Words have consequences – the era of the keyboard warrior may soon be coming to an end.

Recent events in the United Kingdom under the new premiership of the Labour Party’s Sir Keir Starmer have thrown the role of online rabble rousers into clear focus, with substantial prison sentences being handed out to those found guilty of encouraging unrest on social media.

 It all started when a lone individual, a 17-year-old autistic British Citizen of Rwandan descent, went berserk on a killing spree in Southport, Merseyside on July 29th 2024.

 The accused, Axel Rudakubana, for as yet unknown reasons, allegedly entered a Taylor Swift themed kiddies’ dance class in the town, stabbing eleven young children and two adults. He is charged with killing three of the children and seriously injuring several of the other victims.

Misinformation online

 Very soon after the attack, far right-wing political activists and uninformed keyboard warriors took to their computers and phones to spread disinformation about the religious leanings of the accused murderer, claiming that he was a Muslim and that the attack was motivated as a fanatical religious terror incident. This has since turned out to be entirely untrue.

If ever there was a case for online comments being anonymised and cloaked by using Urban-VPN.com this is it – but the miscreants never tried to hide their identity and spread blatant falsehoods without ever fact-checking or researching anything before posting their messages of hate.

 Even though the posts contained completely untrue content, many people took those assertions at face value and before you know it, religious hatred and unrest across the UK exploded into riots and attacks on mosques and budget hotels hosting asylum seekers.

 Starmer, the recently elected UK prime minister, took swift action in having rioters arrested, fast-tracked through the courts and stiff prison sentences handed down. It was easy to find rioters guilty as footage of the unrest was plastered all over social media, and looters often didn’t even bother to wear face masks. Many were arrested from their homes within hours of the disorder.

 Crucially, some of those who hadn’t even attended riots were imprisoned for spreading misinformation under hate-crime laws, and the two men featured in the linked BBC article above respectively received sentences of 38 months and 20 months in prison.

 People who backed the rioters, many of a far-right wing and racist persuasion, were up in arms saying that now one could be jailed in the UK for free speech. Those taking the opposite political view argue that it isn’t ‘free speech’ to simply state that a person who has killed three children did so for religious fanatical reasons and encouraging others to go attack mosques. There are those who would defend a person’s right to free speech, so long as that opinion doesn’t cause violence and hatred, and what they’re saying is at least true.

In short, everyone’s entitled to an opinion, but if you extend that opinion to representing it as fact – then encouraging people to riot as a result – you can be held responsible under hate crime laws. Words now have consequences, in public, in a bar somewhere and / or  online, so throwaway comments on social media could cost you a criminal conviction and loss of your livelihood.

 Whether you think such strong government action is ‘fair’ rather depends on your politics; but one thing is for sure. Be careful what you say and which images you post online, especially if the images are AI synthographs created to tell an untruth.

Social media platforms’ responsibilities

 There are now tech gurus and thought leaders who feel that democracies may soon have had enough of billionaires like Elon Musk and Zuckerberg making huge profits out of publishing their users’ opinions on social media and causing hatred to spread, whether that’s through online bullying or simple racial hatred.

As soon as these platforms themselves receive hefty fines for allowing their users to post such things, with potential jail sentences for senior social media managers as well as the individual user, organisations like Meta and X (formerly Twitter) will almost certainly clamp down on the bile that they currently allow.

Using a VPN to guard your own privacy

 The other worry about this development in individual responsibility for what’s said online is that if your socials are hacked, you might not even be aware. The first time you find out about it might be when two burly policemen come to arrest you at 5am for something you didn’t know you ‘published’.

 Fortunately, protecting your cyber-security, especially when travelling away from home, using a virtual private network (VPN) – is easy and free. It might be an extremely sensible precaution, especially if you are a political activist of any persuasion, as someone is likely to want to hack your devices and then ‘dox’ you (downloading all your computer’s files and publishing them all over the internet).

 A VPN works by a small executable piece of software that ensures a connection via an intermediary server before you connect to the online target service. So if you’re logging on to Facebook via your phone’s browser, the VPN server connects to the platform, as opposed to your device doing so directly.

The advantages to this are several, but crucially it means that your connection is encrypted, so your identity and location are cloaked. If a hacker was looking for you to either steal financial information or hack your social passwords, they would not be able to identify you, and move on to target someone else.

Not only do VPN servers encrypt and cloak your connection, but they also tend to carry advanced malware protection facilities. This is a bit like virus protection on steroids, because if any malware or phishing attempt is detected by the VPN, it disconnects you from whatever internet connection you currently use before any harm can be done.

 In summary

 It seems like a new era is being entered in terms of people’s online presence and the consequences of trolling, bullying, hate speech and misinformation will soon be actionable with fines and prison sentences fast becoming a reality.

A new form of harassment is obvious to predict – hack someone’s social accounts and then start posting hate-fuelled content willy-nilly until the cops knock at the victim’s door. It might be easy to subsequently prove one’s innocence, but it’s still a nasty shock for the victim, and they could lose friends and even be shunned by work colleagues as a result.

 Whether you’re an online influencer, maybe run a small business or you’re a regular employee, it’s going to be more important than ever to keep your devices safe from opportunist mischief makers or politicos with an axe to grind.

Using a VPN is free and offers many advantages including saving money on online purchases, access to overseas streaming platforms, sometimes faster internet connections, all while protecting your online privacy and reputation.