March 16, 2025
In an epic courtroom showdown today, far-right activist Tommy Robinson, aka Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was found not guilty of a terrorism charge by a jury at Westminster Magistrates’ Court.
The controversial charge relates to an incident in July, when Robinson was stopped by border counter-terrorism police as he was entering the UK through the Channel Tunnel. Prosecutors said he refused to provide his phone PIN number to officers, in what they later deemed a form of obstruction and cited as grounds for their case against him under the Terrorism Act 2000. Speaking today, Judge Michael Gledhill ruled that the border police who stopped Robinson had a right to do so, as Robinson had legally entered UK territory at the time. However, he also stated that in refusing to provide the PIN number, Robinson had done nothing more than to exercise his “right to privacy”, and acquitted him on that basis.
Robinson’s case, now concluded, has shone a spotlight on Britain’s recent crackdown on free speech rights, especially online and in the context of social media platforms. Under the country’s draconian laws, a single Facebook post, tweet, or Instagram update can land you in jail, and a rash of uploaded TikToks can net you a million-pound libel fine, no matter your intent. As more people find their voices in social media, where the power of an individual to shape the conversation far exceeds any one mainstream outlet, so does the British state step up its tactics of repression – from creative contempt rulings to trumped-up terrorism charges. In what is becoming an increasingly familiar pattern, we saw this latest outrageous use of terrorism laws against Robinson in response to him exercising his basic right to privacy in the digital age, and by extension, the free speech rights that stem from there.
Elucidating the Events: How Robinson went from Border Stop to Terrorism Charge
It all began in July 2025. Robinson, returning to the UK from abroad in his Bentley, was stopped by Border Force officers who suspected he might be trying to bring drugs or other illicit substances into the country at Dover’s port. During a “reasonable grounds” search of Robinson, officers at the port’s Channel Control Unit demanded to search Robinson’s phone, citing Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000 as their legal cover. “Not a chance, bruv,” Robinson quipped, denying officers his phone PIN.
The allegation, laid against Robinson as a terror offence and outlined in a Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) public statement on September 13, 2025, claimed that Robinson, by failing to reveal his PIN to UK police, “interfered with the operation of the terrorism Act 2000.” Schedule 7 of the act states that police have a duty to stop and search any individuals as they enter the country to prevent the spread of both terrorism and other serious criminality. A follow-up investigation, including analysis of phone data downloaded from Robinson’s device, took place, but it is not known whether Robinson’s phone was encrypted or otherwise secure. Officers who stopped Robinson at Dover’s port subsequently submitted a police intelligence report to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which laid the charge against him following a nine-month investigation.
In denying his PIN, Robinson was therefore technically obstructing officers and “resisting or willfully obstructing a constable in the execution of his duty”, which under Section 176 of the Police Act is itself a form of “summary offense”, in the spirit of the Terrorism Act 2000. The prosecutors’ case, built as it was around Robinson’s alleged breach of Section 176 of the Police Act 1996, placed special emphasis on the contents of Robinson’s phone, about which they requested a great deal of discovery from Robinson’s defense.
Prosecutors also referenced past criminal cases against Robinson, such as his recent contempt of court ruling or an old “ethnic violence” case dating back 18 years, but were ultimately hinging their argument around the contents of Robinson’s phone and what could therefore be reasonably expected of Robinson with respect to that data, namely, the PIN. The potential obstruction of Section 176 of the Police Act is significant here, given how that law was used to track down murderers and gang members following their Facebook posts in the 2010s. The suggestion was clear: Robinson’s phone contained incriminating evidence or live updates to be shared through his active social media accounts, evidence of wrongdoing and/or intent that was “necessary for the prevention of acts of terrorism” and which a reasonable citizen would therefore have no basis in law or reason for obstructing. The prosecution even cited Robinson’s previous conviction for contempt of court over a Facebook post as grounds for suspecting he may have had similarly “intent to obstruct” UK counter-terrorism police at the time of his Channel Tunnel stop.
Robinson’s defense, however, argued that he was acting in the interests of “privacy”, the bestowal and retention of which in the digital age is both central to an individual’s free speech rights and has been specifically cited by the courts as grounds for exercising personal discretion and even obstructing overreaching authorities at a time of reasonable suspicion.As Elon Musk, who has been backing Robinson since reinstating him on X after years of banishments, tweeted in response to today’s news:“Free speech wins again.”
Musk’s own platform, despite facing a vocal ban in the UK itself, has served as a refuge for some of the country’s most prominent free speech voices in the social media era. A number of these voices, such as Anthony Ahmed and Olivia Moore, were among a number of “anti-terror” raids on October 25, during which a dozen or so activists and YouTubers were detained and charged by police or, in some cases, reportedly questioned, for their online activity.
