I'm American, but I moved to the UK about 13 years ago. Been living and working here since then.

Over the last few years, there's been a significant increase in a feeling by a large part of the UK citizenry that the government is overbearing in what kinds of speech it's willing to punish. I frequently hear, "You can go to prison for a politically incorrect tweet these days!"

Now if that's true, this is definitely an issue worth being concerned about. It's my belief that you shouldn't be punished by the government for just saying something other people don't like. That's not to say you can just say ANYTHING, but if you say something like, I don't know, "I think women are stupid" or "I think asians aren't very good at driving", there shouldn't be any legal action at all for something like that.

So I did some looking yesterday, googled around, and almost all cases of someone going to prison for a tweet, it wasn't things as harmless as that, it was usually people who could be said to be inciting some kind of actual violence. One of the most prominent examples, someone made a racist tweet about immigrants and included the line "Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care."

I couldn't find an example of someone going to prison for a tweet that didn't include some kind of actually violent rhetoric.

So... is this concern about free speech in the UK legitimate? Is the UK government genuinely overstepping its bounds and not allowing speech that we absolutely should allow? Can you give some examples?