Social Media Posts: Penalties for Offences

Luke Taylor Excerpts

Monday 17th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[Luke Taylor (Sutton and Cheam) (LD)]

It is, as always, a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Roger.

The text of the petition makes specific reference to “posts on social media”, as if this modern medium is somehow separate from every form of speech that came before. Social media posts take seconds to write and publish, and then they are everywhere. They are seen by our parents, grandparents and kids, with no fact check and no filter. Terrifyingly, a 2025 Ofcom study found that three quarters of 18 to 24-year-olds use digital platforms and social media to get their news.

The sort of reach once available only to professional journalists, filtered through editors and media owners, is now available to anyone with a phone. We can post with a moment’s thought during our morning coffee break, with the same ease as world leaders with armies of speechwriters, fact checkers and lawyers to craft their statements. One impulsive tap on an app can land in the timelines of tens, thousands or millions of people.

Let us be honest: who has not posted online something they later regretted? I know I have, and I challenge anyone these days to have an unblemished record online. The incredible reach that modern social media has enabled, compared with the guardianship and control of legacy media sources for centuries, has rightly been compared with the unleashing of the evils of the world from Pandora’s box. We must recognise that attempting to reverse the exodus is as futile for us as it was for the Pandora of myth.

To keep with an historical allusion, the story of the sword of Damocles described how a single hair of a horse’s tail held a sword over the head of King Dionysius, threatening to take away all that he enjoyed as a king, without notice. A second’s misplaced rage, or a misjudged reaction to somebody else’s message, can cause the thread to break and the sword to fall, with the nationwide media sent to a person’s doorstep, their career and life torn apart. That is the reality of casting our thoughts into the social media forum.

The fragility of the risk cannot be used to diminish the impact, and hence the responsibility that must be held by users who can reach millions around the world in seconds. The ease of posting cannot be allowed to dilute the seriousness of the impact. I return to my earlier argument: I invite us to replace “posts on social media” in the petition with “words in a national newspaper” or “speech on national television”. Would there be the same uproar or calls for clemency if a journalist or TV presenter had urged their audience to set fire to hotels full of people? I suggest not.

In the case of Lucy Connolly, her post inciting violence against a hotel full of people, as riots raged throughout the country, was seen by more than 300,000 people in the three and a half hours before it was deleted. That is roughly the same number as the combined daily circulation of The Daily Telegraph and The Times newspapers. I cannot agree with treating social media differently from incendiary violence elsewhere. There were 9,000 followers and it was viewed more than 300,000 times in three and a half hours.

We cannot keep pretending that what happens online stays online. The digital world is now shaping how people think, speak and act, and the consequences are now impossible to ignore. The very power that social media holds is exactly why so many people wield it with such vigour.

Let us not forget that it is a nice little earner for some, too. The hon. Member for Great Yarmouth (Rupert Lowe) has earned over £40,000 from Twitter since his election, showing the huge potential of the site, and potentially why he is incentivised to defend so enthusiastically people’s right to say inflammatory and shocking things to drive engagement, clicks and views. The online world has become a place where hate speech—or, as the petition puts it, “opinion…speech”—is allowed to spread like wildfire. Too often, social media platforms shrug their shoulders and walk away from the responsibility of monitoring it or, worse, they actively encourage disinformation.

Twitter is the most obvious offender. I am told that, for those who still do, scrolling through Twitter feeds feels like stepping into the wild west. Abusive comments and dangerous posts are left to fester without consequence. A factual error is twisted and retold as the gospel truth before anyone has had time to draw breath. Communities are put at risk by conspiracies that proliferate like a virus.

Twitter must do far more to tackle the surge of hate speech that we see on our phones and tablets every single day. Since Musk took control of the company in 2022, Twitter has rolled back on safeguards designed to prevent misinformation and dangerous rhetoric. The same Elon Musk suggested that America should liberate the people of Britain and overthrow our democratically elected Government. Incidentally, the US customs and border protection guidelines for allowing non-citizens to enter the USA state that if an immigration officer knows or believes that someone would be entering the country to attempt to overthrow the US Government, they are inadmissible. If we applied that reasoning to Mr Musk’s next trip to our country, I wonder whether he might have complaints about his treatment. There is free speech, but not without consequences. This is a foreign billionaire, armed with his global megaphone, fanning the flames of division and calling for the overthrow of our democratically elected Government. We call that treason here.

We cannot allow tech oligarchs to set the rules for British society. Instead of allowing the world’s richest man to decide what toxic content floods national conversation, the Government must wake up and intervene. We Liberal Democrats call on the Minister to properly equip Ofcom to enforce tough regulations to clamp down on the spread of misinformation online. Online safety cannot rest solely on the shoulders of individual users, as algorithms push controversial content for views and shares. Legislation must be tightened to hold social media platforms accountable for the dangerous rhetoric they allow to thrive.

Social media is simply the latest chapter in humanity’s long history of communication, and vectors for incitement, from clay tablets to the printing press to broadcast news. Because it is so accessible, it arguably needs more accountability from its users and operators—not less, as the petition proposes.

Liberal Democrats exist to build and safeguard a fair, free and open society. We have always, and will always, stand up for freedom of speech. However, that does not mean no accountability for hate speech or speech that incites violence. Those who use violence, racist abuse or hate speech must face serious consequences. We do not support the suggestion in the petition that social media posts should be treated any differently from any other types of speech.