online Safety Act 2023, it was an offence to Cunningham's Law someone (posting a knowingly-false statement online to annoy someone into correcting you). That said, I'm more or less ambivalent about "grossly offensive" speech: most of the examples I find people moaning about are people being gratuitously abhorrent and should have known better. But again, there are examples of police and prosecutors getting it wrong.
But I think the leap from acknowledging that to "speech should never be infringed", as many freeze peachers would advocate, to be infinitely more destructive: just see what it's doing to America. Just look at what the infiltration of American-style freedom of speech principles is doing to this country: we have people defending Lucy Connolly, the woman who publicly advocated for the burning down of hotels housing asylum seekers, calling her a "political prisoner", that the government is "silencing the right".
One part where I agree with you is "From the river to the sea": there are two versions of this (more than two, but they are variations of the same thing), the first being "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", and the other "between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty". Guess which one our government finds objectionable. And guess which one is being used to justify a genocide. It does bother me that the government can chill and punish speech that objects to its foreign policy. But I feel as if (this is just vibes, feel free to correct me) the most harm being done is through anti-protest laws, not grossly offensive digital communications: I personally know of multiple people who regularly post abrasive, if not downright virulent "silence is violence" type content online, but do not go to protests because they fear arrest, detention, and being fired.
The previous law used to control racial hatred was the law of criminal libel; it was successfully used to prosecute antisemitism etc. As a species of libel, it had an absolute defence of of speaking the truth. Now, clearly you can be clever enough to spread hatred by only the use of true statements. But we have reached the point where those speaking the truth about atrocities committed by a foreign government are imprisoned for hate speech, and vastly more self censor. Your implied claim that those criticising the law just want to be free to be racist is not defensible - and indeed, you're not bold enough to defend it, merely "find it interesting".
It's inaccurate to say there's a war against Hamas. We have enough video evidence by now, posted by the people doing the acts so there can be no doubt to its authenticity, to see it's a war against civilians.
Norwood vs UK was about Norwood displaying an "Islam out of Britain" sign.
Samuel Melia was jailed 2 years for publishing downloadable stickers saying "Mass immigration is white genocide," "Second-generation? Third? Fourth? You have to go back," and "Labour loves Muslim rpe gangs".
Are those messages controversial? For sure. Should originator of these messages be prosecuted? I don't think so. Are anti-christian, "dead men don't rpe" or "eat the rich" messages treated the same in uk? Absolutely not.
If you want to spell rape on HackerNews you can just spell it. There’s nothing wrong with using the word in its proper context, or in quotations. There’s no algorithm censoring the word, and you’re not shielding someone from “getting triggered” by replacing the vowels with an underscore.
> Norwood, a member of an extreme right-wing political party [the British National Party], placed a poster on his apartment window that called for the removal of all Muslims from Britain.
> the poster in question contained a photograph of the Twin Towers in flame, the words “Islam out of Britain – Protect the British People” and a symbol of a crescent and star in a prohibition sign. The assessment made by the domestic courts was that the words and the images amounted to an attack on all Muslims in the UK. The ECtHR largely agreed with the assessment, and stated that such a general, vehement attack against a religious group, implying the group as a whole was guilty of a grave act of terrorism, is incompatible with the values proclaimed and guaranteed by the Convention, notably tolerance, social peace and non-discrimination
> Melia was the head of the Telegram Messenger group Hundred Handers, a social media channel that generated racist and anti-immigration stickers that were printed off and displayed in public places.
> The stickers contained "ethnic slurs" about minority communities which displayed a "deep-seated antipathy to those groups", the court heard.
> The judge told Melia: "I am quite sure that your mindset is that of a racist and a white supremacist.
> "You hold Nazi sympathies and you are an antisemite."
> Melia, who was also found guilty of encouraging racially-aggravated criminal damage, was sentenced to two years for each charge to run concurrently.
Law is always subject to interpretation and as imperfect as it sounds it is better than no law at all. And I'm not talking about hate speech specifically. Using this as a tool to silence opposition is possible and made easy in countries that do not value and nurture independence of institutions and have rampant corruption, often countries with authoritarian leadership.
UK is not exempt of criticism, it would be unhealthy not to, but comparing Russia/Putin with UK/Starmer makes it evident that you are more concerned by pushing a political agenda that by facts and reason.
It is really difficult to define what hate speech is, it certainly can be used as a cudgel to silence the opposition though I'm not sure about "more often than not" and bluntly everything can be used that way: my previous commute took me across the lines of what was officially known as (translated) an "anti-fascist protection rampart"* to keep people from leaving a country that put "Demokratische" in its name.
For the UK, it's not even clear what Starmer doesn't want to hear, he's got the charisma of the 10th-worst-in-class GCSE-level presentation on a topic not of his own choice. This can be observed in the poll ratings which are both amusing and the kind of thing that should only be found in a farce and not reality.
I'd instead point to Musk, who has openly said that "cis" is "hate speech" on Twitter now he owns the site. Starmer may or may not have such examples, but it's just too hard to figure out what they even are 'cause he lacks presence even as PM with all the cameras pointed at him.
More precisely, an Egyptian citizen who was given British citizenship recently without having visited the country, and his views (about Jews, killing police) clearly not being factored in when granting said citizenship. Whether right or wrong, your comment omits improtant details.
That comparison is not only highly inaccurate, it’s also harmful in that it distracts from the real problem at hand.
Putin and Khamenei are ruthless, brutal dictators. You don’t need to like Starmer, but he’s none of that. He’s a proper democrat. The implication that they’re all somewhat the same delegitimises democracies and legitimises these dictators. That’s how they win.
I personally don’t think UK’s age verification thing is a good idea. I like Germany‘s idea of mandating PC and smartphone manufacturers to put simple parental controls in thar parents, not the central government, can enable for their kids.
I love Australia‘s banning of Social media for kids. Let’s see where that leads. I don’t live there but am very excited for rhe outcome of that experiment.
We can’t just sit here and simplify everything to black and white while Russian troll farms polarise our societies. We bear some responsibility here to have a nuanced debate about these things.
The same Starmer who's cancelled local elections? Who's not looked at the polls and thought maybe it's time to go, because the demos clearly don't want me? The same Starmer who said no rise in NI in the manifesto, only to increase NI? The same Starmer who raised the threshold of votes required for an MP from within the Labour party to challenge his leadership?
He's no proper democrat. People are already talking about the rhetoric being used around war with Russia as laying the foundations for removing a 2029 general election.
> The same Starmer who raised the threshold of votes required for an MP from within the Labour party to challenge his leadership?
From 10% of the MPs to 20% of the MPs. As challengers would have to, you know, get more MPs than him to win, the only thing going from 10% to 20% is to have less pointless drama.
> People are already talking about the rhetoric being used around war with Russia as laying the foundations for removing a 2029 general election.
First I've heard of that. Would be exceptionally dumb for a UK politician to do on purpose for the same reason that it would be correct to cancel elections in the event of such a war: the UK is not even remotely close to being ready to battle Russia. UK armed forces are just about big enough to keep the nuclear weapons safe, not much more besides that.
