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Nine people a day are being arrested for posting allegedly offensive messages online as police step up their campaign to combat social media hate speech.
More than 3,300 people were detained and questioned last year over so-called trolling on social media and other online forums, a rise of nearly 50 per cent in two years, according to figures obtained by The Times.
About half of the investigations were dropped before prosecutions were brought, however, leading to criticism from civil liberties campaigners that the authorities are over-policing the internet and threatening free speech.
Arrests are expected to rise after Amber Rudd, the home secretary, last week announced a national police hub to crack down on hateful material online. Freedom of information requests have revealed that 3,395 people across 29 forces were arrested last year under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which makes it illegal to intentionally “cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another” with online posts.
It is a rise of nearly 50 per cent since 2014, when there were 2,315 arrests, and an increase of 23 per cent since 2015 when there were 2,755 arrests.
The total number of arrests under the act, which also criminalises public online messages that are “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character”, is likely to be much higher because the request for data was rejected by 13 forces and two did not provide adequate information.
Data from two of the UK’s largest police forces show big increases. The Met detained 867 people last year, up by 53 per cent from 2014. West Midlands police arrested 635 people, an increase of 877 per cent since 2014 when there were 65 arrests. The number of cases reaching the courts has remained stable. Last year 1,696 people were charged and 1,399 convicted.
The Police Federation said officers lacked the training to take investigations beyond an “online reading exercise”. Simon Kempton, the federation’s spokesman for cybercrime, said more needed to be done to improve online policing and blamed stretched resources for officers’ limited knowledge.
The National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) defended the rising arrest figures, saying officers had improved their ability to combat crime online as it continues to grow. Stephen Kavanagh, of the NPCC’s digital intelligence unit, said forces had adapted well to the “changing nature of harm in our society”.
Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of Index on Censorship, a free speech campaign group, accused police of unnecessarily hunting internet trolls. She said: “These figures bear out what we’ve been saying: that police are wasting more and more time investigating people for comments online that are offensive but not criminal.”
Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, said the Crown Prosecution Service emphasised section 127 was to be used only in “extreme circumstances”. “But the problem is ‘grossly offensive’ is not something you should normally be prosecuted for. It’s not showing harm to other people. It’s not showing that somebody is being harassed . . . attacked or threatened.”