History Repeats: The Case Files on Robinson’s Free Speech Battles
Online, it’s not necessarily the nature of what you say, but who’s listening, who can criminalize, who will prosecute. And that has repeatedly been the state for Robinson, whether its contempt of court, defamatory libel, or even dumb luck. A more notorious example of this free speech “trap” for Robinson, however, came in a high-profile 2018 case, when Robinson was jailed for nine months for contempt of court after live-streaming a Facebook video about a grooming gang trial in Leeds from outside the courtroom itself. Broadcast live on Robinson’s Facebook page and reportedly seen by two million people by the end of the trial, Robinson’s video was shown to have “the potential to cause serious or imminent prejudice to an active trial” and was ordered as a result to pay £200,000 in court costs. Still, Robinson’s appeal was denied, and he spent the following three years in and out of jail over the case, even spending some time on remand for the next contempt case, a libel ruling in 2021 against Syrian schoolboy Jamal Hijazi. In that case, Robinson shared multiple videos on Facebook claiming that Hijazi had attacked English girls at his school in 2019. Hijazi successfully sued Robinson, who was ordered by the court to pay £100,000 in damages and costs, having been found guilty of defamation by a jury.
Though Robinson and his team had by then argued that the posts in question had been shared on “reasonable grounds” to drive the social media conversation on the broader issue of mass non-white immigration into British schools at the time, both the share and Robinson’s commentary on those posts were decried as “defamatory” and damaging to Hijazi’s family. Hijazi’s case was in fact one of three cases where the court ruled on Robinson’s use of social media and either called on him to make posts or the use of such posts as evidence and the basis of contempt rulings. In the same trial, Robinson’s channel was issued with a Facebook injunction over a Robinson video “alleging that another court employee was involved in grooming children”. It was also the same year in which Robinson was given an 18-month jail sentence for contempt after screening his feature-length film Silenced, a documentary that repeated the same “libels” against Hijazi, at a Trafalgar Square rally and subsequently uploading it to Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms.
The ruling, appealed and upheld, had found that Robinson’s reading of a statement on live television and “posting it on social media” had been an “extremely serious breach of court order” and “embarrassed and undermined” the entire court’s ability to do its job.The same held true earlier this year, when Robinson was arrested in August 2025 for three seemingly innocuous posts on X, and, again, after Robinson had questioned a MailOnline journalist on live television the following month for allegedly “harassing” him by posting photos of his home on social media. In both cases, Robinson was simply exercising his right to free speech. In one case, social media posts were the direct cause. In another, the line between journalism and harassment in the online era was rendered moot as Robinson was found by an industry jury to have “breached” that very same journalist’s data protection rights by sharing details online and thereby risking “serious harm.” Each of these cases serves to illustrate a dangerous pattern, in which the British government is weaponizing social media both as a means of gathering “evidence” against its most vocal critics (Facebook), but also as a trap. Share an inflammatory post, they’ll arrest you. Ban a dissident, Elon Musk will gladly step in. This is how the Internet works, yet under the UK government’s ideological surveillance and censorship regime, there is nowhere left for UK activists and pundits to safely post at all.
The Threat Looming: Britain’s Descent into Digital Authoritarianism
As we are learning the hard way, social media doesn’t lie, but laws do, and the British government’s latest laws are suffocating. In 2023, the British government’s Online Safety Act passed in the House of Commons with all-party support, backed by a cadre of crossbench peers at the Lords. The bill will mandate a “regulatory regime for online safety”, which, in practice, means that the government’s arm’s-length regulatory authority, Ofcom, will be able to fine tech firms and social media platforms billions of pounds if they fail to block, ban, or otherwise delete “harmful” content from their platforms. The definition of such “harm”, of course, is broad, and in an environment in which anyone posting anything online risks being criminally investigated and/or prosecuted, it’s a safe bet that it will cover absolutely everything. In practice, the law and its fallout have made it easier for platforms to collude with the government by way of gag clauses, because their executives will literally lose their lives if the fail to police broad enough in good faith. We’ve already seen how it plays out, for instance, when five UK pensioners were arrested over “inciting” far-right violence with WhatsApp posts during the 2024 riots. We’ve even seen priests questioned and sued for defamation over Bible quotes shared on Twitter. This is not the only way the bill is bad, either. The very fact that the powers have mandated so-called real-time surveillance of social media communications in real time has set the stage for total state control of public discourse, as recently as last year did Keir Starmer order up “anti-hate” policing squads to monitor social media accounts in “real-time”, flagging social media posts by live streams, live police dispatches, and eventually mass arrests as well. So far this year, a UKISD undercover troll was jailed for six months for anti-Muslim online posts, another jailed for seven months for anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim posts, and a third jailed for 27 weeks for saying he was “happy” about the migrant riots in Rotherham in April.
