The death of Queen Elizabeth II has sparked a welter of discourse, from debates about the British monarchy and the history of imperialism to sometimes embarrassing wall-to-wall media coverage around the world. It’s also led to a shocking clampdown on free speech.

The trend began before the British queen had even died on September 8, when Carnegie Mellon University modern languages professor Uju Anya fired off a series of, to put it mildly, strident tweets criticizing the monarch. After Anya — who hails from Nigeria, where the British Empire ruled with brutal exploitation and violence — called the queen the head of a “thieving raping genocidal empire” and wished her “an agonizingly painful death,” Twitter erased the offending tweets, citing an unnamed rule violation. The company had acted in response to a wave of criticism from other users, set in motion by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos tweeting his unhappiness with Anya’s words.

This early incident was followed by a series of detentions and arrests across the UK at royal-related public events, where protesters were targeted, even charged with crimes, by police for criticizing the British monarchy using language nowhere near as extreme as Anya’s.