Freedom to Offend

It's getting to the stage where you can't write or say anything online for fear of censorship and prosecution. Which is a far cry from those heady early days of the net, when we all thought that it was going to be this great new medium of communication, free from the interference of national governments and the artificial barriers of national frontiers.  But instead - at least here in the UK - we've ended up with the situation where posting a tweet or a Facebook comment that upsets someone can result in you being arrested, prosecuted and possibly jailed.  We're not talking about misogynistic, racist or homophobic tweets and posts here, (although I'd say that some of the actions taken against these of late have been excessive, bearing in mind that most are simply the idiotic rantings of immature pillocks), but just stuff that offends someone.  

Or, to be specific, upsets a sufficient number of very loud individuals who shout and wail about it until the police cave in to mob pressure and start arresting the perpetrators.  Now, I'm not even defending the content of these posts - the most recent I can recall was an unpleasant Facebook posting about the teacher who was stabbed to death in her classroom by a pupil, basically saying she deserved it, which landed the poster in court - but the fact is that people are entitled to hold and express opinions different to our own.  No matter how offensive, deluded and just downright wrong those opinions are.  So long as they don't act on them, these idiots are entitled to express those opinions. No matter how much they might offend us.

However, the idea that people are entitled 'not to be offended' and that if they are, it should be a criminal offence, seems to have taken root in this country.  Which, of course, is highly injurious to the whole concept of free speech.  After all, who is to say that someone finds one of my past blog posts so offensive that they not only succeed in getting the whole blog taken down, but get me arrested as well?  Which might sound extreme, but let us not forget that, during the run up to the recent European elections, one blogger found himself visited by the police and asked to 'remove' something he'd retweeted because someone in UKIP didn't like it.  (Obviously, he explained to the police that, once a tweet is out there, it is near impossible to remove it from the entire web!)  The danger, clearly, is that eventually we'll all become too scared to publically tweet or post anything remotely controversial: the public web will be reduced to a series of updates about what people had for breakfast. 

However, as a public employee, I'm faced not only with the constant threat of offended readers, but also a threat from my employer.  Increasingly, the civil service code is being invoked to punish and dismiss public employees who publically express opinions contrary to those of their departments and the government of the day.  This is clearly a gross violation of the code and an assault on our freedom of speech: despite being government employees, we are still entitled to hold and express personal opinions, just so long as we don't represent them as being those of the organisations we work for and they don't bring the service into disrepute (ie, by posting racist, sexist or other obviously offensive stuff).  And people wonder why I hide behind a series of pseudonyms on the web and never mention exactly where I work, or even exactly where I live.  I really shouldn't have to take such precautions, but the way things stand, I have no choice if I am to preserve my job (and possibly my liberty).