We came across the following posts on the social media sites X and Reddit, as well as on other online forums:

The posts claim that the UK had made 3,300 ‘arrests for social media posts’, in comparison to just 411 made by Russia. The post was shared by the far-right Britain First party, which often espouses anti-immigration and anti-Islamic views. It has also received more views on posts from other accounts. There were no further details regarding the arrests, such as the time scale that applied.

When we conducted a keyword search on X regarding the claim, we found that the same claim had been circulating in recent months, including some in June last year. Some of the posts also included a clip from a video where a man named Konstantin Kisin was making the claims included in the posts. Several of the posts had accrued tens of thousands of views.

The Origin of the Claims

We looked up the origin of the viral video and found that it corresponded with a YouTube video uploaded on 7 April 2020, where Kisin was a guest on a podcast about politics hosted by John Anderson.

John Anderson is a former deputy prime minister of Australia and former leader of the conservative National Party. Kisin, meanwhile, is a Russian-British comedian and political commentator who has been described as an increasingly influential far-right figure in British politics. A check on Anderson’s website revealed that Kisin is a regular guest on Anderson’s podcast.

While Kisin’s podcast appearance seems to have accelerated the spread of the claims, further investigation also indicated that the claims originate well before the 2020. The original claims included archival web links, that when accessed, led to articles that pointed to the figures referenced in the posts.

The first, a 2018 article from Newsweek, references the Russian human rights group Agora who said Russian law enforcement had opened 411 criminal cases against internet users in Russia in 2017.

The second, a 2017 article from The Times, references figures obtained from freedom of information requests that state which revealed that 3,395 people across 29 police forces in the UK were arrested in 2016 under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003.

This UK law makes it illegal to ‘intentionally cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another with online posts’. The figures reported in the Times are also an undercount as 13 UK police forces rejected the freedom of request information and two more did not provide sufficient information.

A Closer Look at the Numbers

The figures quoted in the posts are therefore accurate representations of publicly available information. A further review, however, reveals that the figures are not directly comparable, and are therefore likely to be misleading.

We uncovered a factcheck by PA Media, a UK-based news agency that also conducts regular factchecks, which found that the claims were missing key context.

While PA Media noted that the figures were from the same period, they found that while the figures for Russia refers to the number of criminal proceedings, the figure for the UK refers to arrests before possible criminal proceedings. The Times article, which provided the original figures for the UK, noted that ‘about half of the investigations were dropped before prosecutions were brought’.

Moreover, the UK figures also encompass the broader category of online malicious communications, not just social media posts. PA Media noted that section 127 offences in the UK cover harassment that ‘takes place via an “electronic communications network”, and is not limited to social media posts’.

Harassment via email and other methods of online communication are also covered under this definition, and some of these are often dealt with as civil, rather than criminal, cases in other democratic countries.

PA Media also added that while in the UK, ‘jail sentences for speech that is protected under international human rights norms remain rare’, Russian authorities had cracked down on critical expression about religion, and that LGBT+ activists had been targeted for their activism and expression online.

Nonetheless, the article notes that ‘the scale of prosecutions (in the UK) remain a concern’.

The Situation Today

The PA Media article notes that the Freedom on the Net index, by the independent US-based Freedom House think tank, has consistently rated Russia’s internet freedoms to be lower than that of the UK.

The 2017 index gave Russia a score of 34 and the UK a score of 76, while the same index today rates Russia with a score of 21 and the UK with a score of 79.

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, censorship and prosecution of online content spiked. Russia saw the highest number of blocked or removed webpages in 15 years in 2022, while a record number of people were also charged over social media comments and posts in the same year, and people have faced criminal charges for reposting anti-war opinions or information on social media.

With regard to the UK, several commentators have found section 127 to be too ambiguious, with the tech publication The Verge writing that cases often ‘seem to involve ill-defined notions of public propriety’, and threatened to lead to ‘inconsistent policing’.

Section 127 makes it an offense to send public messages of a ‘grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character’. However, official government guidance states that content that is ‘merely shocking, disturbing, satirical, or iconoclastic’ should not be prosecuted.

Given the ambiguity of the law, the UK government has passed a new law, the Online Safety Act 2023, which will replace the current offences under section 127. The new law sets a higher threshold for criminal liability by requiring prosecutors to prove the harmful effects of online content rather than proving that it is harmful content, and reformulates the existing section 127 offences to ensure they are better suited to the online environment of today.

The new law will be fully implemented and enforced following a three-year phase-in period after it was passed in October 2023, and is likely to deliver greater clarity and consistency over the boundaries of permissible online speech.

Nevertheless, posts carrying the comparison between Russia and the UK appear to have made a resurgence following a string of arrests and issuance of jail terms to individuals involved in inciting racial hatred and violence during the recent riots in the UK.

The recent UK riots, which targeted minorities, migrants and asylum seekers, were led by far-right groups and were driven by disinformation after multiple false online posts wrongly identified the suspected killer of three young girls in a July 29 knife attack as a Muslim migrant.

A Poor Comparison

In summary, the figures for the UK in 2016 and Russia in 2017, while accurate, are not comparable as they refer to different scopes of offences and different stages in the criminal prosecution process.

Moreover, the legal environments of both countries in relation to online expression and social media use are vastly different and have developed to grow even further apart since 2017.

The posts that carry the claim do not note that the figures are outdated and do not make any mention of the significant differences between what the figures represent. As the posts seem to have been shared by far-right groups, this could also suggest malicious intent, given that the posts have emerged following a crackdown on individuals affiliated with the far-right after the UK riots.

Therefore, while the numbers are accurate, we find the claim as a whole to be mostly false in nature.