The U.K. has sadly become a combination of the movies “1984” and “Minority Report.” It’s perfectly understandable for police departments to want to try and prevent crimes from being carried out. But, when those same police departments begin possibly going after people for social media posts in an effort to stop crimes that haven’t or might not have happened, the situation becomes a little “big brother-y.”
Police in the U.K. are reportedly going to “launch Twitter bots that will predict where hate crimes will take place after Brexit deadline day, according to The Daily Mail.
Notice how they said these hate crimes, that haven’t even happened and might not ever happen, “will take place.” How do they know?
Anyway, this program will supposedly monitor Twitter for posts that are “deemed antagonistic over religion, ethnicity or race” and use the location of the person who sent out the tweet to determine where a hate crime could possibly occur.
This is what happens when you treat your entire citizenry like terrorists. It allows for the government and, subsequently, police departments to take as many liberties as they want with your liberties.
You could post something that most people would agree is just a criticism of a certain topic. But, as long as the government and/or the police feel that your words don't fit their narrative, they can arbitrarily claim you’re the perpetrator — or potential perpetrator — of a hate crime.
I’ll just put it bluntly. The government and the majority of police departments in the U.K. are becoming really creepy.
The thing that worries me is the use of the term “early intervention” in the Daily Mail’s article. It doesn’t mention what that exactly means. Will people be interrogated and/or arrested for Twitter posts they deem harmful? Does it just mean an increased police presence in the area where a lot of tweets concerning a specific topic were posted?
If this “early intervention” pertains more to my first question, then police in the U.K. are becoming more and more like the authorities in “Minority Report” who go after people for crimes they haven’t yet committed. And, the landscape will also be reminiscent of the “Thought Police” in the classic dystopian novel “1984.”
Let’s hope “early intervention” means the latter of my two questions will be in effect. That’s a better way to police, and I only needed common sense to tell me that.