<p>London&rsquo;s first Muslim Mayor is anything but conventional. As I wrote in a previous article, he came under fire in June for his decision to ban &ldquo;body shaming&rdquo; advertisements. Many viewed this ban as censorship. ;</p>
<p>Now, Mayor Sadiq Khan has promised to fund an &ldquo;online hate crime hub&rdquo; to criminalize &ldquo;trolls&rdquo; who &ldquo;target individuals and communities.&rdquo; Khan has already invested millions of taxpayer pounds in the project to police online speech. ;</p>
<p>&ldquo;The purpose of this program is to strengthen the police and community response to this growing crime type,&rdquo; stated Khan. &ldquo;[It will] involve a dedicated police team&rdquo; supported by &ldquo;volunteers.&rdquo; ;</p>
<p>The ;mayor&rsquo;s office for policing and crime (MOPAC) is currently looking for a ;&ldquo;program manager,&rdquo; to head the initiative. ;The program manager, earning a salary of £;52,455, will work with social media providers and a handful of police employees to filter and identify online hate crimes, to locate criminals, and to use &#8220;appropriate force.&rdquo; ;</p>
<p>In May, the EU announced that Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, and YouTube had &ldquo;committed&rdquo; to working more closely with national governments and law enforcement agencies to &ldquo;criminalize&rdquo; instances of &ldquo;illegal hate speech&rdquo; on the Internet. ;</p>
<p>London&rsquo;s Metropolitan police force (MET) says it welcomes the extra work and encourages offended Internet users to report hate crimes. ;&ldquo;The Metropolitan police service is committed to working with our partners, including the mayor, to tackle all types of hate crime including offences committed online,&rdquo; stated a MET spokesperson. ;&ldquo;By establishing this unit, we are sending a strong message to those who use online forums to spread hate that their actions will not be tolerated. The Metropolitan police service continues to have a zero-tolerance approach to all forms of hate crime.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Section 127 of the <em>Communications Act of 2003</em> is increasingly used to catch Internet trolls, and convictions have increased ten-fold during the past ten years. ;The Ministry of Justice reports that over 1,200 individuals were found guilty of this sort of offense in 2015 &#8211; compared to only 143 in 2004.</p>
<p><em>The Communications Act</em> criminalizes &ldquo;using [a] public electronic communications network in order to cause annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety,&rdquo; and can result in a 6-month prison sentence or a fine of up to £;5,000. ;As you can imagine, what constitutes as &ldquo;needless anxiety&rdquo; is up to interpretation. ;</p>
<p>&ldquo;Pure rants, very childish [people online] are increasingly criminalized, and as a result of that the police are becoming more and more involved in controlling our morality,&rdquo; explains Frank Furedi, a sociology professor at the University of Kent. ;&ldquo;[The police are] almost playing the role of a moral police. And instead of dealing with real crime in the offline world, [the police] find it&#8217;s very convenient to &lsquo;send the message&rsquo; in the online world because it&rsquo;s a relatively easy thing to do.&rdquo;</p>
<p><strong>Author&rsquo;s Note:</strong> If someone has to think twice before speaking &ndash; or before typing &ndash; I would argue that his or her freedom of speech has become compromised. Mayor Khan is a dangerous man, and it bothers me that few people seem to realize that. First he went after advertising and now he&#8217;s going after online speech; how much longer before he pushes for full censorship?</p>