At least 60,000 people were arrested for “communications offences” in Britain between 2021 and 2025, new statistics show, while in many areas child sex offenders are offered voluntary interviews.
A report titled Britain’s Free Speech Problem, published this week by civil liberties campaign group Big Brother Watch, identified 62,199 arrests during the five-year-period, resulting in 18,520 charges and 12,292 convictions.
The figures were compiled using Freedom of Information requests, but only 38 of the UK’s 45 territorial police forces responded with full data, and Big Brother Watch said if national averages were used the total number of arrests was estimated to be 73,023, with 21,339 charges and 13,779 convictions.
Two female officers arrive at a family’s home. At first, one might think they were enforcing some form of Sharia law… But no — not this time. They are here for a different reason: to confiscate a young girl’s phone, simply for viewing a post online. This is Britain, 2025. Fuck… pic.twitter.com/RYJkSr83Nz
— Nikki Roth (@roth_nikki79371) September 21, 2025
The report’s data covers three offences, the first of which is sending a letter or electronic communication which is “indecent or grossly offensive for the purpose of causing distress or anxiety to another person”.
The second is sending a message which is “grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character by a public electronic communications network, or to persistently use such a network to cause someone annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”.
And the third, Section 179 of the UK’s controversial Online Safety Act, is sending a message “containing information the sender knows to be false with the intent of causing non-trivial physical or psychological harm to anyone who might see the message”.
The report included a number of case studies, including a teenager who was threatened with arrest by West Midlands Police for simply viewing a TikTok video, a man who told an immigrant that he could be deported if he reported to police for harassing him, and an animal rights campaigner who was threatened with an “online thinking skills” course for sharing a factual video.
The TikTok incident was even “factchecked” by Yahoo and Reuters journalists who attempted to justify the officers’ behaviour based on a statement from the force defending their actions, but the report noted Reuters has since withdrawn its fact check due to the police eventually admitting the child was innocent.
The report also found that arrests for communications offences varied widely from force to force, with Cumbria Police making 25.69 arrests per 10,000 people, while Staffordshire Police made 0.58, which the civil liberties group said called into question the principle of equal treatment under the law.
Similar variations were present in charge and conviction data, and Big Brother Watch found that “some police forces greatly exceed the number of arrests compared to the number of charges they make, suggesting that many of those arrests fail to meet the threshold for prosecution”.
“Analysing the data across arrests, charges and convictions reveals significant variance between forces, suggesting that in practice the right to freedom of expression is a ‘postcode lottery’ in the UK,” the report stated.
“An arrest is a significant inference with an individual’s liberty, and the thousands of arrests now being carried out year on year for communications offences is having a cumulative, chilling effect on the public’s right to free speech as a whole.
“Further, individuals may be subject to bail conditions that infringe on their liberties, while the ordeal of being detained and processed by police is stressful, embarrassing and can have both personal and professional consequences.”
The report also noted that the arrests were taking place despite policing resources being stretched across the country, and that “police forces are using voluntary interviews instead of arrests to deal with allegations of online child sexual abuse”.
“Online child sexual exploitation offences are some of the most grievous, harmful crimes, carrying substantial prison sentences,” the report stated.
“The use of voluntary interviews by some forces due to ‘resource management’ while tens of thousands of people are arrested on suspicion of speech offences raises serious questions about police priorities.”
Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo told The Daily Mail the Prime Minister should take action and launch a review in order to safeguard free speech.
“There is mounting concern among the public that speech policing is out of control in Britain and it’s long overdue that the government takes action,” he said.
“Andy Burnham must now launch a free speech reset and order an independent review of our laws and police training around speech, in order to fix this Orwellian mess.
“Thousands of people are being arrested for controversial speech, online jokes and non-violent protest. People have even been arrested for holding blank pieces of paper, and urged to take ‘online thinking skills’ courses by police. Enough is enough.”
Header image: West Midlands Police officers investigating the TikTok video in the case study (Facebook).