> Putin and Khamenei are ruthless, brutal dictators. You don’t need to like Starmer, but he’s none of that. He’s a proper democrat. The implication that they’re all somewhat the same delegitimises democracies and legitimises these dictators. That’s how they win.
Someone who is a citizen of the UK who has no connection to Iran or Russia is legitimately much more concerned with the ways in which Starmer governs the UK, than in whether Putin or Khamenei "win". I don't even disagree with you that Putin and Khamenei are ruthless dictators, and certainly plenty of people in Russia or Iran or countries in the Russian or Iranians sphere of influence have plenty of good reasons to politically oppose both those dictators. But a democratically-elected official can wield the power of the state against you and harm your interests just as much as a dictator can, and people in the UK who oppose Starmer and his party shouldn't let up in that opposition just because it makes Starmer seem closer to Putin or Khamenei than Starmer's supporters would like.
> a democratically-elected official can wield the power of the state against you and harm your interests just as much as a dictator can
Really? Can they? Because in a functioning democracy you generally have recourse to courts, tertiary adjudication of various forms, a (relatively) free press that you can try and interest in taking up your story, etc. In a brutal dictatorship you're likely to have none of those, and to go missing in the night if you try and suggest that you should.
It's absolutely right to oppose politicians you disagree with - that's what political engagement is all about! But beyond a certain level, hyperbole (and the general sense of "they're all the same") simply does serve to undermine not just democracy, but any rationale for political engagement vs. simple rioting.
Do you have any evidence for that claim or is it a gut feeling?
> in the UK it's what Starmer doesn't want to hear.
In a literal sense that can't be true, since upon change of government, the hate speech definition does not suddenly change. In contrast, Putin and Khamenei are very literally able to personally define the definition.
In a figurative sense, that's likely true. As a democratically elected representative of the people, what he wants censored reflects what the people want censored, so is in alignment with a democratic society. If the people change their mind or realize it's not actually what they wanted, they elect somebody else next time. Good luck trying that with Putin or Khamenei.
> In a literal sense that can't be true, since upon change of government, the hate speech definition does not suddenly change. In contrast, Putin and Khamenei are very literally able to personally define the definition.
Well it might if people systematically vote for politicians who promise to change the hate speech definition.
Just read the damn law before spouting nonsense. There have been hate speech laws since the 1980s. There are simply just more and more insane neonazis groyper-types online to which it is applicable.
I don't think groyper speech is (or should be) automatically banned, though. It's a point of view that many find abhorrent, but it should be possible to express it. Same for far left messages encouraging the public to "eat the rich".
Please do not equate demands for more taxations with calls to do more genocides of jewish people. The far right is uniquely problematic in our modern political landscape.
And I disagree, free speech is a liberal value, you don't get to say nazi shit and hide behind free speech. Being a groyper is not a crime, but calling for genocide is and should be punished. Else we run the risk of normalizing these abhorrent ideas and repeating the worst times of our history, like the US seems on a course to doing.
That would be "eat the rich"? It looks like more demand for homicide and cannibalism, at least at a face value.
> free speech is a liberal value
That is a really nice definition that allows your side to say whatever they want, but the other side to have their speech restricted. It looks like "free speech" because you say it is, but of course it is not.
> but calling for genocide is and should be punished
And that is the usual strawman. "Calling for genocide" is incredibly vague. Is repatriation of immigrants genocide? Is CECOT genocide? Is advocating bombing Gaza genocide? Is "from the river to the sea" a coded call for genocide? Is, God help us, saying that trans women are men advocating for "trans genocide"? (apparently that's a thing)
I have this feeling you don't want to establish a line in the sand for free speech to be free - you just want to pick and choose the examples that you deem acceptable.
> That would be "eat the rich"? It looks like more demand for homicide and cannibalism, at least at a face value.
Very bad faith interpretation. You know full well that's not what is meant when this phrase is employed.
> That is a really nice definition that allows your side to say whatever they want, but the other side to have their speech restricted. It looks like "free speech" because you say it is, but of course it is not.
Free speech is a liberal value. Don't take liberal as meaning "american left", take it as meaning pro-freedom. Nazis famously don't believe in it. The Trump administration only believes in it when they're making themselves to be the victims of supposedly unfair censorship, but then use the full power of the state to silence media, or individuals.
Should we extend free speech to groups actively trying to suppress it? That's the paradox of intolerance: "if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance". Example of this to be found in the US.
> And that is the usual strawman. "Calling for genocide" is incredibly vague. Is repatriation of immigrants genocide? Is CECOT genocide? Is advocating bombing Gaza genocide? Is "from the river to the sea" a coded call for genocide? Is, God help us, saying that trans women are men advocating for "trans genocide"? (apparently that's a thing)
You're completely muddying the waters, you know what is a genocide. And throwing in a line about trans people for some reasons, because your side is literally obsessed with making their lives as miserable as possible.
> Very bad faith interpretation. You know full well that's not what is meant when this phrase is employed.
I hope you're willing to extend this charitable way of interpreting intentions to the hyperboles made by the far right in their slogans. What if a anti-immigration group came out with the "eat the aliens" slogan? Should they be allowed to chant that? Make signs?
> Should we extend free speech to groups actively trying to suppress it
Again, it cuts two ways. Should we extend free speech to groups trying to suppress public discourse by deplatformimg, cancelling and banning people they don't like from speaking in campuses?
> You're completely muddying the waters, you know what is a genocide. And throwing in a line about trans people for some reasons
I only mentioned trans people because not believing their self appointed sexual identity was famously equated to erasing and genociding them. As you see, the waters are indeed very muddy. You see them clear just because you already made up your mind about what kind of speech you want to allow and what kind of speech you want to ruthlessly ban.
It's a quote that justifies homicide of the wealthy class, popularised during the French revolution: "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich"
No, external influence is an attack on democracy’s ability to form consensus. No hate speech required to drive a wedge between constituents and make people focus on the wrong things.
Maybe [the UK is not on the list] because this article focuses on technical aspects of overcoming blocking of the global internet in those countries that benefit from improvements to the TOR infrastructure. Maybe there are no problems circumventing DNS-level blocking with TOR in the countries which you mentioned. Maybe those people arrested (source?) were actually able to technically access the platforms on which they raised whatever they had to say. So maybe, the post is simply about a completely different topic.
Looking into the situation in the UK specifically, I found a description of the potentially underlying issues [1] and those are indeed worrisome. I still fail to see why one would raise it in the way GP did to comment on the TOR post.
Others have pointed at the funding of TOR through the US. If there is actual evidence that this impacts the stated purpose of TOR (non-discriminating access to the internet, I‘d say), please share. Otherwise, my impression is still that TOR works as advertised and is working on solutions where it is not.
> I still fail to see why one would raise it in the way GP did to comment on the TOR post.
It's started cropping up in almost any thread related to free speech or censorship, and comes directly from the mouth of right-wing darling Tommy Robinson [0].
I‘m acting a bit naïve of course ;)
The comments are simply dominated by the root comment, which does not even try to put it into context of the linked post.
On top, it‘s a comment riding the outrage wave. There’s no contextualization (a number is only the beginning of a story, not the end). Not a substantiated starting point for an exchange on the matter.
I‘d just like to see better on HN.
The British arrest stats subsume DV harassment cases, and the original Times reporting quoted a police officer stating that they are the bulk of these numbers. I haven’t found an apples-to-apples comparison in the US, but the FL number gives a point of reference.
Yet I have only ever personally been prevented from speaking in the UK by Xitter, with that great champion of Free Speech at the helm. I was given a the spurious reason of 'impersonation' for my ban.
The Netherlands in the recent past has detained journalists on multiple occasions but you never read about that. Absolute horrible for a “free” country.
Plenty of sources, it is not being suppressed. We even had a journalist shot and killed. Look up Robert Bas, Bart Mos, Joost de Haas, Bas van Hout, Koen Voskuil, Peter R de Vries.
Yet The Netherlands is in third place for World Press Freedom Index. How is that even possible.
Much as I take a dim view of the laws and politics of England & Wales*, those numbers include "indecent" and "obscene" messages, i.e. dick picks could be mixed up in these totals.
I suspect the actual number of un-asked-for dick picks sent each year is significantly (multiple orders of magnitude) higher than that, while also suspecting that most of those pics don't lead to arrests and what people are arrested for is in fact hate speech or threats that at first glance seem like they might be terrorist in nature, but so far as I can tell this distinction is not actually recorded in any official statistics so we just don't know.
* I left the UK in 2018 due to the overreach and incompetence shown in the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, plus the people in charge during Brexit all hating on international human rights obligations; I would've left a year sooner but for family stuff.
I'm getting fed up of people posting these figures. Especially with a misleading description like "arrests for comments on social media". They cover a very broad range of offences, many of which the public would want to keep as an offence. It includes cases like pedophiles grooming and blackmailing children, stalking, harrassment, even people emailing photos of aborted foetuses to pharmacies.
> I'm getting fed up of people posting these figures.
Only way around that would be to get a breakdown of the specific details of the arrests. If sufficient details of those records are publicly available, I don't think anyone has actually categorised them into convenient headline figures as yet.
As I said, we just don't know the breakdown, so this could be anything from 0% to 100% of the arrests are things almost everyone agrees with, or (by necessity of those numbers) disagrees with.
There is no central aggregated place for data about US citizens arrested for the sort of things the UK's Malicious Communications Act covers. There is no reason to assume that the US is more free. It could be much worse.
You must keep in mind TOR is funded in large part by the US government. It’s a bad look for them to put their allies in the same list as their enemies.
Yes, but in this context the US is very much putting European allies on various relevant naughty lists, in the name of "free speech" but unfortunately it does need the air-quotes.
This has been a long held "western" value. Especially in the context of West vs Russia Iran North Korea etc. this rapid increase over the past few years in draconian enforcement of absurd thought control can not be explained away by such a shallow statement. ESPECIALLY the uk. Most of the American bill of rights and early constitutional amendment where based on centurys old English common law values just as much as they took inspiration from the Roman republics.
Hate speech has not been tolerated in the U.K. for many years. Other subversive speech hasn’t been tolerated in many counties, from nazi worship to glorifying terror, from obscenity to copyright.
America bans Harry Potter, in the past The U.K. banned Lady Chatterly, Germany bans nazi worship but America is quite happy with it.
Just because an american view on what is and isn’t acceptable exists doesn’t mean others have that same view.
There's similar phenomenon in safety stats. In the stats Istanbul appears to be vastly safer than London but having lived in both, I can tell you why Istanbul is safer: Because public spaces don't exist and private spaces are guarded with bars and steel doors.
In London, there's pubs etc. everywhere, in Istanbul you are limited to few centers to be outside after 10. The places where people go are bustling because they serve a city of 16 million, so they are well lit and guarded.
In London, there are parks and guard free public spaces everywhere. In istanbul there are very few such places.
In London people mostly live in homes that don't have bars on the windows but in Istanbul there's bars on the first floor on every window on any building that's not a gated community. People with money live in gated communities or one of the very few upscale district.
In London you can walk ro everywhere, it has wide sidewalks and not many hills. In Istanbul sidewalks are tiny and often interrupted and the city has hills, as a result very few people walk more than a few hundred meters and people with bicycles are rounding error level non existent.
In Istanbul there's simply not many opportunities for crime, so when it happens it happens differently that the way it happens in London. No one ill grab your phone and run but if you wander in a non-commercial location or location that is not well lit after dark, you can be raped or stabbed just like that.
You can't really compare the realities of these cities by simply looking at some numbers without proper context.
I say the exact same thing about living in NYC. It is statistically safe if you look at murders per capita compared to a rural area. But that one statistic tells you nothing about what kind of random crap you have to put up with on a day to day basis taking a 45 minute subway commute daily that isn't collected in any statistic.
That's a stupid perspective. That's presumably Russia's self-reported numbers, not the actual numbers of people who were detained for speech Putin's regime didn't like. For example, in 2023, Alexei Navalny was sentenced to 19 years in a special regime colony, his lawyers were arrested, and then Navalny was murdered in prison.
What are people saying that gets them arrested? This important question, whose answer is for some reason never specified in complaints about UK censorship, is crucial to evaluating the severity of the UK's censorship regime.
Am I living in a parallel universe or are you just a troll. In Iran you criticize the government on social media and you get arrested. In the UK you promote Nazi ideology and you get arrested. Is that really the same thing for you? Are you not seeing it?
He's a troll because those also aren't the real numbers. The UK law categorizes arrests under this category in the same bucket as domestic violence arrests.
The people talking about this never make the distinction.
When a dictatorship uses police to imprison innocent people the correct response isn't to say "but in Sweden there is police as well, see how many people they imprison a year".
Details matter.
Media laws already penalize traditional media for lying about various subjects in most democracies (see libel laws, etc.). And it's good that they do. The alternative of unchecked lies spreading everywhere is worse.
Why should the internet be exempt from media laws?
The problem with dictatorships isn't that fake news is prohibited. It's that the people who decide what is fake news and what isn't have bad intentions and can't be challenged.
Probably because the post is not about the good or bad, but about fighting with censorship technically. Usual tor connections have been blocked for a long time in Russia and Iran. They explain the way they bypass these blocks and advancing the TOR.
Nobody blocks them in the UK and the EU so there is nothing to fight in technical terms for TOR Project.
They are not EU/UK political representative to fight legally or politically.
Why is Tor making it so difficult to change the region/ExitNode then? Geo-Blocking is by far the most prevalent form of online censorship and while Tor can work around it, it requires fiddling with config files and restarting the service instead of clicking a button.
Currently in China (as a visitor). Wireguard literally just works (to a VPS). Mullvad works as a commercial provider, just slower. Xray-core (vless, Trojan) if you're paranoid. I have my own proxy over syncthing relays https://github.com/acheong08/syndicate which I use to proxy to my home in the UK (residential IP) without exposing any ports.
I get rate limited to around 10mbps in Chongqing. Was slightly higher in Beijing.
Folks using nyanpass setup for first hop into a near China hosting provider, then it's usually two additional hops within Asia and then the internet. There's a whole industry / ecosystem of folks who sell this - and set rate limit controls based upon how much you pay etc.
