How the West Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Censorship
There’s a particular irony in writing about freedom of speech in 2026. Not because it’s dangerous… well, not yet, anyway. But because the very act of discussing it feels like shouting into a void that’s simultaneously monitored, categorised, and filed away for future reference. We’ve reached that delightful point in history where defending free expression makes you sound like either a dangerous radical or a tedious bore, depending on which side of the increasingly nonexistent middle you’re standing.
Let me start with a confession: I’m a British citizen who’s been living in Spain for eight years now. Which gives me the dubious privilege of watching two countries simultaneously descend into censorious madness, whilst enjoying Spanish sunshine and wondering if I’ve simply traded one form of authoritarian theatre for another. The UK, where I’m still technically from, has spent the better part of a decade refining the art of arresting people for being mean on the internet. Thirteen thousand, eight hundred arrests in 2023 alone for offensive online posts. That’s not a typo. That’s not hyperbole. That’s just… Tuesday.
But here’s the thing. We’re not special anymore. We’re not even leading the pack. The Americans have decided to join the party, and when America does authoritarianism, it does it with the same enthusiastic lack of self-awareness it brings to everything else.
The Land of the Free (Terms and Conditions Apply)
Let’s talk about what’s happening in the United States right now, because it’s both fascinating and terrifying in equal measure.
In early 2025, the Trump administration issued executive orders that essentially said: “You know that First Amendment thing? Yeah, that’s only for citizens now.” Non-citizens… students, activists, people who’ve built lives in America but haven’t got the right bit of paper… they can now be deported for saying the wrong thing. Specifically, for criticising Israel. Even more specifically, for expressing pro-Palestinian views.
I want you to sit with that for a moment. Not because I’m trying to make a political point about Israel and Palestine, that’s a different essay entirely, but because of what this represents. A government is now openly saying: “Your right to speak freely depends on your immigration status.”
As someone who’s lived as a foreign resident for eight years, this hits differently. I’ve got the luxury of EU citizenship, sure, but the principle is chilling. The idea that your right to express political opinions becomes conditional based on a bureaucratic status… that’s not a slope we’re slipping down. That’s a cliff we’ve already driven off.
The ACLU is up in arms. Federal courts are scrambling. A case in Minnesota just saw immigration agents temporarily restricted from targeting protesters. Over 140 members of Congress voted to advance impeachment articles partly on these grounds. This isn’t fringe stuff. This is mainstream American politics eating itself in real-time.
And the justification? National security, of course. It’s always national security. The most versatile excuse in the authoritarian playbook.
Meanwhile, Back in Blighty
The UK I left eight years ago was already showing signs of this disease. The UK of 2026 has gone fully symptomatic.
We’re the ones who inspired the phrase “free speech disaster” in global discourse. We’re the country where you can go to prison for a Facebook comment. Not a death threat. Not incitement to violence. Just… a comment someone found offensive.
From my vantage point in Spain, watching British news feels like observing a slow-motion car crash you narrowly avoided by moving house. A Swiss man got jail time for posting about gender. A German woman faced prosecution for insulting a rapist. Let that one sink in. She insulted a rapist, and the state decided she was the problem that needed addressing.
And now, in the UK, we’re considering an Islamophobia definition so broad that Hindu leaders are warning it could criminalise historical and ideological discussions. Because nothing says “free society” quite like making it illegal to discuss ideas that might upset someone.
The chilling effect isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s meteorological. I watch friends back home check their words three times before posting, conversations becoming self-censored performances of acceptable opinion. It’s one of the things I don’t miss.
The Spanish Perspective
Spain, to be fair, hasn’t quite reached British levels of speech policing. Yet. There’s still a Mediterranean temperament here that resists the Anglo-Saxon urge to regulate every utterance. People still have heated political arguments in bars without calling the police on each other.
But don’t mistake that for safety. Spain has its own history with censorship, its own tender spots, its own topics you learn not to discuss too loudly. The Catalan situation. Historical memory laws. The monarchy. You learn the boundaries through social osmosis rather than arrest statistics, which might actually be more insidious.
