Can you imagine a hideous dystopian future where your favorite football team spied on all your social media accounts and then banned you from attending games if they didn’t like something you posted? Not for posting anything violent or threatening or anything. Just banned you for expressing an opinion.
Sounds awful, right? Well just across the pond in England, that dystopian future has arrived.
Meet Linzi Smith. She can no longer attend soccer games at the stadium 10 minutes from her house where her favorite Premier League team (Newcastle United) plays.
Why not? Because Linzi believes that “transgender” women (ya know, men) aren’t actually women. And she had the temerity to say that on Twitter(X). The management of Newcastle United monitors the social media accounts of their fans, saw her post, and banned her for the remainder of this season, and the entirety of next year’s season.
For a full account of this matter, I recommend this article from FEE about it. The full details of this cruel, creepy, and capricious incident can be found there.
But here, I want to take a guess at how this Stasi-like atrocity came to happen. It’s not like it’s obvious that a soccer team would want to police its fans for “wrongthink” and ban them from games.
How on earth does that add to the bottom line?
I’ll bet the practice began the way so many violations of privacy and freedom occur — as an attempt to improve security.
I have no evidence for this hypothesis. But I do know that English soccer fans are famous for their violent riots. Win or lose, soccer fans love to get rowdy and smash stuff.
It’s easy enough to imagine that a soccer team’s management might brainstorm ways to get ahead of such damaging (and possibly tortious) events and head them off.
“I know!”, I imagine some enterprising young exec saying, “Let’s offer our fans something for free on social media, and when they opt in, we get their info. Then we can monitor them for signs of future violent behavior, and take proactive measures!”
I know I’m only speculating, but it’s pretty easy to picture, right?
And of course, once such a stupid, intrusive, and obnoxious system is in place, it’s easy to imagine its purpose morphing, right? It’s a classic case of mission-creep. Who could resist flexing on people who express opinions you don’t like when you have the power to hurt them?
Far too many of us humans can’t resist abusing power - even power as seemingly petty as this.
And it wasn’t petty to Linzy Smith. She is devastated.
We must resist the urge to sacrifice liberty for security. Often we make a bad bargain when we do.
Naturally,
Adam