In the U.K. people can be prosecuted for speech found to be offensive.
There have been several high profile cases used as examples, like the guy who was convicted for making a video of his girlfriend’s dog pretending to do a Nazi salute: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Meechan
Doing anything considered “grossly offensive” online can result in the police knocking on your door and financial penalties. It’s a foreign concept if you’re in a country where making jokes online doesn’t constitute a risk to your freedoms and finances (which is more than just the U.S.)
I’ve had too many circular discussions of this issue on HN already, but arrests are a low bar. You can find examples of people being arrested for stupid reasons in pretty much any country if you google for it. The exact reasons might vary, but any individual police officer being a moron at any moment can lead to someone being arrested.
There are also some examples of people being convicted for questionable reasons, but the UK is far from the only country with laws against hate speech. It is really the US that is the outlier in having a fundamental legal guarantee of the right to hate speech.
Are there similar examples from Europe or the West? I know there are restrictions for promoting Nazism in some countries, but the UK seems to be an outlier when it comes to censoring offensive content in general.
It seems to be an outlier because news coverage in English-speaking media tends to report on the UK more than other European countries, for various reasons.
It’s super easy to find examples if you look for them. In fact, this example from Spain is far worse than any of the examples you’re likely to find in the UK:
The thing is, it’s not an important part of a certain unmentionable person’s political strategy to portray Spain as an authoritarian hellhole. So you won’t hear nearly as much about cases like this.
Honestly, the point of these laws is that they could get rid of anyone they want to. It is not usually enforced (AFAIK). It is there in place to enforce it on people they do not like, at any point.
There have been several high profile cases used as examples, like the guy who was convicted for making a video of his girlfriend’s dog pretending to do a Nazi salute: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Meechan
Doing anything considered “grossly offensive” online can result in the police knocking on your door and financial penalties. It’s a foreign concept if you’re in a country where making jokes online doesn’t constitute a risk to your freedoms and finances (which is more than just the U.S.)