And Europe as a whole is moving in the same direction as Britain. The EU’s Digital Services Act, sold as protecting users, contains provisions that could easily be weaponised against speech. When you’re a British citizen living under EU jurisdiction, you get to enjoy the censorship impulses of both.
Lucky me.
The Global Contagion
This isn’t just a Western problem anymore. It’s gone viral.
Australia is drafting new hate speech laws. Freedom of expression globally has dropped 10% since 2012. Self-censorship is rising everywhere, that peculiar phenomenon where the government doesn’t even need to arrest you because you’ve already arrested yourself.
Over 150 journalists were assaulted in the US in 2025, with 30 arrested, mostly at protests. Think about that. The people whose literal job is to report on events are being prevented from doing so, often by the very state that’s supposed to protect press freedom.
University campuses, once the supposed bastions of free inquiry, have become ideological minefields. Fifty-three percent of American students say the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is too hard to discuss openly. Acceptance of disruptive tactics like shouting down speakers has hit record highs. We’re not debating ideas anymore. We’re preventing them from being voiced in the first place.
Living abroad gives you a certain perspective on this. You see patterns more clearly when you’re not immersed in a single country’s particular brand of madness. And the pattern is unmistakable: every Western democracy is finding its own path to the same destination. We’re all building cages. We’re just decorating them differently.
The Narcissism of Small Differences
Here’s where it gets properly absurd.
Both sides of the political spectrum are cheerfully dismantling free speech, they’ve just got different targets. The right wants to ban criticism of Israel, discussions of race and gender, anything that makes them uncomfortable about history or power. The left wants to ban “hate speech,” which increasingly means anything that challenges progressive orthodoxy about identity, religion, or social issues.
They’re both wielding the same cudgel. They’ve just painted it different colours.
The Swiss man jailed for a comment about gender… that’s progressive censorship. The pro-Palestinian activists being deported from America… that’s conservative censorship. The British arrests for offensive posts cover the full spectrum of wrongthink, from far-right racism to gender-critical feminism to criticism of Islam.
We’ve achieved a kind of bipartisan unity, finally. Both sides have agreed that free speech is dangerous and needs to be controlled. They just can’t agree on which speech.
From Spain, I watch both the UK and wider Europe play this game. The British Left wants to arrest people for transphobia. The Spanish right wants to criminalise Catalan independence advocacy. The American right wants to deport people for criticising Israel. The European left wants to prosecute climate “disinformation.”
Different teams. Same sport. Everyone loses.
The Security Theatre Excuse
Every authoritarian measure comes wrapped in the same packaging: security.
National security. Public safety. Protecting vulnerable communities. Preventing radicalisation. Maintaining social cohesion.
These aren’t inherently bad goals. But they’re being used to justify measures that would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. We’re trading freedom for the promise of safety, and getting neither.
The federal appeals court reviewing the Homeland Security policies got it right when they argued that preventing non-citizens from speaking doesn’t just harm those individuals… it prevents US citizens from hearing diverse viewpoints. Free speech isn’t just about the speaker. It’s about the listener. It’s about the marketplace of ideas that only functions when all the stalls are open.
When you deport people for their political views, you’re not protecting the country. You’re impoverishing it.
And as someone who lives in a country that’s not my birth country, I’m acutely aware of how this logic extends. If America can deport non-citizens for speech, what’s to stop any country? Spain could decide British expats are too mouthy about Spanish politics. The UK could revoke citizenship from naturalised Britons who say the wrong thing. We’ve already seen citizenship stripped for terrorism… how long before it’s stripped for opinions?
The University Problem
Universities deserve special mention because they’re supposed to be the guardians of free inquiry. They’re failing spectacularly.
When 53% of students can’t openly discuss a major geopolitical conflict, something’s broken. When shouting down speakers becomes an acceptable form of protest, we’ve confused censorship with activism.
I’m not talking about protecting hate speech or giving platforms to genuine extremists. I’m talking about the basic ability to have difficult conversations about complex topics without fear of social or institutional punishment.
The students engaging in these tactics genuinely believe they’re on the right side of history. They see themselves as fighting oppression by silencing oppressors. But they’re not reading the room. The tools they’re using to shut down speech they don’t like are the exact same tools being used by governments to shut down speech they don’t like.
