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When Does Social Media Become Criminally Anti-Social?

A UK police officer said incidents on social media account for 'half' of anti-social behaviour calls, but the situation isn't quite so clear-cut.
Image: chillchill_lanla/Shutterstock

When do social media disagreements become a police matter? Surprisingly often, according to comments made today by Chief Constable Alex Marshall, head of the UK’s College of Policing.

Speaking to the BBC Radio 4 show Law in Action, Marshall said that half of calls to front-line police now involve a complaint around social media, a statement that was swiftly picked up across other media outlets. But let’s be clear: social media crimes are not taking up 50 percent of police officers’ workload.

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Marshall said that crimes arising from social media were “a real problem,” and that’s no doubt true. But that “half” amount is a little more specific than some headlines would have you believe. In a statement sent to me (which I understand has been updated for clarification since the BBC report this morning), Marshall said that “Officers dealing with less serious crimes and anti-social behaviour might deal with a dozen calls in a typical day and they tell us that at least half of reports of this type, whether around abuse or threats of assault, may be related to Facebook, Twitter or other forms of social media.”

So what’s he’s actually saying is that around half of calls passed on to specific sections of front-line police—those dealing with low-level crimes like antisocial behaviour—involve social media. I called up the College of Policing and a spokesperson told me that these low-level crimes are on the level of things like graffiti (depending on the type of graffiti) and that special units deal with this kind of incident.

Those calls are also highly unlikely to all actually constitute a crime. The spokesperson I talked to emphasised that even if calls made to police units include a large amount of complaints involving social media, they likely wouldn’t contribute as much to an officer’s workload. If they clearly did not involve an actual crime, they could be quickly dismissed, and dealing with a Twitter argument isn’t going to take as many resources as dealing with a murder.

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That said, there are of course serious incidents in which behaviour on social media can constitute a crime—real threats, abuse and harassment—which require greater investigation. "If something is serious and someone is genuinely threatened, at risk or vulnerable, that's a serious issue that we need to take on,” said Marshall. “The challenge for officers is to establish what is a criminal act and what is not.”

The problem is that there’s still confusion around what actually constitutes a crime on social media. While “low-level” complaints are being lumped in with categories like antisocial behaviour, there’s little recognition of online behaviour under this criminal offence, which has a pretty flexible definition in the first place.

In the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014, “anti-social behaviour” is broadly described as “conduct that has caused, or is likely to cause, harassment, alarm or distress to any person,” with more details when the complaint involves housing.

The British Crime Survey suggests examples of public perceptions of what anti-social behaviour is, which include “noisy neighbours or loud parties,” “people using or dealing drugs,” and rather less convincingly “teenagers hanging around on the streets.” None of those seem particularly relevant to online crimes (and if you have a problem with teenagers “hanging around” on Twitter, I suggest you just save yourself the trouble and leave the platform).

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Despite confusion around the exact boundaries, incidents on social media that meet the requirements of existing criminal offences have undeniably gone up recently—a report at the end of 2012 noted a huge rise in over the past four years. But that’s entirely unsurprising given the increase in social media use for all purposes over that period.

What’s interesting to consider is whether the calls police are now getting should be considered a new type of crime, or whether it's just that more conventional means of committing an offence are being transferred to social media platforms. Do they represent additional crimes that wouldn't exist otherwise, or are they merely new ways of expressing crimes that would else have been conducted offline?

Marshall hints at the latter with his comment that, “As people have moved their shopping online and their communications online, they've also moved their insults, their abuse and their threats online, so many more police investigations are having an online element to them.”

I asked the College of Policing spokesperson if the overall number of calls for these kind of low-level antisocial crimes had gone up, or if those relating to social media were now just taking up a bigger portion of the pie. He was unable to give a clear answer—partly because social media crimes aren’t counted separately in any official figures—and said the college was looking to conduct further research into the phenomenon.

Anti-social behaviour on the whole doesn't appear to have increased over the past few years according to stats collated by the Economic Policy Centre, though the levels fluctuate quite a lot month on month and that only shows actual crimes, not all calls to police.

It’s wouldn’t be surprising that, as our lives shift online, so do our criminal habits. But we need to figure out exactly when social media becomes criminally anti-social in order to effectively pick legitimate crimes out from reports of online squabbles. And that’s something the public, as well as the authorities, needs to understand.

As Marshall put it, "Police officers can't deal with every bit of nonsense or disagreement that occurs on social media and there is a line that needs to be drawn." If someone unfriends you, don’t call the police.