Policing social media: A full-time job in Britain

"An extraordinary announcement was made this week by Chief Constable Alex Marshall, head of the College of Policing. The announcement should have come as a shock -- sadly, however, it did not. Marshall told the BBC’s Law in Action programme that around half the complaints received by front-line police now relate to online activity. ...

He also indicated -- in a detail that could have come from an episode of Brass Eye -- that many of these complaints relate to entirely trivial behaviour, such as people being 'unfriended' on Facebook. So why is this unsurprising, however ludicrous? Because it is the inevitable result of our increasingly punitive approach to internet speech."

According to Marshall, there are 6,000 police officers currently being trained to deal with anti-social behaviour online. Marshall warns that many are still trying to understand the point at which insults on social media become crimes. Maybe I can help them with that: they don’t. To conflate credible threats of violence on the one hand, with trifling insults on the other, is absurd. The purpose of the police can never be to ensure complete interpersonal harmony in a country of 62million people. The notion is preposterous in concept, and any attempt at its execution will be dystopian in effect. Even if we could, would we really want to spend our days in some insipid echo-chamber of perpetual accord?

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