The recent
incarceration of Russell Brand has been widely portrayed in the British media
as the culmination of a prolonged public controversy. Regardless of personal
opinions about Brand or views on the verdict, a broader issue emerges that
transcends the specifics of this case. The central concern is the evolving
political and legal context in which guilt is determined in public life, and
the degree to which foundational democratic principles are being supplanted by
a sequence of accusation, media amplification, corporate sanction, and only
subsequently, judicial process.
The
implications of the Brand case extend well beyond the individual. In the past
decade, a form of extrajudicial punishment has emerged that can be described as
trial by social media. Newspapers and broadcasters publish allegations, then
social-media platforms rapidly disseminate them. Employers, publishers,
advertisers, and technology companies impose economic sanctions, while
parliamentary committees and politicians intervene. Commentators frequently
call for institutions to sever ties with the accused as a demonstration of
virtue. Frequently, these actions occur before any evidence is presented to a
jury. This process inverts the traditional sequence associated with the rule of
law: rather than investigation, charge, trial, verdict, and punishment, society
is increasingly encouraged to accept accusation, publicity, punishment, and
only later, potentially years afterwards, a trial. Such developments pose a
significant threat to democratic rights.
The
presumption of innocence
The presumption of innocence is often characterised as an outdated legal technicality, relevant only within the courtroom and irrelevant to broader society. In fact, it represents a fundamental historical principle: the state bears the burden of proving its case against the individual, who is not required to establish innocence before a potentially prejudiced public. British contempt law restrictions were partly instituted in recognition of this issue. Limiting prejudicial publication during active proceedings aims not to shield defendants from criticism, but to safeguard the integrity of the trial process. Jurors are expected to determine guilt based on admissible evidence presented in court, not on media headlines, edited television segments, or viral social media posts encountered before jury service. Digital communication has subjected this principle to unprecedented strain. Information is now instantly replicable across jurisdictions and remains accessible indefinitely. While a judge may instruct a jury to disregard inadmissible material, such directions cannot eliminate the effects of prolonged publicity from collective memory.
This transformation is both quantitative and qualitative. Traditional mass media wielded significant influence, yet publication was largely confined to identifiable newspapers and television networks, each subject to certain legal and editorial constraints. Social media introduces a vast apparatus for instantaneous content reproduction. A newspaper investigation can evolve into a television discussion, followed by thousands of clips, memes, posts, podcasts, reaction videos, and search results. Allegations become embedded in an individual's permanent digital identity. The core issue is not the existence of public opinion on criminal cases, which has always existed, but the emergence of an industrial system that translates accusations into reputational and economic penalties before judicial determination. This explains the importance of corporate intervention. A private technology corporation taking action against someone's ability to publish or earn an income is not equivalent to a jury returning a criminal verdict. The evidential standards differ, the procedures differ, and the opportunities for appeal may differ radically. Yet precisely this distinction has increasingly disappeared from public discussion. In the social-media age, corporations occupy positions once unimaginable for private enterprises. A handful of enormous companies control major infrastructures through which political argument, journalism, culture and entertainment circulate. Their moderation and monetisation decisions therefore have consequences that extend far beyond ordinary commercial relationships.
The risks are heightened when corporate decisions align with political pressures. Although the formal distinction between government and private platforms remains significant, democratic oversight is essential because decisions affecting public expression often arise from relationships more complex than direct government censorship. This issue has gained further prominence with the establishment of the British online-safety regulatory framework. The Online Safety Act 2023 imposes statutory obligations on social-media companies and search services regarding illegal content and child protection. According to government guidance, platforms have borne legal responsibilities for illegal content since 17 March 2025, and Ofcom holds enforcement powers that include investigations, substantial financial penalties, and, in the most severe cases of non-compliance, applications to the courts to block services.This legislation must be represented accurately. Ofcom states that its role is to ensure regulated companies implement systems to protect users from harms identified in the legislation, and its published guidance requires providers to assess illegal-content risks and establish appropriate safeguards. The political concern is not that Ofcom officials directly determine permissible online opinions, but rather that the state has established an increasingly expansive regulatory relationship with private corporations whose infrastructures mediate a substantial portion of modern public communication. This development warrants thorough democratic scrutiny, not complacency.
From
Fleet Street to the algorithm
Trial by
media is not new. British newspapers have damaged reputations for generations.
Sensational reporting, moral panics, and politically motivated campaigns
predate platforms like Facebook, X, YouTube, and TikTok. The primary change
lies in the technological and economic infrastructure. While the traditional
press produced newspapers on a daily cycle, digital platforms continuously
monitor audience reactions and disseminate content through automated
recommendation systems. Controversy acquires economic value because attention
itself is monetised. Consequently, an accusation involving a celebrity becomes
more than a news story; it generates content that can be perpetually reproduced
across a vast ecosystem of professional journalism, amateur commentary, and
algorithmically distributed material.
