over the past five years, there s been a 107% increase in people, mainly women, reporting online hate. but over the same period, only a 32% increase in the number of arrests. dr rachel clarke has reported the worst of her abuse to the police but no one s been arrested. never have i heard anyone from the police standing up to say nobody gets to issue rape threats to an nhs doctor or nurse because they are telling the truth about covid. why are institutions and individuals in power in british society not standing up and saying, enough, you don t get to do that. we are going to prosecute you all because this is unacceptable. i think the police have a hellishjob.
have a hellishjob. i don t know how we are going to manage this is future. but we do have to try harder because this is real. it s affecting the way people live their lives. in a small number of cases it s affecting how people are threatened in the real world, outside the world of online harm. but also it s affecting the health and mental health particularly of our young people who have bullying and oppression online. that does impact them in a very real way, even if it doesn t result in an attack, physical attack offline. the national police chiefs council says the police take all reports of malicious communications seriously and will investigate but must prioritise their finite resources . the main social media companies say they don t promote hate on their platforms and take action to stop it. they each have algorithms that offer us content based on things we ve posted, liked or watched in the past. internet researcher chloe colliver is helping us run an experiment to