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As I underline in my Three Laws of Reading the Media, “Always assume that ‘fact-checkers’ are trying to bullshit you.” What ‘fact-checkers’ really are is Confirmation Bias Machines. They exist almost exclusively to shore up lyin’ legacy media narratives – not tell you the truth.
Case in point: a graphic doing the rounds on X, showing how the UK arrests tens of thousands of people each year for social media posts. This, at the same time as tens of thousands of Muslim gang rapists of children go uninvestigated, let alone punished. A police force that can’t solve a single burglary in the entire country in a year, somehow has the resources to arrest people every day for ‘non-crime hate incidents’ online.
So, what’s a ‘fact checker’ to do? They can’t deny it, because the UK government’s own statistics prove the case. Instead, they resort to dodgy circumlocations and excuses that, ‘Oh, but comparisons are hard to make’.
Britain now arrests more people for social media posts than China, Russia, and Turkey combined nearly matching the rest of the top 10 countries combined Britain really leads the world on these thought crimes Insane how the UK, which used to be a free country, turned out to be so totalitarian.
The sheer volume of people arrested in Britain for their free speech online is staggering and undeniable.
The Freedom House country report for the UK cites a Times FOI finding that more than 12,000 people were arrested in 2023 under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, a volume that the newspaper summarized as roughly 30 arrests per day for offensive online messages; the same Freedom House summary notes annual arrests have more than doubled since 2017 though fewer than one in 10 of those arrests in 2023 resulted in sentencing.
This is from the spin doctors, oops, the ‘fact-checkers’ themselves.
Let it sink in: more than 12,000 arrests a year. Thirty arrests per day for ‘offensive online messages’.
Note, too, what else ‘Factually’ thinks is somehow exculpatory data: fewer than one in 10 ten of those arrests in 2023 resulted in sentencing. In other words, nine out of 10 of these arrests were groundless. Twenty-seven people per day, or nearly 11,000 per year, falsely arrested by the UK’s Thought Police.
While a quarter of a million girls are raped by Muslim gangs, with almost none of the perpetrators ever facing justice.
No wonder the ‘fact-checkers’ are so desperate to try and spin those shocking figures away.
The best they can come up with is, ‘Well… other countries do it, too!’
Other countries in the supplied material (Turkey, China, India) clearly arrest people over social media, sometimes for political expression or satire, but the reporting does not give reliable per-day counts to place them quantitatively against the UK figure.
Yet, even they admit that reliable data on social media monitoring and arrests for ‘political content’ both rank higher in the UK than other similar countries.
Even the ludicrously mis-named ‘UK Fact Check Politics’ website admits that:
A widely cited figure of 12,183 arrests in 2023 (across police forces in England and Wales) relates to arrests under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, sourced from FOI-based reporting by the Times and discussed in subsequent fact-checking coverage.
No matter how they try and cut it, that’s not something the UK can brag about and nor can ‘fact-checkers’ hand-wave away.
