Toby Young: Does Britain Have a Free Speech Problem?
When J.D. Vance raised British speech restrictions in the Oval Office last year, Keir Starmer waved the concern away. At the Daily Sceptic, Free Speech Union founder Toby Young answers with numbers instead of anecdotes. Citing a new Big Brother Watch report, he notes that 62,199 people were arrested on suspicion of three communications offenses between 2021 and 2025 — about 34 a day — and 12,292 were convicted:
That’s a shocking figure, but it’s an underestimate. Several police forces didn’t respond to Big Brother Watch’s Freedom of Information requests, including Police Scotland. Big Brother Watch estimates the true figure is 73,023. So on a conservative estimate, the police are arresting an average of 34 people a day for things they’ve said, the vast majority online, and the true figure is closer to 40 a day. Russia, incidentally, is thought to arrest around 400 people a year for similar offenses.
Of those 62,199 people, 18,520 were charged and 12,292 were convicted. That’s more than 12,000 people with criminal records for speech offenses in five years. And that number is likely to go up if the proposals to curtail the right to trial by jury, first put forward by David Lammy when he was Justice Secretary, become law.
Research by the Free Speech Union found that in the year to June 2025, 14% of people tried for speech offences in a magistrates’ court were acquitted, compared with 33% in the Crown Court, where the case was heard by a jury. Twelve ordinary men and women, it turns out, are less likely than a district judge to conclude that an intemperate tweet merits a criminal conviction. Leave the decision to them and more people will be convicted.
Josh Pauzé: Texas Wants Free Speech on Campus—With Exceptions
After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Texas leaders created select committees on campus free speech in his honor. At Reason, Josh Pauzé notes that Texas schools nonetheless averaged an F in FIRE’s new College Free Speech Rankings, which cite 25 controversies across the state — much of the censorship, he writes, coming from the right. Exhibit A: a UT Dallas student editor placed on a two-year deferred suspension after appending a disclaimer to a letter from the campus Hillel president. He’s now suing:
Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez was an editor of The Mercury, a student newspaper at the University of Texas at Dallas, before he was placed on a two-year deferred suspension after his school deemed that his editorial decisions constituted “discriminatory harassment.”
This all started when UT Dallas Hillel president Jade Steinberg sent The Mercury a letter about campus antisemitism and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Gutierrez thought the letter lacked credible sources, so he added a disclaimer to its publication stating that the letter “does not meet the journalistic standards of The Mercury“ and should be treated as opinion rather than news. A day after the piece went live, Steinberg complained, leading to Gutierrez’s suspension. Gutierrez filed a lawsuit last week, alleging that the school violated his First Amendment rights.
Gutierrez’s case is one of many free speech controversies at Texas universities. Texas schools received an average grade of F in the annual college free speech rankings recently published by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The report cites 25 free speech controversies across the state’s universities, and 42 percent of students claim to have self-censored at least once a month.
The failing grades are a stark contrast to the state government’s recent attempt to support free speech on campus in the wake of conservative activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Robby Soave: Aaron Sorkin Accidentally Made Mark Zuckerberg the Hero of His Anti-Facebook Movie
Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, is a sequel of sorts to 2010’s The Social Network. Robbie Soave argues the film meant to cast Jeremy Strong’s Zuckerberg as a cartoon villain. Then a newly released scene shows the Zuck character rebutting Bill Burr’s character with free speech arguments, and Soave caught himself cheering:
Sorkin—whose own politics seem to fall mostly in line with the sort of overly idealistic, bland do-something liberalism that typified The West Wing, his best known piece of entertainment—is a passionate detractor of Facebook and Zuckerberg. In 2019, Sorkin went so far as to write an open letter to Zuckerberg (in the form of a column for The New York Times, of course), in which he accused Facebook of “assaulting the truth.”
Over the course of the last two decades, from Network to Reckoning, Sorkin’s nuanced but mostly negative representation of social media and its impact on society has yielded to Jonathan Haidt-esque blind hatred; his forthcoming depiction of Zuckerberg (now portrayed by Jeremy Strong rather than Jesse Eisenberg) is intended as one-dimensional cartoon villainy.
Well, so much for those intentions. This certainly isn’t what Sorkin intended, but I found myself cheering Strong’s Zuckerberg in a recently released scene from the movie, in which the Facebook CEO marshals free speech arguments to rebut the histrionic apprehensions of Bill Burr’s character.
Around X
Last Thursday, hours after Judge Timothy Kelly (a Trump appointee) ordered the White House to restore press passes for CNN, MS NOW and Politico, some of their reporters were still being turned away at the gate. Brit Hume observed that a White House that has generally avoided defying court orders appeared to have done exactly that. The reporters were let in around midday.
Two days later, Kaitlan Collins reported that the White House was barring CNN from flying on Air Force One for its TV pool duties on the president’s weekend trip to Tennessee. The court restored the passes; the plane, apparently, is another matter.
Finally, in India, activist Abhijeet Dipke accuses Meta of taking down hundreds of reels demanding the resignation of the country’s chief election commissioner, and banning accounts — reportedly at the government’s request. Burnham’s new information-defence centre, it’s worth noting, also plans to work with social media companies.