The
commercial incentives are evident. Moral outrage sustains audience engagement,
with each new allegation prompting additional cycles of reaction. Even denials
generate further content, and every development can be repurposed into new
programs, articles, or videos. As a result, capitalism has industrialised
denunciation. However, this does not imply that allegations are inherently
false due to media profit motives, nor does it suggest that individuals
alleging abuse should remain silent. The fundamental point is that neither
commercial profitability nor viral popularity should determine criminal guilt.
The
lessons of previous media disasters
British history offers numerous warnings against disregarding this distinction. Sir Cliff Richard is a prominent example of the consequences of turning a police investigation into a televised spectacle. Police searched his home in connection with an allegation, and the event was broadcast widely. Richard was neither arrested nor charged, and his successful privacy case against the BBC illustrated the profound harm publicity can inflict before any judicial determination. The Metropolitan Police investigation known as Operation Midland serves as another cautionary example. Extraordinary allegations regarding an alleged Westminster abuse network were entertained and publicised, resulting in severe consequences for those accused. The eventual collapse of these allegations and the subsequent conviction of accuser Carl Beech demonstrated the significant costs incurred when institutional credulity and public certainty surpass evidentiary standards.The intention is not to suggest direct equivalence among these cases, as they differ substantially in their facts, investigations, and legal outcomes. The common thread is the caution against conflating accusation with adjudication.This warning remains relevant even when an individual is ultimately convicted. The principle of a fair trial derives its significance from its universality. Democratic rights must not depend on the prior sympathies of journalists, politicians, or the public. Rights that apply only to popular defendants are not genuine
The prosecution of Kevin Spacey exemplifies another aspect of this issue. Although his eventual acquittal in the London proceedings resolved the criminal charges before the jury, it could not restore his professional and reputational standing, which years of allegations and publicity had already damaged. This distinction is of considerable importance. The current media environment generates consequences that extend beyond judicial decisions: employment opportunities vanish, contracts are terminated, and access to cultural work is lost. Search engines permanently associate individuals' names with allegations. Friends and professional associates may fear that maintaining contact could themselves become grounds for denunciation. Certain institutional responses may be justified, as organisations have obligations to employees and the public, particularly when credible allegations concern immediate safety. However, precaution and conviction are not synonymous. Failing to recognise this distinction encourages institutions to act primarily based on reputational considerations. The central question shifts from “What has been proven?” to “What will happen to us if we are seen not to punish?” This represents an extraordinarily dangerous foundation for public life.
The controversies surrounding Lucy Letby's conviction show that the argument cannot be reduced to protecting celebrities accused of wrongdoing. Questions regarding media certainty are significant both before and after conviction. Once a high-profile criminal case becomes embedded in a dominant public narrative, challenging any part of it becomes extremely difficult. Journalists may have invested years in the story. Institutions have defended their actions through it. Politicians have commented on it. Documentaries, podcasts, and books have been commissioned around it. The financial and institutional interests generated by a major criminal narrative do not dissipate when the jury retires. This does not imply that any specific conviction is necessarily unsafe; only the appropriate judicial and review processes can determine that. Rather, it establishes a more fundamental point: journalism must retain the capacity to investigate potential miscarriages of justice without treating criticism of an established narrative as morally illegitimate.
The historic campaigns surrounding miscarriages of justice, from the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four onwards, demonstrate the importance of precisely such scepticism. The disorders following the killings in Southport in 2024 revealed another dimension of this transformation. Social-media communication became closely linked to debates about disorder, misinformation, criminal prosecution, and the legitimate boundaries of expression. No socialist can object to prosecuting genuine incitement to violence under the law. Freedom of speech has never entailed freedom from responsibility for criminal conduct. However, hateful or irresponsible expression should not erase the distinction between speech, incitement, and physical action. A broader risk is normalising exceptional procedures whenever politicians declare an emergency. Governments facing social crises often assert that extraordinary conditions necessitate extraordinary powers. However, powers created to address unpopular targets rarely remain limited to those groups. Legal and technological mechanisms established today may be employed in entirely different political contexts in the future. The working class should therefore evaluate every extension of state power not solely from the perspective of the government's current target, but from the perspective of potential future applications.
Who
possesses the microphone?
