Prosecuting X and Facebook users for inaccurate posts is a very dangerous path: Bill Carmichael

Similarly, the law is catching up on those who, while not rioting themselves, encouraged others to break the law on social media.

Again, I have no problem with that. If you are inciting others to commit violent acts against innocent people you have gone well beyond the bounds of legitimate free expression.

But some of the rhetoric coming from government ministers, and some of the actions of police, are deeply worrying, and represent a real threat to free speech.

Ministers have become embroiled in a very ill-advised spat with X/Twitter owner, Elon Musk, and are now noisily demanding further restrictions of freedom of expression on the big tech platforms.

In a finger wagging lecture Stephen Parkinson, the Director of Public Prosecutions, warned that even re-posting “a message which is false” could land you behind bars.

Seriously, if we are going to start putting people in jail for posting inaccurate information on the internet we are going to have to build a hell of a lot more prisons.

In truth “misinformation” has been around since Adam was a lad. As a journalist I have attended many incidents and in the early minutes and hours, with people often shocked and disoriented, all kinds of rumours fly about.

I would ring the news desk with what I had found out only to be told sternly that nothing would be published until it was completely “copper-bottomed”. In other words it was my job as a reporter to discern truth from falsehoods and verify the facts.

That is an increasingly old fashioned view, with many of today’s journalists seeing themselves as activists, rather than dogged pursuers of the truth. And into the vacuum where reliable information once resided are sucked all kinds of lies, conspiracy theories and “misinformation”.

Take for example last October when the BBC informed us that the Al Ahli hospital in Gaza had been “flattened” by an Israeli missile with over 500 deaths.

Given the ingrained anti-Israel bias of our national broadcaster, I decided not to take this on face value, and instead logged onto X/Twitter where within minutes I found reliable experts on military munitions who were raising massive doubts about the BBC’s version of events.

It eventually turned out that they were right and the BBC was wrong. There was no “Israeli missile” (it was a misfired rocket launched by Islamic Jihad), the hospital had not been “flattened”, although there was some damage to the car park, and the casualty numbers had been hugely exaggerated.

The BBC had greedily gobbled up blatant and easily disprovable Hamas lies, and regurgitated them entirely uncritically to millions of people. Huge damage was caused because of these falsehoods, with negotiations for a ceasefire scuppered and anti-Semitic attacks increasing across the globe.

So in that case it was the revered BBC who were guilty of propagating “misinformation”, and the much maligned social media platform X/Twitter where the truth was to be found. Can you guess which one the government wants to censor?

The police already have enough on their plate, without spending even more time and money scouring social media for hurty words and “disinformation” (while insisting they “don’t have the resources” to investigate real crime!).

We already have the Orwellian abomination of “non-crime incidents”. In my view if it is not a crime, it is none of the police’s business to investigate.

They have also turned themselves into the paramilitary wing of the extreme trans movement by constantly harassing women who believe that biological sex is real, and men cannot become women on their say so.

If they now start arresting people for memes, jokes, “inaccurate information” and for raising legitimate concerns about what is happening in their neighbourhoods, then they will lose what little respect and support they currently possess.

All the talk of censorship and “misinformation” is mere deflection by a government seemingly incapable, like all previous administrations, of dealing with the root cause of the current unrest - uncontrolled, open borders immigration.

It won’t work. It is like trying to cram a lid on a simmering pot while the flame underneath intensifies. Unless you deal with the flame in the first place, the whole thing is inevitably going to boil over.