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TIL: The UK Now Arrests More People for Online Speech Than Russia and China (hrnews1.substack.com)

submitted 5 days ago by theHRguy@lemmy.world to c/latestagecapitalism@lemmy.world

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[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 28 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Hmm...

UK (2023): 12,183 arrests under communications laws. Recorded annually. Enforcement is continuous and year-round.

China: Approximately 1,500 arrests from a specific government crackdown on online rumours, running from December 2023 to April 2024 — a time-limited campaign, not an annual figure.

Russia: Approximately 400 cases cited from a 2017 report. A more recent 2023 report documented 882 criminal prosecutions for online posts, following new censorship laws introduced after the invasion of Ukraine.

So the number from China is from a single campaign specifically targeting "online rumors", and the number is publicly (voluntarily) reported by the body which made the arrests, which is suspect. This figure does not represent all arrests made related to online speech, only this one campaign. Even if you could find such information from China, anything published by the PRC would probably not be trustworthy.

The Russian number... similarly, the figures reported by the government are suspect. Also, Russia has been making significant efforts to restrict access to online services nationwide in recent years, so... it's hard to get arrested for posting something if you can't get online at all. Also, this is prosecutions, not arrests, and Russia has a habit of leaving political dissenters in prison for a long time before they get a court date, if ever.

The UK figure is a continuous annual total recorded under laws that have been in operation for decades. The China figure covers a four-month campaign. The Russia figure reflects a specific legislative period following wartime emergency laws. The UK does not publish this data centrally — the 12,183 figure was compiled from Freedom of Information requests to individual forces, covering 35 of England and Wales’s 43 territorial forces. The full national total is not publicly available.

This is not serious journalism. The author wants to push a narrative. We can give them credit for at least informing us that the figures don't really correlate, but knowing that means that the headline of this article is at best tabloid journalism, if not outright propaganda. Either way, this news source should be treated as highly irresponsible.