I visited China last year. I had a lot of issues accessing some known VPN services. My main tool to avoid censorship was using my foreign roaming and then I used VLESS on my VPS. Both approaches worked for me.
I'm not sure about rate limited by few megabytes per second, as I had rate limits like few bytes per second, when I tried to use ssh as a proxy. Few megabytes per seconds sounds like a perfect connectivity to me.
No as long as you pay CN2 GIA rate. Not ratelimited just oversubscribed and bad peering. Purchase the hundred dollar per mbps CN2 GIA dedicated bandwidth its no problem.
Nothing to add other than I have no idea what the list of tech in the replies are here, and I consider myself somewhat up to date on most tech... strange world.
The "Mimicry" Angle (Best for technical discussion)
The shift from "obfuscation" to "mimicry" is the real story here. In 2025, "random-looking" traffic is itself a signature for DPI. Tools like WebTunnel that mimic standard HTTPS/SNI and Conjure that hides in unused ISP space force censors into a "collateral damage" dilemma: they can't block Tor without breaking their own web.
The section on conjure is fascinating. For those who haven't followed the refraction networking space, the idea of leveraging unused address space at the ISP level is something academic papers have proposed for years [1]. Seeing it deployed in the wild is huge. The hardest part of this has always been non-technical by the way. Convincing ISPs to cooperate. If the Tor project has managed to get ISPs to route traffic destined for unallocated IPs to a station that handles the handshake, it completely breaks the censor's standard playbook of IP enumeration. You can't just block a specific subnet without risking blocking future legitimate allocations.
I'd be curious to know if these are smaller, sympathetic ISPs or if they managed to partner with larger backbone providers. I'm interested to hear more about this.
>It completely breaks the censor's standard playbook of IP enumeration. You can't just block a specific subnet without risking blocking future legitimate allocations
At least in Russia, they don't really care about collateral damage. Currently, without a VPN, I can't open like 30-50% links on Hacker News (mostly collateral damage after they banned large portions of IPs)
Do they have official instructions on how to setup (which URLs for STUN, etc - there are a couple required) TOR via Snowflake on desktop (bc on Android it all seems to be bundled inside Orbot)?
Legal question for the Tor team (disclaimer, I love Tor and use it in BrowserBox):
- Does Tor need an OFAC license to supply to Russian and Iranian (and other sanctioned entities)? What's your approach to stay compliant and globally helpful? I know 50% of your funding comes from US government (or did a few years back, still?), does this give you extra pathways to engage those regions?
I'm wondering because the system would seem to fall under ITAR due to its encryption, and even if non-ITAR is still a cyber product and these countries are heavily OFAC listed rn.
This is relevant for me right now as I was recetnyl contact by a significant entity in a sanctioned region with a massive deal for BrowserBox. Applying for an OFAC license to see if it's possible to serve them (but we have to make final determination on ethics/legal even if license is approved, I guess). My feeling is that broad sanctions don't hurt the things they are meant to but punish people in all countries from forming transnational links that might actually help to prevent conflicts and build relations however small. Idk, just my reflections after encountring this situation.
This sounds a bit like the GrapheneOS shenanigans in France recently: it's an opensource project with no product per-se. There's no supplying to anyone; rather people help themselves to grab it. The debate would be should opensource projects like Tor or GrapheneOS prevent sanctioned people from grabbing the freely (as in both beer and speech) available project from the shelf.
(writing this message, I realized how hard it is not to write "product" for the thing graphene and tor make)
OFAC regulates international trade. Isn't Tor's publication an act of pure speech, rather than commerce? They're not charging for it, and they aren't physically moving any goods across borders. How could Tor be subject to any restrictions here?
(not a lawyer, just someone who naively thought the Crypto Wars ended in the 90s)
OFAC applies to trade, like your "massive deal". OFAC's original authority comes from a law titled, literally "The Trading With the Enemy Act".
Tor publishes free software, asking nothing in return. That isn't trade. Neither are those evangelists who broadcast sermons on shortwave radio -- they certainly "serve" Iran in the sense that people in that country can hear their broadcasts.
"Cyber product" lolwut? I think you have been breathing too many beltway fumes.
It seems to me that what you are allowed to say in the US is very dependent on how much the person you are saying it about is able to spend on lawyers, for instance.
2017: ~5,500 arrests
2019: ~7,734 arrests
2023: ~12,183 arrests
Are you serious here?
In russia you get problems for calling a war a war and worse problems if you say it is a bad war.
In UK you certainly can call a war a war and you can critize the government or other people all day long. What you cannot do is calling for violence against them. Or do you have counterexamples?
I’ve seen similar outrageous arrests for mean tweets in the UK.
Europe has lost its mind about right and wrong.
https://www.facebook.com/piersmorganuncensored/videos/elizab...
Elizabeth Kenney was arrested for a homophobic slur used privately in a text message to a third party -- not even a public comment -- against a man who physically beat her. The man served no jail time for beating her.
https://www.welt.de/vermischtes/kriminalitaet/article2521783...
How about calling a natal male a "he" - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6687123/Mother-arre...
Or perhaps: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/graham...
OBVIOUSLY there is a difference between Russia and the UK, obviously Russia is worse. But saying "the only thing you can't do is call for violence against them" is a completely dishonest characterisation of the situation, when we've seen documented cases of police overreach and people being arrested for thought crimes.
In the second case, it was not about misgendering someone - they were accused of a campaign of persistent harassment, something which the Daily Mail fails to mention except as a minor aside near the end of the article (not untypical of the Mail, naturally).
The Linehan case was debatable, and the approach taken probably wrong in some forms by the police (as admitted) but they were not arrested for simply voicing an opinion, but for behaviour which was sufficiently threatening and/or assaulting for the police to believe that a crime may have been committed and thus warrant further action.
There are cases of overreach, that applies outside of the speech issue as well - and indeed for any country with a reasonably effective policing system, it's never perfect. But these cases are not the simple slam-dunk that people will try and paint them as.
This is blatantly disingenuous. The Public Order Act 1986, Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006 and the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 all criminalize "insulting" and "abusive" words, or any public display of literature that is "insulting" or "abusive" -- much more than calls for violence:
> A person who uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or displays any written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting, is guilty of an offence if—
> (b) having regard to all the circumstances racial hatred is likely to be stirred up thereby.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64/part/III/crossh...
British jurisprudence has consistently put the likelihood of racial hatred being stirred up to the whims of the presiding judge. If the unaccountable bureaucrat feels like your comments could likely stir up racial hatred to even a single one of your cousins, even if there was no evidence of any stirred, then you are guilty.
What exactly constitutes "abusive" or "insulting" is not only vague but applied solely to white Christians. Certainly a document that says polytheists should be murdered (Quran 9:5) or one that says Hebrews should "completely consume" all the people that they get control of "with no pity" (Deuteronomy 7:16) could be considered not only insulting and abusive, but outright threatening. But these statutes are only used to attack people saying "I don't like how many foreigners are in my country and they should be rounded up and shipped back." Whatever your position on this kind of jingoistic nationalist sentiment, you should be able to recognize that the hypocrisy and lack of liberty is stupid and dangerous and is going to eventually result in genocide (either of the native Britons by the new arrivals, or the latter in the backlash).