Advocates of social-media denunciation often characterise it as the democratisation of justice. From this perspective, established institutions historically silenced victims, while social networks now enable ordinary individuals to speak. This claim has some validity. Digital communication has undoubtedly allowed individuals to publish allegations and testimony without prior approval from newspaper editors or broadcasting executives. However, the theoretical ability to post content does not equate to possessing equal social power. The primary mechanisms of amplification remain profoundly unequal. Billionaire-owned media corporations employ professional newsrooms. Technology corporations control platforms through which vast audiences communicate. Governments possess press offices, police forces, and regulatory powers. Celebrities and corporations can purchase professional public-relations services. Ordinary workers possess nothing comparable. The worker subjected to harassment by a manager, victimised by an employer or injured because a corporation ignored safety measures does not ordinarily receive days of national broadcasting attention. Thousands of social grievances disappear almost completely from public discussion. What therefore presents itself as democratisation can conceal another hierarchy: everyone may speak, but only certain institutions possess the power to ensure that millions hear them.
The class
content of democratic rights
For
Marxists, democratic rights cannot be treated as gifts a benevolent state
bestows on the population. They emerged historically through bitter struggles
against arbitrary authority. The English Revolution challenged monarchical
absolutism and generated unprecedented debates concerning sovereignty,
representation and popular rights. The Levellers' agitation demanded political
equality beyond the objectives of much of Parliament's propertied leadership.
Later struggles for freedom of the press, trade-union organisation and
universal suffrage were inseparable from the emergence of an increasingly
self-conscious working class.
Chartism transformed democratic demands into a mass social movement. None of these struggles abolished class rule, but they established rights upon which subsequent working-class political and social organisation depended. This historical experience makes the fashionable dismissal of civil liberties particularly reactionary. The presumption of innocence, freedom of speech, public trials and procedural protections are sometimes derided as merely “bourgeois rights”. But precisely because workers lack wealth and institutional power, they require protection against state and corporate arbitrariness more urgently than society's privileged layers. A millionaire can employ solicitors, barristers, reputation managers and political contacts. A worker hauled before a court or dismissed because of an online accusation usually cannot. One of the most politically damaging developments of recent years has been the tendency within affluent sections of the middle class to portray elementary principles of due process as obstacles to justice. The reasoning is fundamentally wrong. Abuse does not cease to be abuse merely because evidence must be demonstrated. Nor is somebody “silenced” because an allegation is investigated rather than automatically accepted as fact.
A serious response to sexual violence, exploitation or harassment requires properly funded investigative institutions, access to legal support, social provision for victims and judicial proceedings capable of establishing facts. Replacing those things with social-media denunciation does not strengthen the oppressed. It replaces legal proof with social power. And once social power decides guilt, the advantage inevitably passes to those possessing newspapers, money, political connections, corporate platforms and influence. The underlying transformation cannot therefore be understood simply as a decline in journalistic standards. Media organisations and technology platforms operate within definite social relations. Their overriding economic purpose is not to discover truth but to accumulate profit. Enormous corporate interests concentrate ownership, while relationships with governments, advertisers, and financial markets shape the environment in which editorial decisions are made. The attention economy intensifies these tendencies because outrage itself has become monetisable. Measured in clicks, views, subscriptions and advertising impressions, indignation can become a commodity. Complex evidence develops slowly; accusation travels instantly. Qualification is difficult to package; certainty generates reaction. A judicial proceeding may last months, while social-media judgement requires seconds. The platform's economic logic therefore collides directly with the deliberative requirements of justice. A jury must listen. An algorithm must engage. Confusing the two is catastrophic.
War,
austerity and democratic repression
These
developments acquire their full significance only when placed within the wider
crisis of capitalist democracy. Across Europe, governments confronting
deepening economic inequality, military confrontation, collapsing public
services and mounting social opposition are simultaneously expanding mechanisms
for regulating political communication. The relationship is not accidental. A
ruling elite preparing increasingly unpopular policies cannot depend
indefinitely on popular consent. It therefore seeks ways to manage opposition,
shape information, and delegitimise dissent. Measures introduced under
apparently unobjectionable objectives can create legal and technological
infrastructures with much broader applications.
The Online
Safety Act 2023 itself illustrates the scale of the regulatory transformation.
The Act received Royal Assent on 26 October 2023 and imposes new legal duties
upon user-to-user and search services. Official guidance states that providers
must implement systems and processes to address illegal content, while Ofcom
establishes codes and has enforcement powers. The Act also formally recognises
rights considerations. Government guidance states that Ofcom must consider
users' rights when developing measures and that providers themselves have
corresponding duties regarding users' rights. These provisions make it
especially important that criticism remain precise. The political concern is
not established by simply labelling all online regulation “censorship”. It
concerns how regulatory powers operate in practice, how definitions develop,
how corporate platforms respond to compliance incentives, and whether
mechanisms designed to target genuinely illegal material can contribute to
broader restrictions on lawful political expression. Such questions should be
investigated, not assumed.
