Worse Than Book Burning: Britain Arrested 62,199 People Over Posts and Messages
The Home Office doesn't track this number. A civil-liberties group had to file Freedom of Information requests to find out how many people the state arrested for what they typed.
British police arrested at least 62,199 people for communications offences in five years. That's 34 arrests a day. About one in five ended in a conviction.
Big Brother Watch sent FOI requests to all 45 territorial UK police forces. Thirty-eight sent complete data. From January 2021 through December 2025: 62,199 arrests, 18,520 charges, and 12,292 convictions.
The group published the tally September 7 in Britain's Free Speech Problem. If you fill in the seven missing forces at the national average, the group estimates about 73,000. Polymarket pushed the number across X on September 11, and it has been circulating since.
The Laws
Three statutes drive the count: Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, and Section 179 of the Online Safety Act 2023. They cover messages that are "grossly offensive," "indecent," "obscene," or "menacing," plus knowingly false messages.
The count includes real threats and domestic-abuse texts. It also includes jokes, opinions, and social posts. The arrest data doesn't separate them, and neither do the statutes.
Postcode Lottery
Cumbria arrested 25.7 people per 10,000 residents, two and a half times the national average. Neighboring Northumbria arrested 1.9. Staffordshire arrested 0.58.
The law is the same in all three counties. The arrest rate is 44 times higher in Cumbria than in Staffordshire.
The Receipts
In one case, West Midlands Police went to a vulnerable girl's home over a TikTok image of a teacher with negative comments under it. Officers demanded her devices and told her to choose between a voluntary interview and arrest. She hadn't made the post, shared it, or commented on it. Police took no further action. The Free Speech Union has the file.
Big Brother Watch director Silkie Carlo says the people arrested include those posting online jokes, those at non-violent protests, and protesters holding blank sheets of paper.
Nadine Dorries wrote the report's foreword. She was culture secretary while the Online Safety Act moved through Parliament. Now she calls it a dog's dinner and wants an independent national review. The group launched the report in Commons Committee Room 8 on September 9.
Lord Young of Acton made the key point on GB News: when four in five cases end without a conviction, the arrest itself becomes the punishment.
What It Means for Your Shelf
Your manuscript probably isn't the risk. Your marketing is. These laws target messages, and authors sell books through posts, DMs, Facebook groups, and TikTok. Writers in thrillers, military SF, and horror build their brands on edge. On a bad day in Cumbria, that edge reads as "menacing."
The UK is a market, not a monolith. Whether a joke is legal can depend on which county reads it.
US authors: You still have the First Amendment at home. Your words still travel into a market that arrests people over messages. Read the statutes before you plan a UK launch the way you'd plan a US one.
UK and Canadian authors: Big Brother Watch and the Free Speech Union hold the casework and the FOI tables. Bookmark both.
A publisher can reprint a burned book. An author in a holding cell writes nothing.
If you want the numbers before anyone spins them, like and subscribe to Author Update.
Commentary
Thomas: In this episode of The Zeitgeist Report, we're beginning what may be an ongoing segment: a world tour, where we talk about how readers in America feel about other countries. That affects authors in two ways. First, if your book visits that country, what's the readers' vibe about it? Second, if you're from that country, you need to understand how American readers feel about you.
Our first stop is the biggest country in the literary world for Americans after the United States. Americans read more American books than any others, but the second-biggest source of the books we read is the UK. And not just because Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and Narnia come from the UK.
Jonathan: So much of our culture.
Thomas: And our genetic ancestry, our cultural ancestry, and our legal ancestry. America was born out of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Not Wales so much. The Welsh mostly stayed in Wales. I have some Welsh ancestry, but I think that's pretty uncommon.
They're skipping straight past the book burning to arresting the authors.
Jonathan: And 12,292 convictions is a really high conviction rate for that many charges. That's kind of nuts.
Thomas: Just yesterday there was a report of a 16-year-old who posted a photo of a British politician as a rabbit. The police raided his house and took him to jail. I don't think the post even had any commentary. It was just the politician's face on a rabbit.
There's a kind of hypocrisy common in the publishing establishment. Publishing news outlets, other than this one, talk about book burning all the time. By book burning, they mean offensive and obscene books aren't being provided free to children in school libraries. Meanwhile, they completely ignore 62,000 people getting arrested for free speech violations. That's an incredible hypocrisy, and people in America see it.
People in America take freedom of speech very seriously. We will kill you if you try to take it away from us, and we did. When England tried to take it away, we said, "You can have our rights from our cold, dead hands." We crossed the Delaware in the wintertime to kill you, just to make it very clear that we will have our liberties. We don't care what your laws say. We have our own laws.
There was a big court case the UK filed against 4chan on a lot of these points. The UK won its case there, but 4chan has no assets in the UK, so they had to go through the American court system to try to seize 4chan's assets.
The American judge looked at it and said, in effect, "You're not going to collect money from an American organization over UK speech codes." And the 4chan lawyer's response was a meme, something like a gangster rabbit sitting on a pile of cash.
