Don’t cry for him, Sir Keir. Argentina’s iconoclastic president, Javier Milei, has a pequeño memo for Downing Street, and it is not about long standing Argentine claims to the Falkland Islands. It has to do with the British government’s incipient crackdown on social media expression, some of which is increasingly being branded with insufficient consideration as “extremist.” Mr. Milei, never shy about speaking his mind, is miffed. 

“Just look at what is happening in England,” he said at a conference last week. “Since the socialists came to power, they are putting people in jail for posting on social networks.” He added that “while other countries propose censorship, we propose freedom of expression.”

Britain’s Labor government was quick to lay the blame for rioting around the country earlier this month, which followed a deadly knife attack at Southport, on social media misinformation. At one point the prime minister, Keir Starmer, got into a highly-publicized spat (online, naturally) with the owner of the social media platform X, Elon Musk.

Sir Keir promised that rioters would face “the full force of the law” and that justice would be delivered swiftly, but in the rush to judgment mistakes are being made. In one instance, a 53-year-old woman with no prior criminal history was sentenced to more than a year in prison over a remark about a mosque she made on Facebook — despite the prosecution’s stating that the comment did not constitute a serious threat.

Of the more than 700 arrests in Britain made this month, only 32 reportedly relate to online incitement. There is now, though, a shift toward the possibility of penalizing people for inciting hate more generally. That is where the issue of censorship starts to rear its head, rankling free speech defenders such as Mr. Milei.

He is not the only one to suggest that leaders like Sir Keir are missing their marks by obsessively focusing on the perceived root causes of illegal migration. Studying the motivators for people to flee what have been described by the Wall Street Journal as impoverished, violent hellholes does not fix the problem any more than scapegoating the internet. 

Britain, however, is rapidly moving in the latter direction. The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, now says that she intends to crack down on anyone who “pushes harmful and hateful beliefs” and that she will kickstart a project that aims to “tackle the threat posed by extremist ideologies.”

The Home Office says that it will attempt to assess the rise of both “Islamist” and far-right extremism in the United Kingdom in addition to “wider ideological trends” that could include misogyny or a fixation on violence.

Since the riots abated, hundreds more illegals have alighted on British shores, with many of the asylum seekers expected to be housed in modern hotels such as Holiday Inn Express — where there is sometimes no room at the inn for paying guests.