preventing children’s access to porn – whether agreed with or not – has kind of been a presumed given

That’s entirely up to the parent.

were being held accountable on social media for hate speech

Free speech answers that, too. Expressing an opinion we disapprove of isn’t an exception to free speech: for that we can express our condemnation.

Your hate speech rhetoric is a conceit built on the falsehood that simply hiding all the publicly visible indications of a problem solves the problem. Evidently, it’s not working & is readily exploited to abuse other rights. Censorship doesn’t change opinion: people are naturally free to think as they want & no force can compel them to change their mind.

To quote someone else, the open exchange of ideas is valuable & necessary to facilitate minds to willingly change. Not needing to be suspicious of everyone hiding what they really think out of fear is valuable. Censorship powers are very tempting to abuse and the consequences of their abuse are terrible, therefore they should be strictly limited. Believing in free speech can just be understanding this stuff and having a bias against shutting people up as a go-to solution.

none of what has been mentioned is really some indication that UK is on the doorstep of V for Vendetta-like dystopia

Restricting private access to information while raising risk of identity fraud & abusing the rights of protesters with loose definitions of terrorism isn’t heading to your cartoonish idea of a dystopia?

Maybe think back to history about oppressive institutions & how we overthrew them. What were those critical ideas underpinning the liberal institutions that replaced them? Oh right: fundamental human rights to liberty such as free speech & freedom of conscience.

in reference to combating Hate Speech and cyber-bullying in Germany, which is a bit different is it not?

Nope

In 2015, a meme posted on Facebook falsely implied that Renate Künast, a prominent German politician, had said that every German should learn Turkish.

Künast asked Meta to delete the false quotes attributed to her.

In a landmark case last year, a German court ruled Meta had to remove all fake quotes attributed to Künast. Meta is appealing.

and

Last year David Bendels, a journalist, published a doctored photograph of Nancy Faeser, Germany’s interior minister, appearing to hold a sign saying Ich hasse die Meinungsfreiheit or “I hate freedom of opinion”. (The original photo, a reference to victims of Nazi atrocities, is shown above.) Such images are a dime a dozen on social media. Yet Ms Faeser seemed determined to prove Mr Bendels right. She filed a criminal complaint, and earlier this month a court handed Mr Bendels a seven-month suspended prison sentence, a hefty fine and an order to apologise.

Finally, hateful words are still words. Has this generation forgotten how to handle words?

Only cowards fear words. You have freedom of speech: use it.

“I Support Palestine Action” is not intolerance. Simply saying that publicly is an arrestable offense in the UK. They dropped from ‘Open’ to ‘Less Restrictive’ in the Global Expression Report, an outlier among the traditional Western countries. They’re not as bad as ‘roving bands of secret police’, but painting this as just a quest against intolerance is nonsense apologia.

I saw some news about it awhile back, and didn’t remember full details so was asking. Just going to delete the comment since its being taken the wrong way.