The "special thing" in terms of authoritarianism was the arrest part, not the tweet part. Arresting for (offline) communication is not unheard of in the UK, as evidenced by anti-monarchist protesters getting arrested for expressing their views during Charles' proclamation.
If I was talking about someone arrested for speaking against the monarchy on Twitter, I wouldn't talk about that as someone being "arrested for a tweet", maybe I would talk about someone being "arrested for tweeting critically about the monarchy" or just "arrested for being critical of the monarchy". If one thinks the speech in question should be legal, you'd think one would mention the kind of speech, not just the medium.
As it is, we can't judge for ourselves whether the arrest is warranted or not, which is kind of a big deal when the arrest is used by robswc to illustrate how the UK is approaching authoritarianism.
An example discussed earlier this year on HN: Joseph Kelly tweeted
> the only good Brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella, buuuuurn
in relation to Tom Moore’s death. He deleted the tweet after 20 minutes. He was convicted of grossly offensive communications under the Communications Act, and was sentenced to 18 month’s probation and 150 hours of unpaid work.
That's certainly crass, but it shouldn't be illegal to say.
If people don't want to support their country's military and servicemen, that should be their business; it's a legitimate political position to take. Not least because all British soldiers are volunteers, and most of what British soldiers have been doing for the past generation is tagging along with American imperial military adventurism.
>Arresting for (offline) communication is not unheard of in the UK
This is not unheard of in the US either. So what is the distinction being made here?
And for the record the UK and Australia are generally higher up on the various freedom lists that rank countries. I don't know that there is much of an argument that their stricter speech restrictions have them any closer to authoritarianism than the various problems in the US have us.
There are plenty of them. You can start here[1] and do digging to find whichever one you think is most appropriate. It has been years since I have looked at any of these in depth, but the general consensus has often been that at our best the US is on par with countries like Australia and the UK and is occasionally a tier bellow those two. I'm not aware of any that have us a tier above either of them when it comes to general freedom metrics.
I looked at a random few of those and I honestly believe their categories are too broad/subjective.
Funny enough, downloading an actual report (https://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index/2021), the UK scores almost perfect (9.8) on "Freedom of internet Expression." The country where you can quite literally be arrested for making an offensive tweet (not a threat), scores just shy of 10/10 on internet freedom? Are the arrests the reason for losing 0.2? I would _love_ to see the methodology behind that score.
Germany, the country where you can have your house literally raided over calling a politician a "dick", scores 9.36 "Internet Expression." 9's are some of the highest scores you can get.
The institutions that put these together have 0 skin in the game. I have tried to find how they create their "indicators" but haven't found anything. I honestly just cannot take these reports seriously unless someone has an answer for how countries that can arrest citizens over offensive tweets could score so high on this particular metric.
Maybe some of them do have categories that are too broad or subjective. That is why I referred to the consensus of the lists and not any individual list. Those list come from a variety of political and ideological backgrounds, so any biases should be reduced in aggregate and they all seem to end up showing the same pattern. The US is generally in the 2nd or 3rd tier while Australia and the UK are generally in the 1st or 2nd tier.
I would assume this means the experts have concluded that the right to be rude to a politician on Twitter is not a particularly important right and its removal doesn't have much impact on the overall freedom of that society. That seems more likely than a diverse group of think tanks, academic institutions, journalistic outlets, and NGOs have all either joined a conspiracy or randomly acted in concert to misrepresent the relative freedom of the US in comparison to our peers.
>Maybe some of them do have categories that are too broad or subjective.
All of the ones I have looked through have that. Every single one.
We're looking at just one metric though. Freedom to express ideas on the internet. Countries where you can get arrested for "offensive" tweets or get your house raided for calling a politician a dick score a few 0.1s away from the maximum of 10. We don't know how, because AFAIK, they do not go into specifics about why they give the UK/Germany a 9.x/10 on "Internet Freedom."
>I would assume this means the experts have concluded that the right to be rude to a politician on Twitter is not a particularly important right
Then I, along with most people, would conclude that their metric (and possibly by extension, their entire index) is useless. Not having your house raided for calling a politician a dick is exactly what most people would consider a particularly important "right."
The People’s Republic of China guarantees freedom of speech in its constitution. However, china doesn’t really do rule of law (the judicial branch has no power to interpret law or rebuke executive application of the law, instead it’s more rule by law), so it is mostly meaningless.
