Though handily, we have a new word to describe this now. At the weekend, two Twitter posts about supposed UK Police overreach went viral, Tweeted by trusted accounts and retweeted endlessly by accounts trusted and untrusted. Neither of them were accurate:
No, he wasn’t arrested for simply firing a gun in a country where it’s legal to do so (and it would be legal to do it here too) and posting a picture of it. He was arrested for a claim made by an anonymous person that this was part of targeted harassment of them, a claim apparently now dropped.
And the day after, this:
No, he wasn’t convicted of enjoying music in the comfort of his own home, as the Tweets would have you believe but of distributing music banned because it contained lyrics supporting terrorism.
The point being, whether you disagree with ‘hate crime’ nonsense, or think there’s two tier policing going on (I agree with both points), the police are here to enforce the law and neither of these cases were as presented.
So when you’re on the Internet, take a tip from a police officer of the kind I wish still existed, and: ‘Mind how you go’
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