Elizabeth Kinney certainly did not "call for violence" against the man who beat her. She simply, minutes after being physically beaten, used a slur in a private text message to a friend, and was arrested for it:
https://www.facebook.com/piersmorganuncensored/videos/elizab...
It is extremely suspect that every thread that Hacker News and other prominent and influential platforms has on these statutes gets flooded by people spreading deliberate pro-government misinformation, claiming that people are only being arrested for "calls for violence".
Threatening violence against parties is generally punished by a separate, far more severe statute (Serious Crime Act 2007, which replaced the traditional mechanism for incitement so that it could be vaguely applied to overeager online comments) that is virtually never invoked for Facebook posts, because none of elderly people arrested under this statute are threatening violence. They are posting something considered unacceptable by the powers that be, because limitless immigration was rammed down the throat of the English without any regard to democratic will or desires.
> This is blatantly disingenuous. The Public Order Act 1986 ... <snip>... criminalize "insulting" and "abusive" words ...
Do you know what i find disingenuous here, you hooked me with the words i quoted above so i went to the legislation:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64
And the thing to stand out was the change of meaning when the full quote is provided:
____
Fear or provocation of violence. (1)A person is guilty of an offence if he—
(a)uses towards another person threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or
(b)distributes or displays to another person any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,
with intent to cause that person to believe that immediate unlawful violence will be used against him or another by any person, or to provoke the immediate use of unlawful violence by that person or another, or whereby that person is likely to believe that such violence will be used or it is likely that such violence will be provoked.
____
If you have to rely on this kind of disingenuous trickery to make a point, then you don't have a point.
The GP is correct in their statement:
>> What you cannot do is calling for violence against them.
You are incorrect in yours:
> This is blatantly disingenuous.
Grandparent is quoting Part III 18 Use of words or behaviour or display of written material.
You are quoting Part I 4 Fear or provocation of violence.
What about Elizabeth Kinney, arrested for a simple slur in a private text message to a friend about the man who assaulted her, minutes after being beaten? What about the tens of thousands of people arrested who did not threaten violence?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c703e03w243o
Just like Elizabeth Kinney, this man did not threaten violence at all. He just said "they should not be allowed to live here."
There is no c) bullet point, the part you misinterpreted as an or is an AND:
"with intent to cause that person to believe that immediate unlawful violence will be used against him..."
>> A plasterer who admitted to stirring up racial hatred...
Admitted?
I was giving an example of the format. That you think that it is necessary for a c) to exist for the example to be valid belies your absurd lack of understanding of the subject matter, whether incidental or willful.
And that doesn't even matter, because the text of the a) part explicitly says or at the end:
> (a)he intends thereby to stir up racial hatred, or
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/64/part/III/crossh...
It clearly is not disingenuous nor deceptive to clip out a) when I highlighted the b) part explicitly showing that it was merely one bullet point, and that a) contains or at the end (meaning that you do not have to commit the behavior described in a to be guilty under the statute). I was being helpful, showing only the relevant parts of the statute for readers that don't want to waste their time. You responded by posting more legalese not relevant to the point, potentially maliciously to try to complicate and confuse readers.
"Admitted" in journalist speak means he pled guilty. It doesn't lend credence to the idea this idea:
> "with intent to cause that person to believe that immediate unlawful violence will be used against him..."
There's no way to go from "they should not be allowed to live here" to the idea that he is making people subject to "immediate unlawful violence". I stand in awe that there is anyone that can argue that with a straight face. This thread is about whether the statute covers behavior that is violently threatening. Admitted spreading of "racial hatred" in the form of simple statements opposed to migrant presence is not violent or threatening. It is an inherently peaceful form of political lobbying.
The most egregious case I could find was someone arrested for a meme of a pride flag morphing into a swastika. Probably not arrest worthy but perhaps it was the last straw for someone with a history of hate speech.
It's also hard to find examples because everyone writing about this has an agenda. So if anyone can find examples of people being arrested for things that are clearly jokes or memes rather than clearly hate speech, I'm curious to see them as well.
The case of Count Dankula is a textbook example: it is plainly a joke, and interpreting it as Nazi promotion or hate speech requires an extraordinary degree of bad faith. And yet, that is exactly how it was treated. https://www.vice.com/en/article/youtube-count-dankula-mark-m...
Which is very cultural dependent as well. "Not being able to log in on TikTok if you are under 16" is not "preventing free speech". And "having no access to pornhub" is not preventing free speech either. Edit: TBC: this is not me defending these laws or rules.
E.g. Freedom of speech in the US, is rather narrow. It merely states you may "speak, write, and print with freedom" but not that you may do so anywhere, on any platform, on private property. It doesn't state that such speech, writings or printings must reach everyone.
The UNHCR article 19 goes further, though. But it doesn't automatically apply to the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human... It includes `... and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers`.
And all these only apply to governments. Many of the examples you mention, aren't government-imposed but imposed by private entities (who, granted, often pre-emptively self-censor). E.g. certain words used on Instagram or in Yourube videos will hurt monetization, or will cause it's discovery or promotion to severely degrade; which is why people use phrases like "unalived". So let's not pretend the US is any good in this.
Dutch culture used to be rather free with nudity in movies and on TV. Every Dutch movie from before the era of US streaming services had at least a pair of naked boobies bouncing around. But this, and in it's wake the entire culture has become more prude-ish. A form of cultural colonialism by the US. Not terrible, but a good example of private companies imposing self-censorship even in places where it really is not needed. IANAL, but I'm quite certain youtube would be allowed to run videos with nudity just fine in most of (nothern?) Europe. But they don't.
I only know about the UK, but this is not really true there.
Your speech has to be obviously threatening or abusive, and obviously motivated by prejudice towards one of a few categories (disability, race, religion, gender identity or sexual orientation are the main ones).
If you don't make threatening or abusive remarks towards these groups, you aren't breaking the law.
I don't know of a single case (and don't believe anyone can point to one) where people have been arrested for simply criticising politicians. Has the number of incidents risen over recent years? Yes, and while this might be partly explained by stricter legal approaches, I suspect it's much more to do with a drastic rise in far-right activity and a consequent feeling among many that they can now say/do whatever they like with impunity (including making threatening and inflammatory remarks about minorities, and so on).
https://sentencingcouncil.org.uk/resources/common-offences/a...
That is by no means the only crime that is committed subjectively.
I agree that the UK has far too many laws that are more subjective than they ideally should be, but they do at least attach some level of observable and knowable process.
It's so serious, that you should really back it up with some evidence or at least some foundation. Got any?
In this very thread you can find lots of comments excusing the censorship because it’s being used to censor the “wrong ideas”.
And I think also frivolous suits lodged by the govt at people for their speech. So that would include suing Twitter users for making jokes about the FBI director girlfriend, etc. One of the biggest things to censor speech the US is doing is forcing the sale of TikTok to government friendly group. There are many ways governments censor our speech, and they seem, sadly, to be increasing worldwide
These numbers are for _all_ arrests under the Malicious Communications Act in that year. So while that category includes arrests for tweets, it also includes all arrests for any offensive communications via an internet-enabled device. So it'd include arrests for domestic abuse where at least one component of the abuse was through WhatsApp. Similarly, it can include just about any arrest where the crime was planned on an internet enabled device.
