“Around 20,000 people in Britain have been investigated in the past three years for comments made online,” Bloodworth confirms, “with around 20 people a day being looked into by the forces of the law, according to figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.” Worse, some of these people have actually been imprisoned: among them, a “woman found guilty of a public order offence for saying that David Cameron had “’blood on his hands,’” a man named “Azhar Ahmed, who was prosecuted for an online post mocking the deaths of six British soldiers killed in Afghanistan,” and a young man named Liam Stacey who tweeted something unprintable at a top-flight soccer player and was incarcerated for two months in consequence.
They may soon be joined by another. As I write, a deliberately “edgy” columnist named Katie Hopkins is being “looked into” by police for having been a little unpleasant on the Internet. Taking to Twitter earlier this week, Hopkins offered a gratuitously crude criticism of an Ebola nurse, dismissively described the Scottish people as “sweaty little jocks,” and suggested (correctly in my view) that the country’s National Health Service “sucks.” These relatively mild provocations were enough to push the police into action.
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