YESTERDAY, this country crossed over to the dark side.

We went from being a free-ish nation proud of its democratic traditions to one where officials talk openly about suppressing certain “views” and “opinions”.

5 Brendan O’Neill is editor of free speech site spiked-online.com Credit: Paul Grover

The Crown Prosecution Service announced that online abuse, the hurling of barbs on Twitter and other platforms, would for the first time be treated as a hate crime.

Under new CPS guidelines — going into Stalinist detail about when online speech is criminal — virtual verbal mockery will be treated as seriously as a real-life scuffle in the street.

So firing off a tweet saying something hateful or sexist about a politician or journalist will be treated as a hate crime on a par with yelling racist abuse in someone’s face or lobbing a brick through a religious building’s window.

But Alison Saunders, the Director of Public Prosecutions, gave the game away with a Guardian column justifying this expansion of hate-policing online.

She said the guidelines are part of a broader conversation we need to have about tackling “extreme views” and finding ways to “prevent such opinions from gestating in the first place”.

Something must be done, she finger-wagged, about certain people’s “extreme views on race, religion, sexuality (and) gender”.

5 Alison Saunders, the Director of Public Prosecutions, says the CPS's guidelines are part of a broader conversation Credit: PA:Press Association

Note the lingo here. Alongside castigating “abuse” and “hatred”, which we can agree is bad, she is also declaring war on “views” and “opinions”.

I don’t want to live in a country where the person responsible for criminal prosecutions talks about policing opinion.

That has the makings of a police state.

If I wanted my internet to be monitored by officialdom’s self-styled know-alls to make sure I never encounter dodgy or weird “views”, I would move to China.

The CPS guidelines should worry us all. They will open up a Pandora’s Box of authoritarianism.

In elevating online slights to the level of hate crime, the CPS has written a Snowflakes’ Charter.

5 Firing off a tweet saying something hateful or sexist about a politician could land you in the dock under the new CPS guidelines Credit: Alamy

All those snowflakes and professional offence-takers who think a cross word is as bad as a slap in the face will relish this opportunity to land their critics in the dock.

It is worth remembering how flabby the definition of hate crime is.

The CPS says it is any crime motivated by “hostility” towards another person on the basis of their disability, race, religion, sexual orientation or transgender status.

But get this. It defines hostility as “ill-will, spite, contempt, prejudice, unfriendliness, antagonism, resentment and dislike”.

So just being unfriendly to someone on the basis of their faith or sexuality could count as a hate crime.

Make the mistake of drunkenly tweeting that a female politician you don’t like is a “bitch” or write a Facebook post questioning whether trans women are “real” women and you could be judged unfriendly and have your collar felt by the cops. It’s terrifying.

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We live in a world in which more and more beliefs and opinions are being redefined as “hateful”.

Consider the ever-expanding use of the term “phobia”.

Criticise Islam too stingingly and you are Islamophobic.

Question whether men can become women, as feminists Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel have done, and you are transphobic. Religious critics of gay marriage are branded homophobic.

Are these moral convictions hate-speech too? Are they among the “extreme views” on religion, sexuality and gender Saunders is worried about?

The potential for people who simply have old-fashioned or politically incorrect views to be branded hate criminals is palpable — and awful.

In his brilliant book Censored, Paul Coleman describes how hate-crime laws across Europe have been used to punish moral and religious opinions.

5 Liam Stacey was jailed for 28 days in 2012 for tweeting vile racist abuse about footballer Fabrice Muamba Credit: Wales News Service

Evangelical pastors have been arrested for criticising homosexuality.

People have been fined for ridiculing Islamic practices.

Under the guise of tackling hate, 21st-century Europe is resurrecting the Inquisition and criminalising people who have the “wrong” views.

The new CPS guidelines will green-light vexatious complaints designed to chill such views.

Even where genuine prejudice is spouted, criminalisation is not the best policy.

Recall the case of Liam Stacey, the student jailed for 28 days in 2012 for tweeting vile racist things about footballer Fabrice Muamba.

Isn’t this a waste of a good prison cell? Surely stigma rather than state heavy-handedness is a better way to deal with such cases?

Mr Stacey was ridiculed online, deservedly, for his horrendous comments.

Civil society is more than capable of dealing with people who express real hatred. Indeed, for extreme cases we have laws already.

You may remember Peter Nunn, from Bristol, who bombarded MP Stella Creasy with vile abuse on Twitter after she supported putting an image of Jane Austen on the £10 note.

In 2014, he was sentenced to 18 weeks in jail for sending indecent, obscene or menacing messages.

We don’t need more laws. We don’t need more state intrusion into the realm of speech.

Online forums are crazy, mad and full of sometimes sewer-like commentary.

5 The Sun's story on the new CPS policy

But the onus should be on users and social media companies to improve the state of debate.

If us tweeters, Facebookers and followers of discussion threads see nasty comments, we should call them out.

That is what responsible citizens do.

More importantly, the Silicon Valley overlords of social media ought to take more responsibility for facilitating rational, civilised discussion.

If the state assumes greater authority to police and punish online speech, it will let these social media bigwigs off the hook.

It will send them the message that they can keep their heads buried in the sand and not worry about the reams of bile on their websites.

It will make them even more cavalier than they already are.

Surely the best response to online invective is trusting users to deal with it and expecting social media bosses to counter it.

Inviting the powers that be to deal with it, to extinguish certain “views and opinions”, is a recipe only for tyranny.