At first glance, you might think Emily Darlington, Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, had simply woken up on the wrong side of a particularly Orwellian bed. During a recent parliamentary inquisition — sorry, hearing — on social media, misinformation, and algorithms, Darlington floated an idea so alarmingly daft that even the Ministry of Truth would have blushed.
Her proposal? That public criticism of the UK’s speech laws by Elon Musk and US Vice President JD Vance might amount to “foreign interference.” That’s right. According to Darlington’s logic, if an American so much as questions the Online Safety Act, they might as well be stuffing ballot boxes or hacking government servers.
“Should we consider the current JD Vance, Elon Musk campaign against the UK — particularly against the government and the Prime Minister — and this push about free speech and the misrepresentation of our free speech laws as foreign interference?” she asked, in a sentence so brazenly bonkers it should come with its own government warning label.
This wasn’t a discussion about cyberattacks or deepfake election manipulation. No, Darlington was talking about speech. Dissent. Opinions. The sort of thing democracies used to be quite fond of.
Now, under the UK’s freshly unwrapped National Security Act 2023, “foreign interference” can land you 14 years in prison and an unlimited fine. It used to be that such punishments were reserved for actual enemies of the state — spies, saboteurs. Now, apparently, tweeting that Britain’s Online Safety Act is a bad idea could get you tossed into the Tower.
One would expect a room full of educated adults to respond to this with a firm, resounding no. Instead, we got caution, hedging, and a heavy whiff of complicity.
Dr. Eirliani Abdul Rahman, a Senior Fellow at Georgetown and one-time Twitter Trust and Safety Council member, refused to outright dismiss the idea that Musk or Vance might be causing harm.
“I think there is some grounds there that, because, for example, we can show there’s harm,” she said. “For example, with the riots, he said, Elon Musk said that this is, the civil war is inevitable… So in terms of, say, it’s not causal, but you can show by timestamps what happened…”
In other words: we can’t prove anything, but if you squint hard enough and ignore causality, it sort of looks incriminating. Like blaming a pothole on climate change because both happened on a Tuesday.
And then came the pièce de surveillance: “You should have every right to legislate it the way you want because you’re protecting your country, your own sovereignty.”
Ah yes, sovereignty. The catch-all cloak for every anti-democratic impulse. Want to censor Americans? Sovereignty. Want to monitor thought crimes with AI? Sovereignty. Want to classify criticism as sedition? You guessed it: sovereign self-care.
Enter Lyric Jain, CEO of the surveillance tech firm Logically, a company so deep in the government’s pockets it probably answers emails in MI5 lingo. Asked about Musk and Vance, Jain did the classic political sidestep; say nothing about specifics and pivot to platitudes about safety.
“Each country does have to make a determination on what its sensitivities are,” he said, before launching into a baffling sales pitch for behavioral surveillance. “Looking at behaviors can be quite technical. It can be quite clinical. We don’t need to get into, really, debates around freedom of expression.”
Speech is messy. Feelings get hurt. People shout. But behavior? Behavior can be measured. Modeled. Monetized.
Committee Chair Chi Onwurah tried to strike a more moderate tone. But in her attempt to balance the scales, she simply reinforced the core problem: a belief that speech online is no different than shouting in a town square.
“We also support the UK’s sovereignty as a sovereign nation and the laws that apply offline now apply online,” she said.
Who’s really interfering in the UK’s democratic processes? Is it Musk and Vance, tweeting criticisms of its free speech record? Or is it the British MPs and bureaucrats using taxpayer money to build a surveillance and speech regime that treats criticism as criminal?
Is it the foreigners with opinions, or the homegrown censors writing laws with more loopholes than a magician’s contract?
This latest stunt by Parliament is less about security and more about silencing. It’s a state quietly muttering, “We believe in freedom,” while reaching for the duct tape.
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