United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer claimed on Monday that his government, who has arrested its citizens over social media posts, is “not censoring anyone.”
Starmer disputed that his government censors any form of free speech, including online speech, in response to a reporter’s question to President Donald Trump on whether he is concerned about the British government censoring his social media site, Truth Social. He argued that the only online restrictions in the U.K. are aimed at preventing children and teenagers from accessing sites that encourage suicide.
“We’re not censoring anyone,” Starmer said. “We’ve got some measures that are there to protect children, in particular from sites like suicide sites, we’ve had too many cases in the United Kingdom of young children taking their own lives and when you look through their social media, they’ve been accessing some sites which talk about suicide and encouraging, if you like, children down that road and that is what we want to stop. Nothing about censoring free speech. This country is proud [to have] free speech in this country, we’ve had it for a very long time and we’re very, very proud of it.”
“We will protect [free speech] forever, but at the same time, I personally feel very strongly that we should protect our young teenagers, and that’s what it usually is, from things like suicide sites and that’s not a free speech issue. I see that as a child protection issue,” the prime minister continued.
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The U.K. passed the Online Safety Act in 2023, which regulates what is defined as hate speech, harmful content and misinformation.
Police in the U.K. made an average of over 30 arrests per day in 2023 for online communications that were deemed “offensive,” which amounted to over 12,000 arrests throughout the year, the European Parliament reported in April 2025. In response to riots that broke out in the summer of 2024, the U.K. implemented several digital speech laws that regulate speech.
The U.K. also threatened to arrest and extradite U.S. citizens who made any online statements that could allegedly cause violence, according to CBS Austin. A British army veteran was arrested in August 2022 for denouncing LGBTQ and transgender activists online, which authorities said caused somebody “anxiety.”
More than a dozen British citizens were jailed in August 2024 for allegedly causing “unrest” on social media while two citizens were sentenced to over a year in prison for stirring up “racial hatred” online, the BBC reported.
British law enforcement had made similar arrests and fined its own citizens over so-called hate speech at protests and for praying in restrictive zones. Adam Smith-Connor, a military veteran and father, got arrested and later convicted in the U.K. for silently praying within a “buffer zone” surrounding an abortion clinic, causing him to pay 9,000 euros in prosecution fees.
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