Because allegations against a famous and controversial individual evoke strong reactions, democratic principles matter. Defending due process for an accused person does not require admiration for that person. It does not require endorsing his politics, lifestyle, previous statements or public persona. And it certainly does not require indifference towards people alleging serious abuse. It requires only recognition of a foundational principle: a criminal allegation has to be proved. If that principle is abandoned whenever an accused person becomes unpopular, it ceases to exist as a principle. The socialist movement has historically defended democratic rights not because courts under capitalism are politically neutral institutions, but because limitations upon arbitrary state power provide essential conditions in which the working class can organise and fight. The same principle applies today to corporate power. A society in which banks can economically exclude individuals, platforms can erase audiences, employers can dismiss workers and media corporations can pronounce guilt before trial is not becoming more democratic because those institutions are technically private. Private concentrations of power can be as destructive of freedom as state bureaucracy, particularly when the two increasingly interact.
None of this diminishes the suffering caused by sexual violence or other serious crimes. Genuine accusations must be investigated. Evidence must be obtained. Witnesses must be heard and treated with dignity. Prosecutors must make decisions based on the evidence. Defendants must have access to the case against them and the opportunity to challenge it. Juries must determine guilt according to admissible evidence and the legal standard of proof. These are not bureaucratic obstacles standing between victims and justice. They are justice. Without them, society has only competing assertions backed by unequal amounts of money, publicity, and institutional influence. The answer to failures of the criminal-justice system is therefore not to replace courts with newspapers, parliamentary committees or technology companies. It is to fight for a genuinely democratic judicial system, adequately funded legal representation and independent investigation, while defending freedom of expression and the presumption of innocence.
The
working class must defend democratic rights.
Ultimately, democratic rights cannot be safely entrusted to those whose social power increasingly depends on restricting them. The media corporations will not dismantle the profitable machinery of sensationalism. Technology monopolies will not voluntarily surrender their enormous power over communication. Governments will not renounce regulatory powers simply because those powers might someday be abused. Defending democratic rights therefore requires a social constituency whose interests fundamentally oppose arbitrary power. That constituency is the international working class. Workers require freedom of speech to organise politically. They require freedom of association to build organisations independent of employers and governments. They require the presumption of innocence and due process because they lack the money to insulate themselves against arbitrary prosecution. They require an independent press because the dominant media overwhelmingly articulates the interests and assumptions of the privileged layers of society. The struggle against arbitrary state and corporate power is consequently inseparable from the struggle against the capitalist social order that concentrates both economic wealth and control over communication in extraordinarily few hands. Trial by social media has reached maturity because the technological foundations of mass communication have developed far more rapidly than democratic control over them. Humanity has communications technology that gives billions of people unprecedented access to information, while ownership of the most important infrastructure remains concentrated in private corporations.
That contradiction cannot be resolved by demanding still greater power for billionaires to police their platforms, nor by handing governments unlimited authority over digital communication. It requires bringing the technological resources upon which modern social communication depends under genuine democratic control. The central principle must therefore remain uncompromising. An accusation is not a conviction. Popularity is not evidence. Virality is not proof. Corporate punishment is not due process. A parliamentary demand is not a judicial verdict. The rights won through centuries of struggle remain indispensable precisely because political reaction repeatedly presents their destruction as progress. A society that abandons the presumption of innocence in the name of protecting victims will ultimately protect neither victims nor defendants. A society that lets corporations decide who may participate in public life will not produce democratic speech. And a society accustomed to seeing punishment precede proof is being prepared for forms of political repression extending far beyond the sensational celebrity cases through which those methods have been normalised. The defence of democratic rights must therefore be taken out of the hands of media monopolies, technology corporations, and the capitalist state. It must become a conscious political struggle of the working class itself.
Bibliography
and further reading
Legislation
and official material
Contempt of
Court Act 1981. UK Public General Act 1981 c.49.
Online
Safety Act 2023. UK Public General Act 2023 c.50. The official legislation
database provides the statutory text and records subsequent amendments. [legislation.gov.uk]
Department
for Science, Innovation and Technology, Online Safety Act: Explainer. The
government's account outlines the Act's scope, platform duties and Ofcom's
regulatory responsibilities. [gov.uk]
Ofcom,
Illegal Content Duties under the Online Safety Act, updated 25 June 2026.
Particularly useful for distinguishing the actual statutory compliance regime
from broader political arguments about censorship. [ofcom.org.uk]
Ofcom,
Online Safety. Current regulatory material and guidance relating to
implementation. [ofcom.org.uk]
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liberties, justice and the state
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