Joey Barton and Jeremy Vine

 

Joey Barton, Jeremy Vine, and the Criminalisation of Speech

Last week saw the news that Joey Barton is seeking to appeal his conviction for offensive social media posts targeting Jeremy Vine and football pundits Lucy Ward and Eni Aluko.

Barton was found guilty of sending “grossly offensive electronic communications” and handed a suspended prison sentence, along with an order to pay more than £20,000 in costs.

To be clear, Barton’s comments were moronic and vile. He implied that Jeremy Vine was a paedophile and subjected Ward and Aluko to crude, sexist abuse, questioning their competence and legitimacy as football pundits on the basis of their sex. None of this reflects well on Barton. While Vine may be guilty of deliberately goading motorists in order to garner social media hits, this does not warrant the torrent of abuse Barton unleashed upon him.

Jeremy Vine was right to open litigation proceedings. This was clearly a case of Barton peddling falsehoods — defamation. However, “grossly offensive electronic communications” should not be a criminal offence. Why not?

Picking apart a Radio 4 interview with Vine following the news that Barton is seeking to appeal his conviction reveals why.

After outlining the nature of the comments directed towards him and welcoming the court’s decision, Vine went on to suggest that “free speech is hate speech.”

This is absolutely astonishing coming from an employee of our so-called public broadcaster.

Who defines hate speech? This will invariably change with the government of the day. What is deemed unacceptable under one administration may be entirely permissible under the next. Handing the state the power to police expression on this basis is reckless in the extreme.

Vine went on to launch a tirade against X, suggesting that social media companies should be legally required to monitor and censor content. Newsflash for you, Vine: your authoritarian demand is already happening courtesy of the Online Safety Act. He went further still, claiming that “social media is the new asbestos. They will be ripping it from the walls in 20 years.”

As a regular listener to Radio 4, I am regularly exposed to anti-social-media rhetoric. Established media obviously feels threatened, most likely because social media proves that the mood of the general public is decisively less woke and less left-wing than the BBC.

But this went a step further — it was a call, implicitly if not explicitly, for a complete ban on social media.

It is true that social media has polarised society and, in some cases, normalised the hurling of abuse. But that does not justify a ban. If people want to sue each other for falsehoods that cause material damage to their life, liberty or property, then fine — go for it. Civil law already provides mechanisms for this.

What is not justified is banning or criminalising a public forum in which the private individual can contribute to public discourse. That is totalitarian. Social media has been a great liberator: it has brought down dictators, given a voice to millions, and democratised the consumption of news.

The fact that it has also been, on occasion, a vehicle for abuse and conspiracy theories is an unfortunate side-effect that must be tolerated. The only logically coherent position on freedom of speech is free speech absolutism — including hate speech.

Joey Barton is a moron. Jeremy Vine is an authoritarian. Try to sue me if you disagree, but don’t try to lock me up.