Translated material
Hundreds of thousands of people are being harassed over tweets
The British government wanted to protect vulnerable minorities from attacks and insults, but instead severely restricted freedom of speech. Hundreds of thousands of citizens of the country began to be persecuted for allegedly offensive posts on the Internet. Anyone can complain about them, anonymously and without explaining any reasons. The police even come to schoolchildren who insult their classmates online. The British are already calling these measures censorship and recalling George Orwell. The new laws were also criticized by Elon Musk, the owner of X, where the police get materials for their cases. Digital Gulag in British style - in the material "Cold".
They are accused of spreading hatred, although many of them were just joking. The police are obliged to follow up on every denunciation. And this is not in Russia
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UK police have introduced a term to record cases of potentially offensive tweets: such posts are called "non-criminal hate incidents". This definition includes statements that, in principle, do not contradict the law, but are clearly motivated by hostility towards a certain group of people. These cases are registered with the aim of preventing actual crimes in the future: in this way, the state “warns” a potential criminal so that he does not move from insults to action.
“Non-criminal hate incidents” have been recorded since 2014. In the first five years of this practice, the police in England and Wales recorded almost 120 thousand of them, that is, an average of 65 per day. From July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024, 13,200 incidents were recorded - and these statistics do not yet include three of the UK's 48 police departments, meaning the actual number of incidents is even higher. In total, 140,000 actual criminal hate crimes were recorded in England and Wales between April 1, 2023 and March 31, 2024, including assault, harassment and stalking.
British police recorded an average of 65 incidents per day between 2014 and 2019
Some cases of “non-criminal incidents” are registered after anonymous accusations, that is, essentially, denunciations. It is believed that the hurt feelings of the “victim” who contacted the police is a sufficient reason to open a case. Because of this, the police are often forced to register absurd cases, without understanding what criteria should be used to record “non-criminal incidents.” They are not limited to the virtual space: for example, a man once complained to law enforcement that bus passengers allegedly grinned and glanced at him because of his appearance.
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Due to vague criteria, even children are persecuted for “non-criminal incidents.” Police have registered a case of a nine-year-old child who called his classmate "retarded" and said his parents hit him on the head as an infant. In addition, an incident was recorded when two girls from a high school said that another student smelled of fish.
Under the law, “non-criminal incidents” are not punishable by fines or imprisonment. But the names of violators are entered into a special database, where all employers in the country can send a request and receive a response.
“Teachers, doctors, nurses and many others are losing their jobs simply for making a joke on Twitter,” complain activists from the Free Speech Union, a right-wing neo-conservative British freedom of speech organization.
And yet, there have already been cases in Britain where citizens were tried for their posts on social networks. For example, in 2012, Paul Chambers was fined 1,000 pounds (almost 120 thousand rubles in 2024 prices) for a comic tweet about bombing an airport in South Yorkshire (he was later acquitted ). Mark Meechan received a fine of 800 pounds (just over 106 thousand rubles) in 2018 for publishing a video of his girlfriend’s pug doing a “Nazi salute.” And Jordan Parlor received a real sentence of 20 months for calling on his social networks to attack a hotel in Leeds, which at that time housed more than 200 migrants.
To combat Islamophobia and anti-Semitism
In 2023 - almost 10 years after the first "non-criminal incidents" were recorded - the British Conservative government tried to regulate the situation. Former Interior Minister Suella Braverman approved a 40-page instruction that was supposed to regulate which violations are worthy of punishment and which are not.
The minister wanted to change the rules, among other things, to improve statistics by reducing the number of problematic episodes. In practice, the relaxations have had little effect : data from 30 of 43 police stations in England and Wales showed that the number of “non-criminal hate incidents” in these stations still increased, albeit by just 0.4% - from 11,642 in 2023 to 11690 in 2024. In Scotland, the number of such incidents, even without innovations, is growing every year: in 2019 there were 619, and in 2023 - twice as many. Some districts in the UK even noticed that the increase in the number of “incidents” was explosive. For example, in Staffordshire they increased by 140%, and in North Yorkshire by 65%. In the last two years, the total number of “incidents” has begun to decline , but only slightly.
In July 2024, Labour's Yvette Cooper took over as Home Secretary. Sources in the British Home Office told reporters that she is going to cancel the relaxation in the law on “non-criminal incidents.” Instead, she wanted to introduce a “zero tolerance” approach to offensive posts and behavior to combat Islamophobia and anti-Semitism: British Jews and Muslims have become much more likely to be discriminated against since the outbreak of war between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas.
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Twitter posts about the war in the Middle East allegedly formed the basis of a high-profile case that was opened against Alison Pearson, a journalist from one of the largest newspapers in Britain, The Daily Telegraph. Two police officers came to her home on the weekend and announced that she was being investigated because of her tweet. It was published a year before, and subsequently completely deleted .
The police were not allowed to tell Pearson which tweet led to the investigation and who she offended with her words. It was about retweeting a photo of two black men surrounded by British police holding the flag of the Pakistani Justice Movement Party. In the post, Pearson complained that the police in the photo were smiling next to two "Jew haters" - apparently she confused the Pakistani party flag with the Hamas flag.
Later it became known that a former civil servant wrote a statement against Pearson. He is not Muslim and was not in the photo the journalist tweeted, but he believed her post was “racist and inflammatory.”
Police priorities
Pearson's source at the British Home Office said that police like to register cases for "non-criminal incidents." Disclosure of such cases, according to the journalist’s interlocutor, gives them the opportunity to “earn points” from various influential people. “Good news, we have recorded 15 incidents of Islamophobia this month!” - Pearson quotes his senior source.
At the same time, the police are not particularly successful in investigating other – already real – crimes.
The Essex station investigating journalist Pearson's "non-criminal incident" solved only 14.3% of the region's reported crimes in the nine months of 2024. Local police were unable to identify suspects in 93.7% of burglary cases. In addition, police were able to successfully solve less than 10% of sexualized crime cases.
Allison Pearson recalled that Essex Police had previously refused to help her friend, who complained of domestic abuse and cheating by her partner. The police officer who took over the case insisted that the case was hopeless: this was the first time her man had hit her, so he would not be charged. Later, Piersen’s partner was arrested, but she herself contributed to this by writing a complaint to the police station. Statistics show Essex Police solved just 11.5% of domestic violence cases in the past year.
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British Prime Minister Keir Starmer drew attention to the current situation. Hecommented on the prosecution of tweets, saying that monitoring social networks should not be a priority for the police. He placed responsibility on the specific police department regarding the prosecution of Pearson, noting that its officers "can make their own decisions."
Now, according to Starmer, the governmentis reviewing the principles of handling “non-criminal incidents” - but it is not yet clear what changes they want to make to it. At the same time, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper spoke about tightening the legislation that affects them. The general secretary of the Union for Free Speech, Toby Young, warned Cooper that he plans to defend the organization’s position in court if the authorities decide to tighten things up.
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Photo: Benjamin Torode / Getty Images Author: Alexandra Yastrebova