Could be that some guy threatened to kill someone over FB, someone saw that, and reported it.
Cause if not a more than doubling is alarming regardless of how exactly the composition is sliced by online vs WhatsApp or whatever.
Hate speech is a problem. If it wasn’t, why are Russia and China spending so much on troll farms? It’s a direct attack on a democracy’s ability to form consensus. I don’t think we’ve found the right, effective way to deal with this problem yet, but I applaud any democratic country that tries sth in that area.
I also think Tor is great, just for the record.
And beyond that, you applaud any democratic country's efforts to reign in speech by arresting their own citizens in order to combat foreign influence operations?
And the fulcrum of this argument is that we believe that Russia and China have uniquely pernicious influence operations and there are no other state-level actors domestically or semi-domestically whose intelligence services also exert influence through the passage of laws restricting speech?
Having seen the last two years of politics in the UK and the US, your impression is that there is an overwhelming Chinese-Russian troll farm operation which self-evidently justifies rolling back the last two centuries worth of hard-fought and incremental precedents won for free speech and free press.
And again, the water-line we need to stay above is merely "this is still better than being arrested in Russia or Iran", keeping in mind that many countries we would not consider to be democracies at all also meet this bar.
> Hate speech is a problem. If it wasn’t, why are Russia and China spending so much on troll farms?
Non-sequitur. The existence of troll farms doesn’t mean it's such a big problem that we should give up our rights surrounding speech and communication that we fought hard for.
> "Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it”
For additional context (which was relevant during the prosecution and sentencing) this was posted during a time of riots and arson attacks centred on asylum accommodations, and very shortly following a highly publicised mass-murder of children which was (entirely wrongly) being blamed on asylum seekers.
She also pleaded guilty to the charged offence, rather than contesting the charge, for clarity. While not all cases will be quite like this, it is definitely not the case that - as some parties of the right have claimed - she is a free-speech martyr, a political prisoner, and so on.
The mass-murder was a consequence of the asylum system. Given what is publicly known, parents of Axel Rudakubana were overwhelmingly likely to have been asylum seekers.
I agree, 100%. Donald Trump should have the power to jail people for things they say online.
You have the right to a trial. Defending yourself from a Federal felony charge only costs $250k+.
Given recent events, I think undermining civil liberties to expand executive powers is crazy.
For Iran and Russia, it is what Khamenei and Putin don't want to hear,
in the UK it's what Starmer doesn't want to hear.
It can be, but free speech types like to pretend it's nigh impossible. The UK has had modern hate-speech laws (for want of a better term) since the Public Order Act 1986, which made it an offence to stir up or incite racial hatred. Amendments in 2006 and 2008 expanded that to religious and homophobic hatred respectively. This exists in stark contrast to the common strawman touted by freeze peach types of "are you just going to compile a list of 'bad words'?!" Hate speech is not magic: you're not casting the self-incriminatus spell by saying the bad word.
That said, I wont pretend like that aren't misuses of police powers in regard to speech, and expression more generally. We've seen a crackdown on protests over the past few years which is more than a little frightening. That said, it's become a pattern that anytime I encounter a discussion online about the UK trampling on freedom of speech or whatever, it always comes back to hate speech. It's almost never about protest or expression. I think that's interesting.
EDIT: Correction, the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 did not make stirring up or inciting "homophobic" hatred an offence, but rather hatred on the basis of sexual orientation. So one could get prosecuted for being inciting anti-straight hatred.
Do you not think that trying to malign your opposition by putting a comical misspelling in their mouths is a bit infantile as a rhetorical tactic? The same thing being done to you would look something like an insinuation that what is being banned is "hurting someone's widdle fee-fees"; surely the discussion here would not benefit if everyone stooped down to that level.
It's an issue because people are being investigated because people are offended by some things while others are not, and others (like comments here) see the difference between offensive speech and outright calls for violence. The police in some areas are encouraged to actively investigate reports of offensiveness whether or not they seem to them serious. It's a good idea on paper but the ambiguities and unequal application of their policy is newsworthy. It leads to conspiratorial and political theories.
There is also a related newsworthy issue of the widening of what hate speech means to encompass forms of offensiveness. So some may say it's a direct call to violence to say some things but others may say it's not. This ambiguity leads to an effect and discussions.
"Silence is violence" and "From the river to the sea" are topical example quotes used in this debate.
But I think the leap from acknowledging that to "speech should never be infringed", as many freeze peachers would advocate, to be infinitely more destructive: just see what it's doing to America. Just look at what the infiltration of American-style freedom of speech principles is doing to this country: we have people defending Lucy Connolly, the woman who publicly advocated for the burning down of hotels housing asylum seekers, calling her a "political prisoner", that the government is "silencing the right".
One part where I agree with you is "From the river to the sea": there are two versions of this (more than two, but they are variations of the same thing), the first being "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free", and the other "between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty". Guess which one our government finds objectionable. And guess which one is being used to justify a genocide. It does bother me that the government can chill and punish speech that objects to its foreign policy. But I feel as if (this is just vibes, feel free to correct me) the most harm being done is through anti-protest laws, not grossly offensive digital communications: I personally know of multiple people who regularly post abrasive, if not downright virulent "silence is violence" type content online, but do not go to protests because they fear arrest, detention, and being fired.
Why are they doing this, in what context?
Edit: from reading the thread I think this is about the war against Hamas and the dire situation on the West bank.
Samuel Melia was jailed 2 years for publishing downloadable stickers saying "Mass immigration is white genocide," "Second-generation? Third? Fourth? You have to go back," and "Labour loves Muslim rpe gangs".
Are those messages controversial? For sure. Should originator of these messages be prosecuted? I don't think so. Are anti-christian, "dead men don't rpe" or "eat the rich" messages treated the same in uk? Absolutely not.
> Norwood, a member of an extreme right-wing political party [the British National Party], placed a poster on his apartment window that called for the removal of all Muslims from Britain.
> the poster in question contained a photograph of the Twin Towers in flame, the words “Islam out of Britain – Protect the British People” and a symbol of a crescent and star in a prohibition sign. The assessment made by the domestic courts was that the words and the images amounted to an attack on all Muslims in the UK. The ECtHR largely agreed with the assessment, and stated that such a general, vehement attack against a religious group, implying the group as a whole was guilty of a grave act of terrorism, is incompatible with the values proclaimed and guaranteed by the Convention, notably tolerance, social peace and non-discrimination
https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/norwood...
Re Melia:
> Melia was the head of the Telegram Messenger group Hundred Handers, a social media channel that generated racist and anti-immigration stickers that were printed off and displayed in public places.
> The stickers contained "ethnic slurs" about minority communities which displayed a "deep-seated antipathy to those groups", the court heard.
> The judge told Melia: "I am quite sure that your mindset is that of a racist and a white supremacist.
> "You hold Nazi sympathies and you are an antisemite."
