I live in the UK and when I raise concerns about government surveillance here people often say, "I've got nothing to hide".
I learnt of a case just this week where a guy on Reddit left a slightly controversial comment and ended up being charged with hate speech, lost his job and received hate abuse online for his opinion.
It was kinda crazy because "all" he said was that didn't care about a teen who died in police custody, specifically that this teen was a, "good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey" (Toxteth being a fairly rough inner-city area of Liverpool).
The teen he was insulting was dead and unable to take offence, but the police officer on Reddit at the time took offence and decided to prosecute the guy anyway.
I'm bringing this up because I don't think most people in the UK realise this. Insulting people online or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution. I mean just this week an autistic child got arrested for calling a lesbian police officer a lesbian here in the UK.
We all have something to hide when what's right and wrong is this arbitrary.
Legal notes:
I do not agree with the views of the Redditor referenced in my comment. I understand how someone may be offended by what he said, but disagree specifically with it being an offence to state an offensive position online.
I also do not agree with the behaviour autistic child mentioned in my comment. I understand that being autistic is not an excuse for being offensive. Again, I am only bringing this up because I do not believe it should be an offence to offend.
The offensive language used in my comment were direct quotes used specifically to make a point.
"will often": no, not at all. Could occasionally. You're not helping your argument by overstating this. The courts are not stuffed with people being fined for saying things that are "mildly offensive".
And nothing of what you're talking about is government surveillance. The police aren't the government, and the police do not routinely surveil the populace.
They wouldn't have the staff, for one thing! The police actually wanted to close the police station in the town in which I live -- population over 100,000 in the wider borough -- and replace it with what amounted to a kiosk and service from police stations five miles away in each direction.
And yes, really: for those viewers who persist in believing that the surveillance system in Hot Fuzz exists in reality... nope
Yes, sorry – you're right. It happens occasionally. If you're willing to take the risk generally speaking you can be offensive and get away with it.
We have a whole small news channel dedicated to it now! ;-)
Offensiveness on the whole is not policed, at all. (Except by Facebook, of course.)
Offensiveness that rises to the level of a crime can end up policed. The guidance around that is still poorly defined, so it's very unusual to see a charge or a conviction and it's for sure wasteful of resources.
I'm obviously not arguing that it's always a good idea to prosecute when people are just offended -- of course it's not remotely a good idea to have that standard. But I do think we in this country should be allowed to draw a slightly different line on racism or hate speech or trolling/griefing/abuse campaigns without being insulted for our lack of "principle", which is the routine HN argument.
It is, in my estimation, unprincipled to stand around and do nothing while people are harassed online, driven from their online activities, doxxed, abused with poster and letter writing campaigns, or incited against by conspiracy newspapers. Freedom of speech can have different limits than those chosen by the US constitution without being morally defective.
The larger question is, how is this even possibly a thing?
That there are legal liabilities that are wholly dependent on the internal emotional state of another person is absolutely insane. How is it possible to take a government that treats its adult citizens like kindergartners seriously?
Because that isn't the standard. Why do you imagine it is? There you are assuming that Brits are mentally enfeebled. Standard HN position.
Look, just because the USA draws this nice simple extreme bright line doesn't mean it's magically the right line or that it works particularly well.
There is a coupling between your obsession with absolute freedom of speech and your obsession with absolute rights to bear arms that leads to you arming yourself in arguments that could be resolved better over a cup of tea.
Racist language isn't just offensive, for example -- it reinforces racist conduct and can be seen in that wider context. There's no reason to assume there's a freedom to be racist in actions in a country that still has racial divides; I'm not sure why "speech" is excluded from those actions. It can rise to the level of harassment. Trolling and griefing is a massive social problem; free speech shouldn't protect you if you make someone's life a misery even only online with entirely broadcast speech.
We (sometimes! actually unusually!) deal with this at the level of misdemeanour (magistrates courts).
The USA has been known to prosecute jaywalking and can't even deal with swatting -- a means of using overkeen armed police who can only perform conflict resolution if they are armed like soldiers to potentially accidentally murder someone at distance -- so I think perhaps it's a little churlish to come after us because we in our crowded little country think being rampantly offensive to large numbers of people sometimes rises to the level of misdemeanour.