alt Hacker NewsThose 30 aren’t arrested for just for writing “social media posts” but for possibly “harmful communication including incitement to terrorism and violence, online threats and abuse, and unwanted communication via email and other means”
Of the 90% many will accept their fault and receive a caution or warning
Edit: and none of those cases would involve pretrial remand/jail
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> possibly “harmful communication including incitement to terrorism and violence, online threats and abuse, and unwanted communication via email and other means”
That's a lot of colorful language to say "words hurt".
I could point you to 30 BlueSky posts that would qualify.... posted in the last 5 minutes.
>Of the 90% many will accept their fault and receive a caution or warning
Why do you need to arrest someone just to warn them?
Given the met police chief thinks they shouldn't be doing this, I doubt that there isn't problem with the level of police involvement:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/sep/03/met-police-c...
Great summary here of the kind of things people are arrested for and a bit more about the laws this refers to https://open.substack.com/pub/monkdebunks/p/are-30-people-a-...
I mean, this is exactly what the Tennessee sheriff accused this guy of doing. The Sheriff said that a meme referencing Trump saying that people 'needed to get over' a school shooting was actually a threat against the school.
This is the problem with going after 'harmful communication'. It is not something that can be defined precisely, which allows government officials to choose to interpret it in whatever way they want when the enforce it. Obviously in these cases, the courts ruled against the official's interpretation, but that didn't stop this guy from having to spend 37 days in jail before they released him.
As they say "you can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride".
While it is good that the UK version doesn't send you to pretrial jail, you still have to fight the charge. You have to respond, spend time in court, hire council, and hope you can convince the courts that your post doesn't fit the definition of incitement to violence.
This has a chilling effect on free speech, even if all the cases are eventually thrown out. This is a tactic the Trump administration has used repeatedly. Go after people in court for things that are clearly not illegal. You make the person fight the charges, both in court and in the public eye, and then the cases are dismissed eventually and the administration moves on. All it does is make people factor this in when deciding how to act; is my act of protest worth having to fight this in court?
And harmful communication can be "Fuck Hamas" which may be hateful, but not harmful.
The vast majority of those arrested are just for mild insults, which are illegal under the censorious UK regime; not incitement to terrorism or threats.