Lucy Connolly, a 41-year-old nanny in central England, has been in jail now for more than 330 days because of a message she posted on X.

Last July, Connolly was at her home, where she runs a small daycare, when news broke that three girls in the town of Southport—aged 6, 7 and 9—were murdered by a knife-wielding man at a dance workshop.

False rumors soon spread online that the perpetrator was a Muslim asylum seeker—he had been born in the U.K. to Christian immigrants from Rwanda.

Connolly, who is mother to a 12-year-old girl and a boy who died as a toddler years ago, and whose husband was then a conservative councilor for their county, tapped out an angry message to her 6,000 followers that evening:

“Mass deportation now. Set fire to all the f—ing hotels full of the bastards for all I care. While you’re at it, take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist, so be it.”

A few hours later, after cooling off and walking the family dog, she deleted the post. It had been retweeted 940 times. In the days that followed, anger over the attack and online misinformation led to days of riots, including several instances where protesters tried to set fire to hotels used by asylum seekers.

An anti-immigration protest in Rotherham, England, in August 2024.

Connolly received a 31-month prison sentence for publishing material intending to stir up racial hatred. Her appeal was rejected. Her sentence was longer than many of the rioters themselves sentenced for criminal damage such as smashing up cars. “Lucy got more time in jail for one tweet than some pedophiles and domestic abusers get,” said her husband, Ray Connolly.

The Connolly case is helping fuel a debate about free speech in the U.K., a debate also playing out across Europe. While the U.S. First Amendment stipulates that Congress “shall make no law” to restrict free speech, and hate speech is generally protected, governments aren’t so constrained in Europe. In a continent scarred by the Holocaust, loosely defined hate-speech laws and the rise of social media have created fertile ground for authorities to crack down on those seen to be stirring up trouble. Rarely a week goes by without a tale of zealous policing.

A German right-wing journalist posted a fake image online of the interior minister holding a sign that read “I hate freedom of opinion” and was subsequently handed a seven-month suspended prison sentence. A woman who posted images of politicians with painted-on Hitler mustaches and called a minister a terrorist was fined about $690.

In France, a woman spent 23 hours in custody for giving French President Emmanuel Macron the middle finger. (She was acquitted after arguing she had pointed her finger in the air and not directly at the president.) Denmark passed a new law outlawing “improper treatment” of religious texts after a series of incidents in recent years when Quran burnings sparked an angry response. A landmark trial began in May for two men accused of burning a Quran at a folk festival in front of an audience.

Far-right Danish-Swedish politician Rasmus Paludan burned a Quran in Stockholm in 2022.

Another controversy arrived in the U.K. last week during the Glastonbury music festival, after British duo Bob Vylan led chants of “Death, death to the IDF,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces. Police launched a criminal investigation into whether the statements constituted a hate crime. The band has said it doesn’t advocate the death of any group of people but that “we are for the dismantling of a violent military machine.”

Cases like Connolly’s are partly why the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance, have sharply criticized European governments for curbing free speech. The administration has also taken aim at European laws to police online content, making U.S. tech firms such as X responsible for ensuring certain types of harmful material aren’t published. The U.S. State Department has said such laws are leading to a “global censorship-industrial complex.”

Moderates in Europe say most forms of speech are still protected, and point out that the U.S. is also struggling to protect free speech, from both the left and right. They note President Trump and his administration have gone after speech they disapprove of, including detaining foreign students for protesting or writing op-eds and filing defamation and other suits against media organizations. But many moderates also concede that Europe might have gone too far.

‘Grossly offensive’

In recent years in Europe, the pendulum has “swung more to restrictions of free speech,” said David Nash, a professor at the University of Oxford who helped drive a successful campaign to remove Ireland’s blasphemy laws back in 2018. Nash said that social media not only acts as a vector for individuals to broadcast views but also reaches a range of people who could be potentially offended, creating a dilemma for European authorities.

British police made 12,183 arrests in 2023—an average of 33 a day—under laws that make it illegal to say something “grossly offensive” or share content of an “indecent, obscene or menacing character” via a public communications network—up by 58% compared with 2019.

A spokesperson for the National Police Chiefs’ Council said officers aren’t trying to “police political views” but to protect the public, adding that “in every decision we must balance the right to freedom of expression with the right to tackle crime.”

Critics say police struggle to define what is indecent or obscene. In the U.K., a woman was recently charged for having a bumper sticker with an expletive.

“It’s going to get a lot worse,” said Toby Young, the founder of the Free Speech Union, which funds the legal defense of people in several countries who are arrested over free-speech matters. His group’s paid membership has nearly doubled to 25,000 over the past year, with the money used to defend people like Hamit Coskun.

Hamit Coskun leaving Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London last month.

Coskun, an atheist who was born in Turkey, announced on social media in February that he would burn a Quran in front of the Turkish embassy to protest the government’s tilt to Islamism. After he set fire to the book and shouted “Islam is the religion of terrorists,” he was attacked by a knife-wielding man and a passerby. He was hospitalized, and then arrested.

It isn’t illegal to burn a religious text in the U.K. But a court in June found Coskun guilty of a “religiously motivated public disorder” offense and fined $325. In his ruling, the judge said Coskun’s actions led to disorder by provoking people to attack him—a decision critics said amounted to victim blaming. In his defense, Coskun asked the court to consider whether he would have been prosecuted for burning a Bible in front of Westminster.

A longtime human-rights campaigner, Peter Tatchell, was recently arrested by London police for holding a sign at a pro-Palestinian rally that criticized Israel for its Gaza campaign as well as Hamas for kidnapping, torturing and executing a 22-year-old who protested against the militant group in Gaza. He was told by officers that his sign represented “racially and religiously aggravated breach of the peace.”