> Melia, who was also found guilty of encouraging racially-aggravated criminal damage, was sentenced to two years for each charge to run concurrently.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-68448867
Interesting that the cases that spring to mind for you are literal neo-Nazis.
If I had a penny for every time this happened....
Free speech is repugnant speech. But I can make the case for far-leftists supporting Palestine action as well.
heh.
For the UK, it's not even clear what Starmer doesn't want to hear, he's got the charisma of the 10th-worst-in-class GCSE-level presentation on a topic not of his own choice. This can be observed in the poll ratings which are both amusing and the kind of thing that should only be found in a farce and not reality.
I'd instead point to Musk, who has openly said that "cis" is "hate speech" on Twitter now he owns the site. Starmer may or may not have such examples, but it's just too hard to figure out what they even are 'cause he lacks presence even as PM with all the cameras pointed at him.
* And to English speakers, "the Berlin Wall"
Putin and Khamenei are ruthless, brutal dictators. You don’t need to like Starmer, but he’s none of that. He’s a proper democrat. The implication that they’re all somewhat the same delegitimises democracies and legitimises these dictators. That’s how they win.
I personally don’t think UK’s age verification thing is a good idea. I like Germany‘s idea of mandating PC and smartphone manufacturers to put simple parental controls in thar parents, not the central government, can enable for their kids.
I love Australia‘s banning of Social media for kids. Let’s see where that leads. I don’t live there but am very excited for rhe outcome of that experiment.
We can’t just sit here and simplify everything to black and white while Russian troll farms polarise our societies. We bear some responsibility here to have a nuanced debate about these things.
The same Starmer who's cancelled local elections? Who's not looked at the polls and thought maybe it's time to go, because the demos clearly don't want me? The same Starmer who said no rise in NI in the manifesto, only to increase NI? The same Starmer who raised the threshold of votes required for an MP from within the Labour party to challenge his leadership?
He's no proper democrat. People are already talking about the rhetoric being used around war with Russia as laying the foundations for removing a 2029 general election.
False: https://fullfact.org/online/council-elections-war-cancelled/
> Who's not looked at the polls and thought maybe it's time to go, because the demos clearly don't want me?
You seem to have missed the "did actually win power" and "this is how democracy works in the UK" parts.
I agree he should go, but I could say that about all of the UK politicians, they're all negative approval: https://www.pollcheck.co.uk/favourability-ratings
> The same Starmer who raised the threshold of votes required for an MP from within the Labour party to challenge his leadership?
From 10% of the MPs to 20% of the MPs. As challengers would have to, you know, get more MPs than him to win, the only thing going from 10% to 20% is to have less pointless drama.
> People are already talking about the rhetoric being used around war with Russia as laying the foundations for removing a 2029 general election.
First I've heard of that. Would be exceptionally dumb for a UK politician to do on purpose for the same reason that it would be correct to cancel elections in the event of such a war: the UK is not even remotely close to being ready to battle Russia. UK armed forces are just about big enough to keep the nuclear weapons safe, not much more besides that.
Talking about ruthless dictators and true democrats in the same post.
Someone who is a citizen of the UK who has no connection to Iran or Russia is legitimately much more concerned with the ways in which Starmer governs the UK, than in whether Putin or Khamenei "win". I don't even disagree with you that Putin and Khamenei are ruthless dictators, and certainly plenty of people in Russia or Iran or countries in the Russian or Iranians sphere of influence have plenty of good reasons to politically oppose both those dictators. But a democratically-elected official can wield the power of the state against you and harm your interests just as much as a dictator can, and people in the UK who oppose Starmer and his party shouldn't let up in that opposition just because it makes Starmer seem closer to Putin or Khamenei than Starmer's supporters would like.
Really? Can they? Because in a functioning democracy you generally have recourse to courts, tertiary adjudication of various forms, a (relatively) free press that you can try and interest in taking up your story, etc. In a brutal dictatorship you're likely to have none of those, and to go missing in the night if you try and suggest that you should.
It's absolutely right to oppose politicians you disagree with - that's what political engagement is all about! But beyond a certain level, hyperbole (and the general sense of "they're all the same") simply does serve to undermine not just democracy, but any rationale for political engagement vs. simple rioting.
Cancelling elections and mass arrests of people protesting against genocide is your idea of a "proper democrat"?
Do you have any evidence for that claim or is it a gut feeling?
> in the UK it's what Starmer doesn't want to hear.
In a literal sense that can't be true, since upon change of government, the hate speech definition does not suddenly change. In contrast, Putin and Khamenei are very literally able to personally define the definition.
In a figurative sense, that's likely true. As a democratically elected representative of the people, what he wants censored reflects what the people want censored, so is in alignment with a democratic society. If the people change their mind or realize it's not actually what they wanted, they elect somebody else next time. Good luck trying that with Putin or Khamenei.
In either case, your comparison does not hold up.
Well it might if people systematically vote for politicians who promise to change the hate speech definition.
Again, try that with Putin or Khamenei. (If such an article even gets published instead of ending the career or life of the journalist.)
And I disagree, free speech is a liberal value, you don't get to say nazi shit and hide behind free speech. Being a groyper is not a crime, but calling for genocide is and should be punished. Else we run the risk of normalizing these abhorrent ideas and repeating the worst times of our history, like the US seems on a course to doing.
That would be "eat the rich"? It looks like more demand for homicide and cannibalism, at least at a face value.
> free speech is a liberal value
That is a really nice definition that allows your side to say whatever they want, but the other side to have their speech restricted. It looks like "free speech" because you say it is, but of course it is not.
> but calling for genocide is and should be punished
And that is the usual strawman. "Calling for genocide" is incredibly vague. Is repatriation of immigrants genocide? Is CECOT genocide? Is advocating bombing Gaza genocide? Is "from the river to the sea" a coded call for genocide? Is, God help us, saying that trans women are men advocating for "trans genocide"? (apparently that's a thing)
I have this feeling you don't want to establish a line in the sand for free speech to be free - you just want to pick and choose the examples that you deem acceptable.
Very bad faith interpretation. You know full well that's not what is meant when this phrase is employed.
> That is a really nice definition that allows your side to say whatever they want, but the other side to have their speech restricted. It looks like "free speech" because you say it is, but of course it is not.
Free speech is a liberal value. Don't take liberal as meaning "american left", take it as meaning pro-freedom. Nazis famously don't believe in it. The Trump administration only believes in it when they're making themselves to be the victims of supposedly unfair censorship, but then use the full power of the state to silence media, or individuals.
Should we extend free speech to groups actively trying to suppress it? That's the paradox of intolerance: "if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance". Example of this to be found in the US.
> And that is the usual strawman. "Calling for genocide" is incredibly vague. Is repatriation of immigrants genocide? Is CECOT genocide? Is advocating bombing Gaza genocide? Is "from the river to the sea" a coded call for genocide? Is, God help us, saying that trans women are men advocating for "trans genocide"? (apparently that's a thing)
You're completely muddying the waters, you know what is a genocide. And throwing in a line about trans people for some reasons, because your side is literally obsessed with making their lives as miserable as possible.