Jonathan: The text of the letter was great too.
Thomas: It captures the vibe. If you're a UK author, you have to be very careful about the vibe in America, which is shifting hard against what's going on in the UK, on free speech grounds but also on other grounds.
It used to be that beans on toast was the slur for British people having bad taste. Now the joke is beans on falafel, the idea being that people in the UK aren't even British anymore. They're Muslim. There's been this Muslim conquest, where now the majority of people in London are Muslim and not even of British ancestry. The number one baby name in the UK is Muhammad.
There's this kind of conquering the UK has submitted to. Americans in the major urban centers still believe diversity is our strength and are all for the Muslim conquest. But outside the urban centers, there's a very strong distaste in America for the Muslim conquest. That colors how we interpret fiction coming out of the UK and authors commenting on things.
For foreign authors writing for the American market, your best bet is not to comment publicly on American politics. I know it's very common around the world to comment on American politics. The world follows American politics much more closely than Americans follow world politics. Most Americans couldn't tell you the political parties in the UK, but most people in the UK could tell you the parties in America.
But Americans really, really don't like it when foreigners comment on our politics, even if you're saying things we agree with.
Jonathan: I was watching a comedian last night who doesn't have kids. He said, "You know what people with kids hate most? When a person without kids tells them how they should parent." You think because you've had a night of uninterrupted sleep, you can tell me how to raise my kids?
It's the same thing. UK people get mad when we comment on their politics. We see it in the chat and the comments all the time. But I'm not trying to sell UK people my books. If you're a UK author trying to sell Americans your books, don't tick them off beforehand. That's just not good business.
Thomas: To understand how Americans see the UK, think of how the UK sees Russia: an evil country that's very oppressive to its people and is fighting a very unjust war. And we look at that and say, well, Russia isn't arresting 60 people a day for speech code violations. They're arresting five or six a day. Still a lot.
Jonathan: If we count shooting them too.
Thomas: So many Americans see the UK as worse than Russia when it comes to oppressing its own people. That's not to justify all the terrible things Russia is doing or its invasion of its neighbors. We're not cool with that, obviously. But it's hard to see how other people see you, and I'm using this as a metaphor for how Americans are starting to see the United Kingdom.
There's also a growing sense in some parts of America that America will have to invade the British Isles and liberate them. There's going to be a civil war. We're anticipating a civil war in Britain, and we're anticipating having to send our sons to fight in that war, to be frank about where we see things going. We don't feel the UK has the virility or the manliness to defend itself, and we won't be able to bear seeing London fall.
Jonathan: Well, it's not another desert. It's not a jungle, it's not a desert. That sounds reasonable.
Thomas: If an American president asked Americans to go fight and defend Britain from the invasion Britain is suffering, many Americans would volunteer.
Jonathan: There's a sense of loyalty. "These are our bros. This is where we came from." We have good memories of World War I and World War II. On the military side, we've been working with the UK military forever. I love my UK Royal Marines. Those guys are awesome, and we got along great. The army is pretty cool too. We have good feelings toward them for the most part, and we want to help them.
In the Vietnam War, the military was hamstrung. You couldn't go past the line of demarcation to chase the bad guys, so they could come up and shoot us for 20 years, and we couldn't go after them. That's what we feel the UK is in right now. They're not even allowed to try to keep their culture.
Thomas: Another big difference is that Americans have a very romanticized view of English history, and a lot of Americans study it in great detail. We know about King Henry VIII and his wives. We know about King Henry V and the Battle of Agincourt. We love English history.
When I was last there, I illegally climbed into Dunnottar Castle in Scotland. It was my last day, the castle was locked, and there was a cliff. I thought, "I think I can climb this." So I climbed the cliff, risking my life. I was very young and stupid.
Then I scaled the wall into the castle ruin and explored it, feeling like a Viking conqueror. I turned a corner and saw two very stunned groundskeepers inside a locked castle, not expecting to find anybody. My first thought was, "They may think I'm a ghost." So I tried to be as friendly, American, and touristy as possible. I think they saved my life. After letting me explore a little, one of them pulled out a giant key and let me out the door.
While I was there, I said, "This is so cool." They said, "It's just a ruin." That captured the British view of their own history. "It's just a ruin. We're evil. We are colonizers. We did all this terrible stuff to all these people."
They really believe colonialism was bad, and they're ashamed of it. They're ashamed of their own glorious history. They don't see it as glorious. They see it as a mark of shame. They're embarrassed of their very identity.
We are not embarrassed of our ancestry in Britain. We don't see it as a mark of shame to be culturally descended from the British. That's a big difference, and I think that's what will motivate the invasion when it comes.
There's still a chance to fix it. The invasion doesn't have to come. But we have not done a good job staying out of English wars. When Britain goes to war, we tend to go to war too, either with them or against them. We rarely let them get into a fight we're not part of.
Jonathan: When your buddy gets in a fight, you say, "Hey, leave my buddy alone." That's how it works. I don't even like that guy over there, but he's a Marine, so I have to go.
