A report from a leading civil liberties campaign group has found that the British state has arrested at least 62,000 people over five years for speech crimes, for an average of 34 arrests per day. Censorship laws such as the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Communications Act 2003, and the Online Safety Act 2023 have been used by both Labour and so-called Conservative governments to arrest 62,199 people for “communication offences”, including offensive jokes online, between January 1, 2021 and December 31, 2025, the Big Brother Watch pressure group has revealed.
The report was based on police data from 38 of the 45 territorial police forces in the UK, obtained following a series of Freedom of Information requests sent to all forces. However, the civil liberties group noted that because some forces failed or refused to provide their data, the true number of people arrested for speech crimes was likely much higher. The campaign group said that if those forces that failed to supply data were in line with the national average for communications arrests, the total would be around 73,000 over the five-year period, or one arrest for every 940 people in the country. However, the report noted that there are “shocking disparities” in the arrest rate for speech crimes between different police forces, with some recording as many as ten times the number of arrests as others.