You're pretending that the line can only be arbitrary, when every jurisdiction already has one. Look at that, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_France
Or this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
I hope you're willing to extend this charitable way of interpreting intentions to the hyperboles made by the far right in their slogans. What if a anti-immigration group came out with the "eat the aliens" slogan? Should they be allowed to chant that? Make signs?
> Should we extend free speech to groups actively trying to suppress it
Again, it cuts two ways. Should we extend free speech to groups trying to suppress public discourse by deplatformimg, cancelling and banning people they don't like from speaking in campuses?
> You're completely muddying the waters, you know what is a genocide. And throwing in a line about trans people for some reasons
I only mentioned trans people because not believing their self appointed sexual identity was famously equated to erasing and genociding them. As you see, the waters are indeed very muddy. You see them clear just because you already made up your mind about what kind of speech you want to allow and what kind of speech you want to ruthlessly ban.
Splitting democratic nations through fearmongering targeted at everyone's online profile is an incredible weapon.
Others have pointed at the funding of TOR through the US. If there is actual evidence that this impacts the stated purpose of TOR (non-discriminating access to the internet, I‘d say), please share. Otherwise, my impression is still that TOR works as advertised and is working on solutions where it is not.
[1]: https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police...
It's started cropping up in almost any thread related to free speech or censorship, and comes directly from the mouth of right-wing darling Tommy Robinson [0].
[0] https://www.standard.co.uk/news/tommy-robinson-uk-speech-cla...
The British arrest stats subsume DV harassment cases, and the original Times reporting quoted a police officer stating that they are the bulk of these numbers. I haven’t found an apples-to-apples comparison in the US, but the FL number gives a point of reference.
Yet The Netherlands is in third place for World Press Freedom Index. How is that even possible.
I suspect the actual number of un-asked-for dick picks sent each year is significantly (multiple orders of magnitude) higher than that, while also suspecting that most of those pics don't lead to arrests and what people are arrested for is in fact hate speech or threats that at first glance seem like they might be terrorist in nature, but so far as I can tell this distinction is not actually recorded in any official statistics so we just don't know.
* I left the UK in 2018 due to the overreach and incompetence shown in the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, plus the people in charge during Brexit all hating on international human rights obligations; I would've left a year sooner but for family stuff.
Only way around that would be to get a breakdown of the specific details of the arrests. If sufficient details of those records are publicly available, I don't think anyone has actually categorised them into convenient headline figures as yet.
As I said, we just don't know the breakdown, so this could be anything from 0% to 100% of the arrests are things almost everyone agrees with, or (by necessity of those numbers) disagrees with.
It’s all about who considers what a bad look.
America bans Harry Potter, in the past The U.K. banned Lady Chatterly, Germany bans nazi worship but America is quite happy with it.
Just because an american view on what is and isn’t acceptable exists doesn’t mean others have that same view.
There's similar phenomenon in safety stats. In the stats Istanbul appears to be vastly safer than London but having lived in both, I can tell you why Istanbul is safer: Because public spaces don't exist and private spaces are guarded with bars and steel doors.
In London, there's pubs etc. everywhere, in Istanbul you are limited to few centers to be outside after 10. The places where people go are bustling because they serve a city of 16 million, so they are well lit and guarded.
In London, there are parks and guard free public spaces everywhere. In istanbul there are very few such places.
In London people mostly live in homes that don't have bars on the windows but in Istanbul there's bars on the first floor on every window on any building that's not a gated community. People with money live in gated communities or one of the very few upscale district.
In London you can walk ro everywhere, it has wide sidewalks and not many hills. In Istanbul sidewalks are tiny and often interrupted and the city has hills, as a result very few people walk more than a few hundred meters and people with bicycles are rounding error level non existent.
In Istanbul there's simply not many opportunities for crime, so when it happens it happens differently that the way it happens in London. No one ill grab your phone and run but if you wander in a non-commercial location or location that is not well lit after dark, you can be raped or stabbed just like that.
You can't really compare the realities of these cities by simply looking at some numbers without proper context.
Probably not acting in good faith.
The people talking about this never make the distinction.
Details matter.
Media laws already penalize traditional media for lying about various subjects in most democracies (see libel laws, etc.). And it's good that they do. The alternative of unchecked lies spreading everywhere is worse.
Why should the internet be exempt from media laws?
The problem with dictatorships isn't that fake news is prohibited. It's that the people who decide what is fake news and what isn't have bad intentions and can't be challenged.
> No mention of "age verification"
> No mention of people arrested for Twitter posts in the UK and the EU
What did they mean by this?
Nobody blocks them in the UK and the EU so there is nothing to fight in technical terms for TOR Project.
They are not EU/UK political representative to fight legally or politically.
My hunch is because they have a backdoor in it.
Does basically all network leaving China still get ratelimited at a few megabytes per second?
I get rate limited to around 10mbps in Chongqing. Was slightly higher in Beijing.
https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/558
I'm not sure about rate limited by few megabytes per second, as I had rate limits like few bytes per second, when I tried to use ssh as a proxy. Few megabytes per seconds sounds like a perfect connectivity to me.
No as long as you pay CN2 GIA rate. Not ratelimited just oversubscribed and bad peering. Purchase the hundred dollar per mbps CN2 GIA dedicated bandwidth its no problem.
https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core
The only successful revolutions are piloted by a small elite with further interests that may not coincide with the people.
I'd be curious to know if these are smaller, sympathetic ISPs or if they managed to partner with larger backbone providers. I'm interested to hear more about this.
[1] look up tapdance
At least in Russia, they don't really care about collateral damage. Currently, without a VPN, I can't open like 30-50% links on Hacker News (mostly collateral damage after they banned large portions of IPs)
- Does Tor need an OFAC license to supply to Russian and Iranian (and other sanctioned entities)? What's your approach to stay compliant and globally helpful? I know 50% of your funding comes from US government (or did a few years back, still?), does this give you extra pathways to engage those regions?
I'm wondering because the system would seem to fall under ITAR due to its encryption, and even if non-ITAR is still a cyber product and these countries are heavily OFAC listed rn.
This is relevant for me right now as I was recetnyl contact by a significant entity in a sanctioned region with a massive deal for BrowserBox. Applying for an OFAC license to see if it's possible to serve them (but we have to make final determination on ethics/legal even if license is approved, I guess). My feeling is that broad sanctions don't hurt the things they are meant to but punish people in all countries from forming transnational links that might actually help to prevent conflicts and build relations however small. Idk, just my reflections after encountring this situation.
(writing this message, I realized how hard it is not to write "product" for the thing graphene and tor make)
> product
OFAC regulates international trade. Isn't Tor's publication an act of pure speech, rather than commerce? They're not charging for it, and they aren't physically moving any goods across borders. How could Tor be subject to any restrictions here?
(not a lawyer, just someone who naively thought the Crypto Wars ended in the 90s)
OFAC applies to trade, like your "massive deal". OFAC's original authority comes from a law titled, literally "The Trading With the Enemy Act".
Tor publishes free software, asking nothing in return. That isn't trade. Neither are those evangelists who broadcast sermons on shortwave radio -- they certainly "serve" Iran in the sense that people in that country can hear their broadcasts.
"Cyber product" lolwut? I think you have been breathing too many beltway fumes.