Human-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell at a protest last year.

The European Convention on Human Rights, which underpins freedom of expression on the continent, states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression.” But it also states there are “conditions, restrictions or penalties.” While incitement to violence is illegal in the U.S., the bar is higher: It has to be a call for a specific and imminent act and not what a reasonable observer might judge to be hyperbole.

Disconnect

European and American views on free speech have been diverging since the 1960s, when the U.S. Supreme Court made a series of landmark rulings defending free speech. Europeans, meanwhile, had been moving in the other direction to curb extremist expression. In the background was a fundamental disconnect, said Eric Heinze, a professor of law at Queen Mary University of London.

“Americans saw Nazi Germany as the place that repressed speech,” he said. “Europeans tended to see Nazi Germany as a place that used speech in ways that ended up in a genocide.”

In 2019, Stephan Ernst, a neo-Nazi extremist, walked up to the house of Walter Lübcke, a moderate conservative politician known for his pro-immigration positions, and shot him in the head. Prosecutors deemed the murder a political assassination, which many blamed on the inflamed political debate on social media. In August 2020, demonstrators waving Q-Anon, American and Russian flags attempted to storm the Reichstag, home to the federal parliament.

Police escorted Stephan Ernst from a court hearing after the murder of politician Walter Lübcke in 2019.

Protesters in front of the Reichstag in August 2020.

German politicians responded by tightening up a little-known 1950s law that bans the slandering of politicians. It lowered the bar for the prosecution of insults against public officeholders—a crime punishable by up to five years in prison. Within years, a legal provision so obscure most Germans didn’t know it existed has become a widely used speech-policing tool.

Now NGOs scour the internet for instances of hate speech while German government ministers pay firms to report insulting comments against them. SoDone, an online service, promises “no more goosebumps when you open Twitter.”

Franziska Brandmann, SoDone’s founder, said the initial impulse for the company came from speaking with an academic who had stopped criticizing Russia’s war in Ukraine after being targeted by hate campaigns from pro-Kremlin accounts.

“If you believe in free speech, and people like her think about withdrawing from the public discourse because they are so heavily, systematically harassed and intimidated—then clearly something is going wrong,” said Brandmann.

In March last year, Stefan Willi Niehoff, a 64-year-old former soldier and retired truck driver, reposted an image he had seen shared on X that showed then-Economy Minister Robert Habeck with the words “Schwachkopf Professional,” which translates to “professional idiot” and was a take on the logo from cosmetics brand Schwarzkopf Professional. Then he forgot about it.

Months later, Niehoff was awakened by a ring at the door at 6:15 a.m. to find two plainclothes police officers demanding to search his home.

“At first I thought my son had been up to some mischief,” he said—then he realized that police were there for him. He handed over his tablet to the police.

Prosecutors later dropped the case about the Habeck post but prosecuted him for other material they found, including five separate retweets and one tweet in which he used Nazi-era imagery to comment on current events. The posts were all meant as satire, said Marcus Pretzell, Niehoff’s lawyer. For instance, after the Catholic Church called on voters to shun the far-right political party AfD, Pretzell posted an image of clerics giving a Hitler salute, which he meant as commentary on what he felt was the hypocrisy of the church.

A court in April fined Niehoff about $1,550. In June, an appeal court lowered the fine to about $971 but maintained the previous verdict on some counts. His lawyer has said Niehoff would again appeal the decision.

Niehoff at his computer.

“Actual threats [against politicians] should be investigated and punished but we can’t criminalize every quote below the level of an academic debate,” Pretzell said.

Habeck’s office filed 805 criminal complaints against insults or threats between September 2021 and August last year, according to government figures. German police say only a small percentage lead to prosecution, but had no specific figures. Right-wing parties also use the law to hound critics. A spokesman for Alice Weidel, co-chair of the AfD, said that she had filed fewer than 100 complaints against online commenters after voters alerted her office about the insulting posts.

Banter ban?

Britain’s crackdown on speech is particularly surprising given its role in pioneering Western democracy. British legislators are debating a new employment law dubbed the “banter ban,” which would hold employers responsible for offensive comments made within earshot of employees in the workplace. The government recently considered banning “legal but harmful” speech on social-media platforms, a plan abandoned over concerns that such demands to tech companies could jeopardize trade negotiations with the U.S.

The U.K. police are investigating an escalating number of “non-crime hate incidents,” where people can notify the police if someone says something that targets their “personal characteristics.” This is aimed at stamping out racist abuse or other harassment, but free-speech campaigners say it has been weaponized.

Those who claim to be a victim can report anyone for anything perceived to be hateful and don’t have to provide evidence of harm. Examples include a schoolchild investigated for calling a classmate a “retard” and a former police officer probed for making allegedly anti-transgender comments on Twitter. He later won his case in court.

The Free Speech Union calculated that there were 250,000 NCHIs recorded between 2014 and 2024—an average of 68 a day. In some cases, the alleged perpetrator’s name is recorded on police records, which could turn up in background checks and affect the person’s ability to get a job, the FSU says.

“Partly the system allows police chiefs to say something is being done, and also allows lower-down police officers faced with complaints about hurty speech to tell complainants that they’ve done something about it,” said Andrew Tettenborn, professor of commercial law at Swansea University. “They do seriously chill free speech.”

Write to Natasha Dangoor at [email protected], Bertrand Benoit at [email protected] and Max Colchester at [email protected]