While drunk, Liam Stacey, a 21-year-old student at Swansea University, tweeted racist insults about Fabrice Muamba after the Bolton Wanderers footballer suffered a cardiac arrest during a match. For sending offensive, upsetting but ultimately harmless insults, he would spend 56 days in prison. His tweets included no threatening language. The Guardian initially claimed he had been charged with "incitement to racial hatred". ITV said it was "harassment and disorder". The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail told their readers it was "racially aggravated harassment" that had ultimately done for Stacey. The law he was in fact found to have fallen foul of was Section 4A of the Public Order Act 1986, which deals with a person who "uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting". Section 4A contains no mention of incitement or racial hatred. These imprecisions and misapprehensions reflect the dangerously broad range of online behaviour that we bundle together and call "trolling".

There is now a steady supply of "trolls" hauled into court for something they have said online. Some of them deserve to be there. None of them are very appealing figures: the likes of Liam Stacey and Azhar Ahmed do not make for heroes of free speech. Because of their unpopularity, defences of their freedom to voice unpopular views are few and far between. In place of an intelligent conversation about the kind of online speech we should allow and the kind we should not, we have poorly articulated rants about "trolls", the evil they do and the bravery of those who stand up to them. The politicians' treatment of the issue is as clumsy as the media's. Grayling's proposals are unneccessary. "Chloe's law" is nothing more than legislation as public relations — multiple existing laws deal with the behaviour he wants to clamp down on — and the Justice Secretary's characterisation of a "baying cyber mob" is at odds with reality. Watch those accused of saying unpleasant things online enter a courtroom and you will see that they do not fit Grayling's caricature: these are sad and lonely people, and rarely is the public interest in pursuing them particularly convincing.

The convictions of Stacey, Ahmed and others have contributed to a nationwide chill on freedom of speech. In polling commissioned for Speakers Cornered: Twenty-First Century Britain's Culture of Silence, a report I have written for the New Culture Forum, YouGov found that 41 per cent believe we are not as free to speak our minds as we should be while just 12 per cent thought we are too free to do so. Those who do feel constrained were asked what they thought was stopping people from speaking freely. The largest proportion, 38 per cent, said they thought people worried about being prosecuted for saying something illegal. There is a palpable unhappiness with the policing of speech, online or otherwise, and yet the policy pronouncements of Chris Grayling, Theresa May and others will further deprive us of a vital liberty.

Although the political climate hardly makes them likely, two reforms would help restore sanity to the way online speech is regulated. The first would be decriminalisation of any speech that is merely offensive or insulting, even if it is grossly offensive. Online speech, like all speech, should only be illegal if it constitutes a credible and serious threat, or if it is part of a pattern of harassment. If such a change is not possible, then at the very least there should be a commitment from the police to limit their activity in this area to communications about which they receive complaints. Ultimately, though, the only proper way of dealing with even the most hateful speech is not the criminal law but a thick skin.