London’s Metropolitan Police is planning to spunk £1.7 million setting up a new “Twitter squad” to combat trolling on social media. On top of this, the Home Office has put nearly £500,000 into setting up an Online Hate Crime Hub.
Gosh, what could possibly go wrong?
No, it’s OK. I’ll tell you.
Police don’t do nuance
The police are good at lots of things: high-speed chases; bashing down doors; saying “You’re nicked, son.” But expecting a rozzer to have the intellectual wherewithal to differentiate between idle social media banter and serious crime is as futile as expecting Joey Essex to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem. We saw this in the ludicrous case of Paul Chambers, who shared the following Tweet with friends: “Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!” Actual members of the actual police – alright, so they were the famously corrupt and stupid South Yorkshire Police (Rotherham; Hillsborough; Cliff Richard), but they are, still, technically a police force – decided that this constituted a genuine threat worthy of prosecution. And, amazingly, the Crown Prosecution Service agreed.
Free speech means freedom to offend
Does this really need explaining?
Haven’t you got anything better to do, officer?
Policemen hate being asked this, even when you call them ‘officer’. Nonetheless, in an era when Britain faces its greatest internal security threat since the height of the IRA’s terror campaigns in the 1970s, you really might have hoped that the police’s scarce resources would be concentrated on the areas of most pressing need rather than, say, – as Police Scotland did last year – investigating Katie Hopkins over her use of the phrase “sweaty jocks“.
Women can’t do banter
It’s no coincidence that the majority of those demanding more internet censorship are females like Caroline Criado-Perez and Stella Creasy MP who, almost certainly, have never said anything witty or even mildly interesting on social media in their lives. Basically, like a lot of girls, they just can’t handle the rough and tumble playground sparring which is meat and drink to many men. So instead they do what girls always do when they can’t compete with the boys: a sly word to teacher so as to get the naughty boys into trouble.
“Rape threats”
If you genuinely intend to rape someone, it is highly unlikely you’re going to announce it on social media through a traceable account.
The Crown Prosecution Service
Almost everything that is wrong with policing in Britain can be traced to the Crown Prosecution Service and the skewed values promulgated by its feminazi Director of Public Prosecutions Alison Saunders. Whether it’s harassing scores of journalists or pursuing elderly celebrities for alleged “historic sex crimes” or bringing rape cases against young men on the flimsiest of evidence, the CPS appears to be engaged in some bizarre politically correct vendetta which has nothing to do with any rational definition of fairness or justice or responsible use of public money. Can we really trust these zealots to take a sensible view on internet trolling?
‘Hate crime’
Brendan O’Neill wrote about this outrageous waste of police resources and terrible abuse of the public trust in the Spectator recently. If his account doesn’t shock you, read the accompanying piece by Kevin O’Sullivan, a journalist who went through months of misery, while the police hauled him through the justice system because some random person on a train had falsely accused him of making a homophobic insult. The bar has now been set so low it is truly terrifying. Basically, if anyone tells the police they feel they have been the victim of a hate crime then they are, by definition, the ‘victim’ of a ‘hate crime.’ This Kafka-esque state of affairs was only supposed to obtain in places like Communist East Europe or Czarist Russia or 17th century Salem. Not Britain in 2016.
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