> Did you know more people are arrested yearly in UK for posting online on social media than in Iran? This isn't exactly true. The Mal Comms laws are a fuckin

> Did you know more people are arrested yearly in UK for posting online on social media than in Iran? This isn't exactly true. The Mal Comms laws are a fucking travesty, but the reporting on them has tended to be wildly inaccurate. Most incidents of "suspected mal comms" are resolved with what's called "words of advice", followed by no further action. Words of Advice happens like so: you call Karen a slag on Facebook, Karen reports you to the cops, the cops are obliged to "do something", so a neighborhood officer swings by and let's you know its been reported, don't do it again, no further action is taken. More serious cases tend to involve an invitation for a voluntary interview, usually resulting in no further action or (rarely) a caution or (even rarer still) the CPS deciding to prosecute. Voluntary interview is a bit of a misnomer - if you refuse to come in for said interview, there is two possible outcomes. Either it gets no further actioned and binned off, or they now have the option to arrest you for the purposes of an interview. Most of the time when someone is actually arrested for "malicious communication" its something high profile and/or they already refused that so called "voluntary interview" and/or they have been repeatedly given said words of advice. Personally I think the UK is a fucking hellscape and a police state, but I find the online commentary about the Malicious Communication laws - especially on primarily American forums - wildly inaccurate.