As Britain’s political and media class begins painfully adjusting to the realities of a world in which Britain is leaving the European Union, a lesser-noticed consequence of the split could be a flowering of free speech.
Among the many other consequences of jettisoning the bureaucracy of Brussels and the power of European courts include the chance to scrap speech restrictions stifling Britain.
Foremost among the laws is the so-called Right to Be Forgotten, enacted by EU Directive C-131/12.
A forthcoming online speech police, announced just weeks ago by the EU Commission, also looks unlikely to have jurisdiction over the British internet.
The Right to be Forgotten rule grants disgruntled people and companies the ability to scrub stories they dislike from the internet if they can convince Google the information therein is “excessive” or “irrelevant”.
Opaque rules mean that the search engine does not have to disclose who makes requests to remove pages, and provide only oblique hints about which results may have been removed.
Stories which have been pulled include a Daily Telegraph report on a woman imprisoned for running a prostitution ring, reports on Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik, benefits fraud and even news of a murder arrest.
Google alone says that in the first year of the rule it acted on more than 250,000 requests. Other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo must also abide by the rules.
Campaigners, including the Index on Censorship, have called the regime “deeply problematic”, “flabby” and lacking in transparency.
The second measure which the UK will be able to dodge thanks to the Brexit vote is the so-called “code of conduct” announced just last month.
Without consulting any member countries or voters, the European Commission announced a new deal with Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft and YouTube to scrub contentious comments.
The tech giants committed to getting rid of posts falling foul of the policy within 24 hours.
The policy gave networks themselves the ability to determine what must go, while also forcing them to make decisions more quickly than ever.
Free speech groups dubbed the measures “state censorship” and predicted a “chilling effect” on expression across Europe’s half-billion citizens.
But the looming departure of the UK from the bloc means that there is little incentive for the tech companies to spend time and money enforcing an arduous extra standard on 65 million people.
The UK’s existing, robust laws protecting against hate crime will remain in force, leaving most users to post unharried by self-appointed speech enforcers, and unable to wipe away and inconvenient truths.