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It’s easy to take free speech for granted when it’s all you’ve known as an American — but look no further than the United Kingdom for a reminder of why our First Amendment is so important.
That’s where a 15-year-old boy was awakened by four West Midlands police officers early one morning this August, because his Facebook posts allegedly offended a local politician.
The case is a stark reminder to all Americans of just how important our rights are — and how even nations in the supposedly “free” world can devolve into dystopian censorship regimes without those protections.
A teen from Walsall identified as Fraser is a precocious activist and Reform UK supporter who has immersed himself in local politics, showing up to meetings and even door-knocking for his favorite politicians.
But snide comments he made about a local Conservative councillor landed him in the middle of a police investigation for harassment, malicious communications and even a hate crime.
Fraser posted an altered photo of Conservative councillor Simon Bennett with bunny ears and captioned it, “Nibble… nibble… crunch… crunch Can you hear it? That’s the sound of a rabbit devouring the last remaining shreds of Wolverhampton Conservatives’ credibility.”
He also criticized Bennett for wearing shorts and a T-shirt to a council meeting, then joked when Bennett showed up in a suit one day that at least he “was not looking like a rent boy,” slang for a male prostitute.
As a result, four cops in two police cruisers showed up at his door, arrested him, and seized his devices in front of his mother and neighbors, before they brought him to the station where they collected DNA, fingerprinted him, and questioned him.
The Free Speech Union (FSU), which has taken on Fraser’s case, received an email from the police saying it “is alleged that your client’s comments could be considered a hate crime offense.” The teen is back home but still is anxiously waiting to see if he will be charged by the Crown Prosecution Service with a crime.
“Perhaps the most depressing element [of his case] is just how familiar all of the facts are to people like us that are used to handling these cases,” FSU Legislative Affairs Director Sam Armstrong told The Post. “Broadly speaking, several thousand people a year are being arrested for, quote unquote, ‘offensive speech’ in the UK.”
Armstrong says that the FSU, which was only founded in 2020, has already handled 7,000 cases of censorship in the United Kingdom. And there have been more than 60,000 arrests for communications offenses in the UK from 2021 to 2025, according to civil liberties group Big Brother Watch.
“We think the UK has the highest number of speech arrests on Earth, including Russia and Belarus,” Armstrong said. He plans to help Fraser file a civil suit once the charges become clear.
The local police declined to comment on the case, citing police guidelines. The Post reached out to Bennett, who did not respond. The councillor told The Telegraph that the teen had “targeted” him “in a number of Facebook posts” and that the local council suggested “it best to report it to the police.” He has since claimed that Fraser’s jokes were part of a larger pattern of online harassment.
The case is so ridiculous it’s almost comical, but the implications are downright serious. Even countries that we consider to be our free-world peers can devolve into police states monitoring speech and persecuting citizens for their beliefs.
Here in the United States, we thankfully have the First Amendment — which Armstrong described as the “global gold standard” — standing between us and this nightmarish state, but our free speech is constantly under attack by activists seeking to stamp out “hate” and a political class looking to protect itself from criticism.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a US-based free speech advocacy group, has sued lawmakers and law enforcement here in the United States for everything from subpoenaing a Facebook commenter over a joke at the expense of a mayor, to banning offensive words during public comment at council meetings, and even jailing a Tennessee man over a meme.
The assaults on our speech rights only keep coming. Sarah McLaughlin, senior scholar of global expression at FIRE, says Americans need to stay vigilant, so cases like Fraser’s don’t hop the pond to the United States.
“I think it’s a warning sign for other democracies,” she said. “The First Amendment is truly the barrier between us and these kinds of arrests, police showing up on your door because they didn’t like what you tweeted.”