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If free speech is protected in the UK, why are there literally thousands of arrests for tweets?
Easy: the UK defines free speech as the ability to say X but not Y. Suffice to say a dog is not a cat even if the government says it is a cat. Likewise, Europe lacks free speech even if they claim they have it.
The basic point you are making is correct - the UK has very weak protections against criminal punishment of speech. But the "12,000 people arrested a year for tweets" statistic is misleading because the Malicious Communications Act covers threats, harassment, cyberstalking etc. as well as mere offensiveness. Based on online and published accounts of day-to-day police work by ex-cops, the vast majority of MCA arrests happen when chavs (or chavettes) make non-credible threats of violence against each other on social media and their parents demand a police response.
I agree with you that c.200 people arrested annually for merely offensive social media posts (which is closer to the real number) is not good and the appropriate number is zero.
It's not misleading. Making threats and harassment are already illegal in most countries. When the UK is pulling off more speech arrests than Russia, that's clear evidence they're more sensitive on the matter than any other country.
Yes, the British police, world-renowned for their honesty when progressive politics form the core part of an issue they're involved in.
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If free speech is protected in America, why do people get fired and blacklisted for the things they say?
Come on, be serious. There are compromises made in every country on Earth
In practice, the UK has more legal protections against being fired or discriminated against for your views, even when those views are right-wing. That is why people who go to employment tribunals tend to win their cases. It doesn't usually give them their jobs back.
The UK has less protections for tweeting in a way that makes the government worried. This is not good.
Broadly, in the US you are more likely to be ruined, in the UK you are more likely to get arrested. Neither of these are good.
Because the American goverment is one of limited powers. The protection is protection from the government.
Being arrested is far worse than people deciding not to do business with you. Being arrested is the state using its monopoly on violence on you.
That's a perfectly valid perspective. But we're now talking about the real tradeoffs and decisions that America makes: we can't protect your speech from retaliation by your employers because that infringes their rights.
America has a particular, limited right to free speech which says that no government can legally punish you for your speech. And that's fine, that's a perfectly valid conception of free speech. I personally happen to disagree with it: I think many people would rather spend a night in a police cell than be blacklisted from their career. That's just my opinion.
What irks me is silly "in America unlike Europe we have Free Speech" comments which ignore the complexity in both countries.
If you spend time in jail, how is that not awful for your job prospects. Are mugshots not searchable in the UK?
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How do you propose to fix this? What do you propose to do? Because the status quo is that the government gets to decide what is allowed to be said in public, and the 1st amendment was codifying that no, the government doesn't get to do that. It doesn't say that everything is OK to say in public. It doesn't say that there are no consequences. But it takes the government out of it and returns it to interpersonal conflict.
So, how do you propose to control all people everywhere to fix this? Because from here is just sounds like whining that someone is trying to do better, but can't fix everything.
No, that's not what I meant to say. I think you are treating the subject in a mature way, albeit one I disagree with.
What I'm asking for is more recognition from others that free speech must ultimately involve trade-offs which different countries are handling in different ways, and less chimping out from certain people (not you @KMC) about how America is glorious land of Free Speech and England/Europe is a contemptible tyranny.
In America you (plural) have broadly decided that it's terrible if the government can punish you for speech, but ok if your employer does. In Europe it's the other way round - it's the governmnt's job to step in and tell your employer that they don't have the right to fire you if they dislike your politics.
I'm split here. On the one hand, I consider the concept of "Free Speech" to be about as thoroughly discredited as a theoretical construct can possibly be.
On the other hand, it seems to me that Speech is in fact significantly freer in all the ways I value in the US than it is in Europe, and further than to the extent that speech continues to be free in ways I value in Europe, it is heavily dependent on material and ideological support from America to maintain itself. It seems to me that speech-hostile-from-my-perspective European and American governments have repeatedly recognized this reality and taken serious steps to attack American speech as a necessary step to stronger speech controls in their own areas.
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If you've been jailed for offensive statements and not already employed, what are your prospects going forward?
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But this isn't even true. Cofnas was originally fired by a European employer, and it took intervention from the US government to get him reinstated. After firing him failed he is now being criminally charged by a European government.
I don't believe the university had the right to fire him, unless he was on some weird short-term contract. As I say, usually the defendants in these cases win and get significant damages. @MadMonzer's thread went into more detail.
He's wrong and so are you. The case Monzer brought up rested on whether or not what Forastater said is "Worthy of Respect in a Democratic Society". After much deliberation they decided that in the end it is, but no amount of worker protection laws would have saved her if they thought otherwise, and while I'm not certain I strongly suspect Forastater's opinion that "we shouldn't discriminate, but 'woman' is a biological category" is a lot more palatable to judges than Cofnas' "Africans are less intelligent than Europeans".
Also the EU is literally officially telling it's staff that they'll get fired for criticizing it in private, off-the-clock, anonymous communications.
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Can a company fire you for being in prison?
Yes, but not for being arrested. IIRC the only people who were actually put in prison were arrested for directly calling for violence in the middle of riots. I don't approve of that, I think it reflects vast hypocrisy on the part of the government who would never treat non-English rioters this way, but I'm fine with that principle if it's applied evenly.
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