Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Much as I take a dim view of the laws and politics of England & Wales*, those numbers include "indecent" and "obscene" messages, i.e. dick picks could be mixed up in these totals.

I suspect the actual number of un-asked-for dick picks sent each year is significantly (multiple orders of magnitude) higher than that, while also suspecting that most of those pics don't lead to arrests and what people are arrested for is in fact hate speech or threats that at first glance seem like they might be terrorist in nature, but so far as I can tell this distinction is not actually recorded in any official statistics so we just don't know.

* I left the UK in 2018 due to the overreach and incompetence shown in the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, plus the people in charge during Brexit all hating on international human rights obligations; I would've left a year sooner but for family stuff.





> those numbers include "indecent" and "obscene" messages

Should we be worried that the government doesn't even bother to track how many people are arrested/jailed/convicted of non-true-threat/sexual harassment speech?

Well surely then one of the many NGOs fighting tyranny is trying to keep track of the numbers, right?


I'm getting fed up of people posting these figures. Especially with a misleading description like "arrests for comments on social media". They cover a very broad range of offences, many of which the public would want to keep as an offence. It includes cases like pedophiles grooming and blackmailing children, stalking, harrassment, even people emailing photos of aborted foetuses to pharmacies.

> I'm getting fed up of people posting these figures.

Only way around that would be to get a breakdown of the specific details of the arrests. If sufficient details of those records are publicly available, I don't think anyone has actually categorised them into convenient headline figures as yet.

As I said, we just don't know the breakdown, so this could be anything from 0% to 100% of the arrests are things almost everyone agrees with, or (by necessity of those numbers) disagrees with.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: