To some in the U.K., the criticisms from the American right over arrests of people for hate speech seem hypocritical, given President Trump’s attacks on those who disagree with him.

Britain was on a knife edge when Lucy Connolly, a mother and former nanny, tapped out an inflammatory 51-word post on social media a year ago, calling for “all” hotels that house asylum seekers to be set on fire. “If that makes me a racist, so be it,” she added, a postscript that did nothing to spare her the wrath of the country’s courts.

Her post was viewed 310,000 times. Now serving a 31-month prison sentence for inciting racial hatred, Ms. Connolly has become a charged symbol in a debate over whether Britain is suppressing free speech. Last month, an appeals court refused to reduce her sentence, drawing angry protests from her defenders, mainly on the political right.

Ms. Connolly’s arrest came during a fevered period after the killing of three young girls by a British son of Rwandan migrants, which ignited anti-immigrant riots across the country. She is one of thousands of people arrested in Britain each year for sending or posting offensive messages, which can include those that are “indecent or grossly offensive” if they are intended to cause distress to the recipient.

Critics, including Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk, accuse Britain of backsliding in the age of social media. They point to a thicket of laws, some old, some new, combined with overly zealous policing, and a perception, on the right and the left, that law enforcement is biased against their points of view.

Britain, they say, is restricting speech in ways that affect “not just the British,” as Mr. Vance put it in February in an Oval Office meeting with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, “but also affect American technology companies and, by extension, American citizens.”

Mr. Starmer gives no ground when asked to respond to Mr. Vance’s claim that “free speech, I fear, is in retreat.”

“We’ve had free speech in the United Kingdom for a very long time, hundreds of years,” the prime minister said in an interview with The New York Times in March. “But there are exceptions to free speech — pedophiles and terrorists are two of them — and I have no qualms about that.”

Striking a balance between free speech and protecting children from sexual predators or preventing acts of violence is hardly an unorthodox approach. Such limitations exist in the United States, where the First Amendment has long enshrined a more absolutist view of free speech rights than in Britain.

Yet Britain finds itself in the cross-hairs of a broader American assault on European values. President Trump and his proxies have targeted Europe for what they claim is systematic infringement of civil liberties, particularly targeted at conservatives, whether it is Germany restricting the far-right Alternative for Germany party or the European Union regulating platforms like Mr. Musk’s X.

Nowhere do these charges land with a bigger thud than in Britain. It is the home of Speakers’ Corner at Hyde Park, where Karl Marx and George Orwell once tested the boundaries of free speech. But it is also a country that has long taken a more qualified view of speech rights than its former colony. Privacy rights are more zealously guarded, while the threshold for proving libel or defamation is lower.

On Friday, Mr. Vance plans to meet David Lammy, the foreign secretary, during a visit to Britain that will include a family vacation in the Cotswolds region, west of London. Whether the vice president will raise these concerns again is not clear; his office said they would discuss “a variety of topics pertaining to the U.S.-U.K. relationship.”

To many in Britain, the Trump administration’s criticisms are hypocritical, given its record of punishing universities and detaining individual students over pro-Palestinian speech, suing TV broadcasters for unwelcome news coverage, or scrutinizing private comments made by civil servants for anti-Trump bias.

“If ever the pot called the kettle black, it is what Trump and Vance are doing,” said Jonathan Sumption, a retired British Supreme Court justice, who himself criticized an early draft of the new Online Safety Act, which imposes requirements on providers to regulate internet content for children, for being vague and overly broad about removing harmful content from the web.

Despite the odd misstep in writing legislation, Mr. Sumption argued, Britain had set the balance in the right place — and certainly in a better place than the more freewheeling United States, where he noted, “there’s no limit on the availability of pornography to children on the internet” in many states. Britain’s law requires service providers to prohibit access to pornography to people below the age of 18.

“You’ve got to look at this in the round,” he said. “There is a really serious problem of the effect of the internet on young people.”

Legal scholars point out that some of the laws now under a spotlight, like the Public Order Act under which Ms. Connelly was prosecuted and the Malicious Communications Act, have been on the statute books for decades.

