I heard things about UK arresting people for social media posts but thought it was just a few cases cherry picked. But I recently looked up the scale of arrests and it's really insane.

Police are arresting over 12,000 people each year for social media posts and other online communications deemed “grossly offensive,” “indecent,” “obscene,” or “menacing.” This averages to around 33 arrests per day.

These arrests are primarily made under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, laws which criminalize causing “annoyance,” “inconvenience,” or “anxiety” to others through digital messages.

Utterly insane.

https://nypost.com/2025/08/19/world-news/uk-free-speech-stru...

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foldr 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

The flip side of this is that convictions under the Communications Act have gone down compared to 2010, so it's a mixed picture:

https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/select-communications-off...

It is hard to get good data on this, but it is probably a combination of overzealous policing (which is indeed bad) and an increase in arrests for behavior that arguably is a police matter, such as domestic abuse, harassment, etc. I would not be surprised to discover that there is more online harassment now than there was in 2010.

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KETHERCORTEX 3 days ago | parent [-]

> I would not be surprised to discover that there is more online harassment now than there was in 2010.

There is simply more people online now than in 2010.

	▲	foldr 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's a good point! The growth in arrests shown in the article I linked starts in 2017, though. I think internet usage has gone up significantly by some measures since 2017, but whether or not that's sufficient to explain the increase in arrests, I am not sure.

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conradfr 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's more damning when you see who (and the cases) they don't arrest in the mean time.

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PieTime 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sadly this trend is echoed in the US as well since 2023 many have been arrested for their freedom of speech https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rnzp4ye5zo

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bko 3 days ago | parent [-]

I don't think that's the same thing:

> The DHS statement says that Ms Kordia had overstayed her student visa, which had been terminated in 2022 "for lack of attendance". It did not say whether she had been attending Columbia or another institution.

I think it's entirely different arresting people who overstay their visas or people on student visas that disrupt academic life. The UK regularly arrests citizens for offensive memes. There have even been cases where someone got a harsher sentence based on a tweet about sexual assault than the person who actually committed a sexual assault.

You can feel any way you'd like about free speech in America, but let's not conflate the two as being equal.

	▲	verzali 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm far more worried that America will stop me at the border and mistreat me for something I wrote online than I am about the UK. Heck, I'm more worried about visiting the US than China at the moment. The America effort to suppress free speech is very real.

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sunshine-o 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

By the way at that scale it is very counterproductive.

If you are gonna end up being arrested for protesting or giving your opinion, it is funnier to do it in the streets than on facebook. And it is probably much easier to be anonymous nowadays in the streets with a mask than on social media.

This is probably why the UK went in flame recently, the government cracked down on the Internet and people just went in the streets instead.

	▲	ethbr1 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Wasn't there some documentary a few years ago about UK citizens protesting in masks? Narrated by that guy from The Matrix?