There is a new free speech controversy in the UK after Joseph Kelly, 36, was found guilty of posting a ‘grossly offensive’ tweet about a war veteran. Kelly was sentenced to 150 hours of community service. The conviction is another blow to free speech in the UK in a case of clear political speech.

Kelly tweeted about Captain Sir Thomas Moore, a British veteran who became a national icon for raising funds for healthcare workers in 2020. Many of us have read his heartwarming story in the US and were inspired by it.

Kelly died in February 2021 and Kelly said: ‘The only good British soldier is an act, burn an old guy buuuuurn.’ It was a horribly obnoxious and offensive tweet. However, it must also be protected speech. This would certainly be the case in the United States. However, many of us view free speech not as a right entirely contained in the First Amendment, but as a human right.

The decline of free speech in the UK has long been of concern to free speech advocates (here and here and here and here and here and here and here). Once you as a government start criminalizing speech, you find yourself on the slippery slope of censorship. What constitutes hate speech or “malicious communications” remains a highly subjective matter and we have seen a steady expansion of prohibited terms, words and gestures. Even having “toxic ideologies” is now a crime.

It is certainly a toxic point of view, but it is also a political point of view. Notably, Kelly was also drunk at the time and appears to have immediately regretted the tweet. He deleted it after around 20 minutes, according to Scottish newspaper The National.

Even that wasn’t enough for prosecutors who pushed for an actual prison sentence. Under the Communications Act 2003, online posts that are “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or threatening nature” can be punished by up to six months behind bars.

Sheriff Adrian Cottam announced his law enforcement against a drunk who took down the tweet 20 minutes later and apologized. He called the case a “deterrent” so that “other people realize how quickly things can get out of hand.”

Cottam’s enthusiasm for speech control shows how such laws “quickly spiral out of control”. Censorship creates an insatiable appetite as people demand that those with opposing views be silenced. There is an alternative. This is called freedom of expression. You allow others to speak out against Kelly and allow good speech to triumph over bad speech.