They are attracting renewed scrutiny because of the rise of social media, which has amplified personal opinions and rewards inflammatory rhetoric. With the passage of the Online Safety Act in 2023, the biggest platforms, like X, also face new legal liabilities.

All of this has coincided with a more combative political environment, in which free speech is used as a cudgel. In the past, said Gavin Phillipson, a professor of law at the University of Bristol, “there were a lot of comedians and journalists who talked about free speech.”

“What is different is that it has become a mainstream debate,” he continued. “It has become more sharply polarized, and it is used as a way of attacking one’s political opponents.”

Critics contend that the laws have failed to keep pace with digital technology. They also argue that since the Labour government came into power last year, the police and the courts have pursued people more aggressively for comments that are offensive, but fall short of being illegal acts, such as inciting violence. Mr. Starmer had been in office for a few weeks when the riots broke out, fueled by viral far-right disinformation online.

Ms. Connolly will serve only 40 percent of her sentence in prison. Mr. Sumption argues that her conviction was entirely legitimate under Britain’s longstanding laws against threatening language intended to incite hatred and violence: “If she had stood on a soap box and urged people to burn an asylum hotel, that would be seen as a violation of the peace,” he said.

But her defenders say she should not have been convicted of any crime. “It’s not just the existence of all these laws, none of which would survive a First Amendment challenge,” said Toby Young, director of Free Speech Union, an advocacy group in London that campaigns for speech rights. “It’s also that the police have begun to move much more zealously in investigating people for breaching these laws.”

Mr. Young, a journalist and a member of the House of Lords, said, “Free speech is in worse shape in the U.K. now than it has been, probably since the Second World War.” He said he welcomed the criticism from Mr. Vance and others, adding, “Sir Keir Starmer should sit up and take notice.”

Others contend that the United States is a pernicious influence. Britain, they say, is being swept into bitter American social debates, like the one over abortion rights, which are far less divisive in Britain than on the other side of the Atlantic.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference in February, Mr. Vance raised the case of Adam Smith-Connor, a physiotherapist convicted of breaking the law when he prayed silently outside an abortion clinic in Bournemouth in 2022.

Sian Norris, a journalist who has written about the expansion of American anti-abortion groups into Europe, said critics were willfully confusing a British law that requires maintaining a safe-access buffer zone of 150 meters, roughly 500 feet, around clinics with the basic right to protest abortion.

“You can have an anti-abortion protest outside Paddington Station,” Ms. Norris said. “It’s just about not doing it right outside a clinic. It’s about a woman’s right to health care.”

Debates over the rights of anti-abortion protesters to rally near abortion clinics have raged in the United States as well. In 2024, the Supreme Court refused to take up two cases seeking to eliminate buffer zones around clinics.

For all the rancor, some argue that free speech laws in Britain faithfully reflect public opinion. Polls show that while most Britons endorse free expression, they have little tolerance for racist or hateful speech. A huge majority of people opposed last summer’s riots, believed that social media acted as an accelerant and supported the authorities’ tough response.

“Most people in Britain are balancers,” said Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a research organization in London. “They are quite free-speech authoritarian while believing they are libertarian.”

Those crosscurrents are reflected in the laws. The Online Safety Act has drawn challenges not just from X but also from the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia. It says the law’s requirement that social-media platforms verify the identity of contributors would make it hard to operate in Britain.

Other critics have expressed bafflement at the government’s decision to put Palestine Action, a pro-Palestinian protest group that has carried out acts of vandalism on a British military base but does not call for violence against anyone, on a list of banned terrorist groups, along with Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. The designation means that any show of support for the group, like wearing a T-shirt displaying its logo, can result in arrest.

Yet Britain also just enacted a law that requires universities to provide broad latitude for free expression and academic freedom on campuses. The previous Conservative government proposed it because of concerns that universities were denying platforms to people with unpopular views. The current government went ahead with the law, despite initial reservations.

“What we haven’t done is try to reconcile all this,” Mr. Katwala said. “It’s an invitation to say, ‘You’ve got it wrong.’ We need to say what we are committed to defending and why, but then draw a line.”

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