Britain’s Minister for Northern Ireland is preparing a major crackdown on social media companies to force removal of all content they say “is illegal” He says anti-immigrant talk causing outrage will no longer be tolerated Cathy Newman tried to get Wikipedia’s founder to endorse censoring Elon Musk. He refused. “The answer to speech you don’t like is more speech — not censorship.” Even the left-wing creator of Wikipedia won’t play their game. “The UK has become a very authoritarian society because they have no other way of trying to control things.” Fundamentally, this violence is the fault of the state, which isn’t listening to people.” Journalist David Shipley warns that the UK government is exploiting the Belfast unrest to justify authoritarian social media censorship. “The reason they don’t want this stuff shared is because it is inherently radicalising.” “The thing about living in the United Kingdom in 2026 is that reality is radicalising. And that is why they want to shut down these sorts of videos.” “The UK has become a very authoritarian society because they have no other way of trying to control things.” “We have violent, awful migrant crime after violent, awful migrant crime. And all they’ve got is trying to shut things down, stop people talking about it—control, control, control.” “It’s been a long time… since the United Kingdom was a free society, and it should frighten us all.” “I very much understand why those people in Belfast are rioting and setting fire to things because, actually, if you can’t get a solution at the ballot box… if you’re told that your very normal political concerns are just not acceptable—they can’t even be voiced—what do you have left?” Previous blog entries:‘If we are living in a country where you cannot report the truth, we are living under a dictator.’
Adam Brooks warns of government censorship as Labour announces a social media crackdown ‘in times of crisis’ after the Belfast unrest. pic.twitter.com/6yyNDXqWNh — GB News (@GBNEWS) June 11, 2026
Once-great Britain is decaying morally, culturally, politically and economically. There’s no better example of this debilitating decline than the U.K.’s plunge into the kind of speech censorship usually associated with tinpot Third World dictatorships.
Police are making more than 30 arrests a day over what they deem to be offensive online posts, retweets or cartoons. That’s 12,000 arrests a year.
The big question is whether Britain can pull itself out of this moral sewer. If it can, it would be a powerful example for similarly infected countries.
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Civilisational Erasure: Images of Great Britons to be Removed From Nation’s Money
The Bank of England is to end the tradition of printing images of great Britons on the verso of paper money notes, stating it has decided to proceed with pictures of wildlife instead after it wanted something “not divisive”.
Many Americans now assume the era of speech policing has peaked or passed.
Free speech in Britain is worse than you think | Blaze Media
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If you want to see where contemporary speech regulation leads, look to Britain.
My country, the birthplace of the common law tradition and parliamentary liberty, now arrests thousands of its citizens each year for “offensive” speech. Much of what Americans still debate as hypothetical has already hardened into policy here.
While commentators work to enforce elite consensus, perceptions of two-tier policing have fueled public anger.
This did not happen overnight, nor did it require a dramatic constitutional rupture. It emerged gradually, through well-intentioned laws, bureaucratic definitions, and institutional habits that now govern what may be said, by whom and about whom. For Americans who assume such restrictions could never survive contact with the First Amendment, Britain offers a sobering corrective.Catalog of grievance
The roots of this crisis can be traced to the Equality Act 2010, which laid the groundwork for today’s restrictions on speech. The act provides a legal definition of “protected characteristics,” making it unlawful to discriminate against individuals on the basis of attributes such as sex or race.Steve Forbes calls out the ugly crackdown on speech in Great Britain, pointing to the shocking arrests and convictions of people based on what they’ve said online. He urges the U.K. to reverse course.
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The UK’s Online Safety Act is a licence for censorship – and the rest of the world is following suit
The Online Safety Act is just the latest in a troubling global trend towards a more censored internet, within which governments and data harvesters have obliterated privacy and everything you do online is logged, tracked and monitored. Australia and Ireland have passed similar age verification measures. Denmark, Greece, Spain, France and Italy have started testing a common age‑verification app, paving the way for potential mandatory EU-wide use.