Not sure how you've missed this because I thought you were a copper? The police have been locking people up left, right and centre for claiming the attack was done by Ali Al Shakati. It's not because they've got his name wrong is it and defamed anyone, it's because of the implication he's an Islamic extremist, which has a strong
possibility of being true.
Also, many other examples of ridiculous prosecutions/persecutions below in an excerpt of an article I linked below:
The Prime Minister’s recent clamp down on free speech is deeply worrying. Since the beginning of August, we’ve witnessed the greatest assault on free speech in this country since Oliver Cromwell passed a law banning all theatrical performances in 1642.
In the wake of the civil unrest that spread across the UK following the murder of three children in Southport, Sir Keir Starmer has blamed ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ on social media for whipping up violence and urged the authorities to prosecute people for saying supposedly inflammatory things online.
As a result, a man who has been sent to jail for 18 months for sharing something “offensive” that someone else said on Facebook, another man was sent down for three years for posting “anti-Establishment rhetoric” and a third man was jailed for 18 months for chanting “Who the f*** is Allah?”.
Stephen Parkinson, the Director of Public Prosecutions, has even warned that people sharing footage of the riots online may be prosecuted. “People might think they’re not doing anything harmful, they are, and the consequences will be visited upon them,” he said.
This threatening language is more reminiscent of a tin-pot dictatorship than the birthplace of parliamentary democracy and it has unleashed a wave of terror across the country, with hundreds of thousands of people now worried that they may be sent to prison for posting something un-PC online.
This has to stop.
We need to remind the Prime Minister, a former human rights lawyer, that free speech is the most important human right of all because without it we wouldn’t be able to defend any of the others.
After barely two months as Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer has already demonstrated his hostility to freedom of speech (The
freespeechunion.org
Hope this is why you joined the force mate
In the case of free speech, the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill drew the line at incitement. He famously contrasted a newspaper article in which the author claimed that corn dealers were starvers of the poor, with the same view spoken (or communicated via a placard) right outside a corn dealer’s house. The first is a controversial opinion that should be allowed to enter the public debate, even if the view is false or immoral; the second is, in those circumstances, an act of incitement to violence and unacceptable.
Mill's example is probably well-known in legal and philosophical circles and forms the basis for what became known as his Harm Principle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harm_principle#:~:text=John Stuart Mill articulated the,Declaration of the Rights of
The key issue here is whether Facebook posts or tweets on X are comparable to Mill's placard, given that we are living at a time when disinformation abounds on social media and spreads like wildfire, leaving ordinary media outlets playing catch-up, and there are also lots of credulous people out there who are distrustful of the MSM but seem willing to take any old drivel at face value.
7/7 is an example. The official version was that the lethal explosives were carried in backpacks by the bombers, who set them off on three trains and a bus, killing themselves and the people around them.
But if the bombs could be shown to have detonated somewhere else – underneath the trains, for example – then they could not have been associated with these so-called terrorists. And this, claimed the conspiracy theorists, was exactly what eyewitnesses claimed they had seen happen when the bombs exploded.
Just to be clear, for anyone who is wondering
why someone would be motivated to believe an explanation like this, one possibility is that they think the government at that time deliberately mounted a false-flag operation in order to instill a fear of terrorism into the British people so that, in the future, they would then be in a position to get away with doing whatever they wanted to without having to worry about ordinary citizens opposing them.
For our purposes though, what is important is that the initial reports about the bombs having gone off underneath the trains could all be traced back to one source: a journalist from the
Guardian newspaper called Mark Honigsbaum.
When he got to Edgware Road, the scene of one of the explosions, in spite of the confusion there, Honigsbaum was able to quickly interview some of the survivors, and two of them told him that the covers on the floor of the carriage of the train had flown up, a detail that was then mentioned in an early report on the
Guardian website.
Only later, after speaking at greater length to more survivors who had been closer to the blast, was he able to ascertain that the explosion had actually taken place inside the carriage.
Unfortunately, by then it was too late. As Honigsbaum himself eventually stated, “My comments, disseminated over the Internet, where they could be replayed
ad nauseam, were already taking on a life of their own.” In the past it would have taken far longer for such a rumour to be shared, but today one can be created almost instantaneously with a few clicks of a mouse.
Such is the power of modern social media.
As for free speech being 'the most important human right', I would agree that it's an important one. However, I'm not sure that it can be regarded as an exceptionless moral absolute.
If that were the case, then if I discovered how to create a lethal nerve gas by blending together some easily obtainable household products, it would have to be regarded as morally acceptable for me to post the recipe on here (or in online spaces frequented by jihadists/Antifa/far-right extremists) and I shouldn’t face imprisonment or other legal consequences.