Echoing the “Thought Police” from Orwell’s 1984, it seems a bad taste in the mouth and about 20 years early to draw parallels between the state of British social media discourse and “thoughtcrime”, but it’s really not that far-fetched when you look at what’s happening.
Echoing Robinson’s repeated and systematic bans from every platform until Musk’s own X reinstated him and over 300,000 users in the UK in 2023, an effective tech-government symbiosis is therefore in place and operational, at least in the form of selective repression. Big Brother has outsourced his censorship apparatus to Big Tech, and the proof is in the pudding: As more people find their voices in social media, where the power of an individual to shape the conversation far exceeds any one mainstream outlet, so does the British state step up its tactics of repression – from creative contempt rulings to trumped-up terrorism charges. In what is becoming an increasingly familiar pattern, we saw this latest outrageous use of terrorism laws against Robinson in response to him exercising his basic right to privacy in the digital age, and by extension, the free speech rights that stem from there.
Keep Fighting, Freedom Is a Team Sport
The good news is that Tommy Robinson walked free today, for now. The bad news is that it took a week, a nine-month investigation, and an international witch-hunt to get there. For Robinson, this is all a bit of a routine by now. For everyone else? It’s a reminder: That social media is not free; that your Facebook page is no longer yours; and that what the government can do to Tommy Robinson, they can do to you. So, if nothing else, Robinson’s vindication by a jury today is a tiny little victory against a terrifying tide of totalitarianism, creeping slowly and surely over this island nation. What this means in practice is this: If Robinson can do it, so can you, so long as you can stay out of jail, off X, and away from platforms that hate free speech.
The real takeaway here is what’s been staring us in the face for years: No one is safe until everyone is. That’s why there’s freedom of speech. It’s not protection; it’s preemption. It’s the start of the fight, not the end. It’s stopping hate, not speech: hate groups and speech, sure, but the real threat out there isn’t protesters, it’s politicians. Keep fighting: support the platforms that support free speech. Stand by the people. Help them. Expose the laws. Fight them. We owe it to ourselves; to Tommy; and to the future, which is already right now.
We can do it. The best is yet to be. Parler News will keep you posted. Until then, #KeepFighting Tommy.
References
BBC News. “Tommy Robinson not guilty of terror offence after not giving police…”. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd9ken44n0eo (Accessed November 4, 2025).
Reuters. “UK anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson thanks Musk after…” https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-anti-islam-activist-tommy-robinson-thanks-musk-after-being-cleared-terrorism-2025-11-04/ (Accessed November 4, 2025).
Sky News. “Tommy Robinson found not guilty of terror offence for failing to give…” https://news.sky.com/story/tommy-robinson-found-not-guilty-of-terror-offence-for-failing-to-give-police-access-to-his-phone-at-channel-tunnel-13463595 (Accessed November 4, 2025).
Elon Musk on X. “Tommy Robinson – Elon Musk on X”. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1966901549851984366 (Accessed November 4, 2025).
BBC News. “Tommy Robinson guilty over Facebook broadcast.” https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-48887440 (Accessed November 4, 2025).
BBC News. “Tommy Robinson loses Jamal Hijazi libel case.” https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-57930901 (Accessed November 4, 2025).
The Guardian. “Tommy Robinson loses libel case brought by Syrian schoolboy.” https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jul/22/tommy-robinson-loses-libel-case-brought-by-syrian-schoolboy (Accessed November 4, 2025).
BBC News. “Tommy Robinson jailed for contempt of court.” https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c704eedkqkvo (Accessed November 4, 2025).
Neil Wilby. “’Tommy Robinson’ reveals further arrest – over social media posts…”. https://neilwilby.com/2025/08/05/tommy-robinson-reveals-further-arrest-over-social-media-posts-on-x/ (Accessed November 4, 2025).
The Guardian. “Tommy Robinson denies harassing two MailOnline journalists.” https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/03/tommy-robinson-denies-harassing-two-mailonline-journalists (Accessed November 4, 2025).
GOV.UK. “Online Safety Act: explainer.” https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/online-safety-act-explainer/online-safety-act-explainer (Accessed November 4, 2025).
BBC News. “They were arrested for posting on social media during the riots.” https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr548zdmz3jo (Accessed November 4, 2025).
WIRED. “Elon Musk Has Turned His Eye to the UK.” https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-attention-on-uk-tommy-robinson/ (Accessed November 4, 2025).
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