I’ve just had the misfortune of reading the Law Commission’s proposals to reform communications laws in the United Kingdom. My conclusion is that the Law Commission should be abolished.

The draft text of the law they proposed is here.

Tl;dr if you say something in public, and it causes “emotional distress” to the reader, the Law Commission proposes that this should be a crime.

I'd remind the Law Commission of the playground wisdom that “sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

This legal development requires a new saying: “words will never hurt me, but a policeman enforcing an unjust thoughtcrime can.”

There are a number of major problems with the proposal.

First, psychiatric evidence is barely worthy of the name, prejudicial to defendants and courts are rightly suspicious of it.

Second, emotional distress can be falsified, either deliberately (Salem Witch Trials) or due to an underlying psychiatric condition (Munchhausen Syndrome, psychopathy). This law would take psychiatric evidence and treat it like physical evidence, which is frankly insane.

Third, the offence dispenses with the traditional requirement that a guilty act be paired with a guilty mind. In the Internet age any public communication on any matter of public importance will be unacceptable to significant swathes of public readership.

Criminal laws have traditionally punished actions, not words, except in limited cases where words are so loaded that there can be little disagreement over the intent of the speaker – in so-called 'true threats' or cases of direct incitement.

The Criminal Emotional Harm proposal, by contrast, makes a statement that would be legal among friends in a pub illegal when in a tweet. It creates a two-tier speech regulation: the public square is violently repressed to protect the sensitivities of the most fragile hecklers.

And yes, what the @Law_Commission proposes is repressing public speech through violence. Arresting people is violent. If they resist arrest more violence will be used.

So essentially the _mens rea_ requirement is shifted: it is not the state of mind of the speaker, but rather the hearer which controls whether the speech is criminal.

Fourth, the plain language of the statute means that anyone engaging with content - e.g. a quote-tweet or a screen-shot - who then magnifies it could also make out the first two elements of the offence.

So if e.g. a Twitter account with 0 followers tweets out a criminal statement, and a Twitter account with 100,000 followers quote-tweets it to refute it, the quote-tweeter will also make out the elements of the offence.

Nothing. The pro-censorship laws being pushed by the Law Commission, in my view, are an argument for abolishing it and not replacing it. MPs need to take back responsibility for writing laws themselves. https://twitter.com/TomJackSpencer/status/1339688919001083904?s=20

Sixth, there's a "lawful excuse" exemption to the offence. What that means, nobody knows. Whoever controls the crown prosecutors will have the power to exercise prosecutorial discretion. This law will invite state-sponsored viewpoint discrimination on a vast scale.

This is a bad law which would trample on the rights of the UK citizenry.

MPs should tell this unelected quango to stay in its lane and stop making political calls clothed in the language of neutral law reform.

MPs should then pass a UK Free Speech Act. https://twitter.com/ASI/status/1331602727638507521

Any public body that would propose the use of force against ordinary citizens for the non-crime of causing offence deserves to be stripped of its mandate, if for no other reason than to remind the rest of the public sector whom they serve.

If the Commission were interested in preserving free speech whilst also rationalizing UK law in this area, it would model new law after 18 U.S. Code § 2261A, which punishes courses of conduct, not mere speech that offends.

They won't do that, of course. But they should.

I'd write a letter with these comments to the consultation, but these tweets will get more views than the Law Commission's own proposal so there's no point.

No idea re: gangsta rap, but Drill rappers are frequently arrested/cited for performing their music in the UK. Skengdo and AM were imprisoned in 2019 and Digga D was slapped with a criminal behavior order in September. https://twitter.com/ASocraticknight/status/1339719543027986432

These are the sort of people the UK elects https://twitter.com/CPJElmore/status/1339901034865569792?s=20