You can’t champion deplatforming when it suits you and then cry foul when the state deplatforms your allies. The principle either matters or it doesn’t.
What We’re Actually Losing
Free speech isn’t about protecting popular opinions. Popular opinions don’t need protecting. It’s about protecting the unpopular, the uncomfortable, the ideas that make people angry or upset or afraid.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: every single advance in human rights, every progressive cause, every challenge to unjust power… started as an unpopular opinion. Started as something that upset people. Started as speech that authorities wanted to suppress.
Women’s suffrage was unpopular speech. The abolition of slavery was unpopular speech. Gay rights were unpopular speech. Civil rights were unpopular speech.
The people advocating for these causes were arrested, silenced, censored, and worse. And the justification was always the same: social cohesion, public morality, protecting vulnerable communities from dangerous ideas.
When we criminalise offensive speech, when we deport people for political opinions, when we make it impossible to have difficult conversations… we’re not protecting anyone. We’re just ensuring that the next necessary, transformative idea won’t get heard until it’s too late.
The Autocracy Playbook
What’s happening in the US and Europe isn’t an accident. It’s not even particularly original. We’re watching the authoritarian playbook being executed in real-time:
First, you create a class of people without full rights. Non-citizens. Immigrants. People on visas.
Then, you restrict what they can say, justified by security or social cohesion.
Then, you expand those restrictions to citizens, because the infrastructure is already in place and the public has been conditioned to accept it.
Then, you watch as people self-censor, as the chilling effect spreads, as the window of acceptable discourse narrows.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. It’s just history repeating itself with different accents.
Living in Spain, I’m watching the UK execute this playbook whilst being vaguely aware that Spain has its own version running in the background. The Americans are doing it with characteristic bombast. The Europeans are doing it with bureaucratic efficiency. Same destination, different routes.
The AI Wild Card
And now, just to make things more interesting, we’re throwing AI into the mix. Algorithms that can monitor speech at scale. Content moderation systems that make decisions faster than any human. Regulation that could either protect free expression or codify its suppression into the digital infrastructure itself.
The tech companies are already censoring at government’s request. The surveillance capabilities already exist. We’re one legislative session away from automated thought-policing.
The EU is particularly keen on this approach. Regulate the platforms, they say. Make them responsible for content. Which sounds reasonable until you realise it means every social media company becomes a de facto speech police, algorithmically enforcing whatever the current acceptable discourse happens to be.
What Actually Happens Next
I wish I could end this with a rousing call to action, a clear path forward, five easy steps to reclaim free speech.
But I can’t, because there isn’t one.
The trajectory is clear. Freedom of expression is declining. Self-censorship is rising. Governments across the political spectrum are finding new and creative ways to control what people can say. And vast swathes of the public are cheering them on, as long as it’s the other side being silenced.
What happens next depends on whether enough people wake up to the fact that free speech isn’t a left or right issue. It’s a foundational issue. Without it, everything else crumbles.
The deportations in America. The arrests in Britain. The laws in Australia. The regulations in Europe. The self-censorship everywhere. These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re symptoms of a global shift away from liberal democracy and toward something darker and more controlled.
And the really terrifying bit? Most people don’t even notice. They’re too busy making sure their own speech is sufficiently sanitised, their own opinions sufficiently mainstream, their own thoughts sufficiently safe.
We’ve learned to love our censorship. We’ve convinced ourselves it’s protection rather than oppression. We’ve decided that some ideas are too dangerous to be spoken, some questions too uncomfortable to be asked, some people too wrong to be heard.
And once you’ve made that decision, you’ve already lost. You just haven’t realised it yet.
From my perch in Spain, watching the UK spiral and America implode and Europe regulate, I sometimes wonder if I escaped anything at all. Or if I’ve just got a better view of the fire spreading.
Either way, it’s coming for all of us. The only question is whether we’ll still be allowed to talk about it when it arrives.
The views expressed here are mine, obviously. They’re also, increasingly, the kind of views that get you into trouble. Which rather proves the point, doesn’t it?
Until Next Time
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