Average people from the UK are going to assume that any pushback on speech controls is nutters if the message comes with absurd exaggerations and outright lies. There are legitimate cases of overreach from our legal system, but too often the focus is on someone actively calling for violence, and those are not the same.

What you are doing is called "whataboutism".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

I and others are perfectly aware that the US is no paradise. However the UK is much worse than the US.

> Average people from the UK are going to assume that any pushback on speech controls is nutters if the message comes with absurd exaggerations and outright lies. There are legitimate cases of overreach from our legal system, but too often the focus is on someone actively calling for violence, and those are not the same.

The average person in the UK probably isn't even aware there are speech controls and probably would support them. Free speech is something that the British public don't value.

The British Government BTW has a long history of suppressing speech, lying to its own citizens, locking up people that they didn't like. They can always find a reason to do it as there are any number of laws you are in violation in without you even being aware of it.

As far as I can tell, the comment you replied to did not do any such thing.

This is bad, but corrective action was taken. You can look through the news in pretty much any country and find some examples of the police abusing their power or arresting people for stupid reasons. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t bad or that it’s not worth drawing attention to. But cherry picking these kinds of incidents can give people outside the UK a deeply misleading picture of what life is actually like here (see e.g. the green account posting elsewhere in this thread for one example).