How many prosecutions and convictions followed online hate-speech arrests in England and Wales in 2024?

1. Context: how the system counts “hate” and where online speech sits

Hate crime in England and Wales is defined by motive — any criminal offence perceived to be motivated by hostility toward a protected characteristic — but a recorded hate incident is not automatically a prosecuted hate crime and the statistics published by police and the CPS do not isolate “online” as a neat, reportable channel for every recorded incident or arrest (Home Office / gov.uk guidance) ^[1]. The CPS prosecutes offences under multiple statutes — from racial and religious hatred to communications offences such as section 127 of the Communications Act and the Malicious Communications Act — and its published hate-crime prosecution figures cover prosecutorial outcomes for hate-motivated offences generally rather than only online-originating conduct ^{[1] [4]}.

2. The headline prosecution and conviction figures for hate crime (year to March 2024)

The CPS reported that, in the 12 months to March 2024, it prosecuted 10,950 hate crime cases in England and Wales and secured convictions in “more than 85 per cent” of those prosecutions — which the CPS quantified as 9,340 convicted cases in that period ^[2]. Those numbers are the clearest official prosecution and conviction counts for hate crime over that reporting year, but they are not limited to offences that began with an “online” arrest or were restricted to online-only conduct ^[2].

3. Newer Online Safety Act prosecutions and convictions from 2024

Separately, prosecutions under parts of the Online Safety Act that criminalise certain online communications began to generate cases in 2024 and early 2025; reporting from a civil liberties group stated nearly 300 people had been charged with offences under the Act (including false or threatening communications) and that “dozens” — specifically cited as 67 convictions — had been recorded under the Act’s provisions by early 2025 ^[3]. Those figures indicate a distinct stream of online-speech-focused prosecutions and convictions that post-dates or overlaps the 2023–24 CPS hate crime reporting year, but the Online Safety Act totals are reported separately from the CPS’s hate-crime prosecution count ^[3].

4. Gaps, ambiguities and competing narratives

Public reporting and parliamentary briefings show rising enforcement attention to online communications offences and point to tensions with free-speech advocates, but the datasets do not connect a clear chain from “online arrest” → “hate-speech charge” → “prosecution outcome” across official publications; police-recorded hate incidents for 2023/24 numbered 140,561, but that figure does not specify how many arose from online posts or resulted in arrests, prosecutions or convictions specifically for online speech ^{[5] [1]}. Independent commentators and organisations emphasise that prosecutorial guidance requires proportionality and evidential thresholds, and press coverage highlights debates about whether some communications arrests reflect necessary enforcement or overreach — a dispute visible in reviews and analysis but not resolved by the raw numbers ^{[4] [6]}.

5. Direct answer and interpretation

Directly answering the question as phrased: there is no single official count that identifies prosecutions and convictions that followed only “online hate-speech arrests” in 2024; the nearest authoritative figures are that the CPS prosecuted 10,950 hate crime cases and recorded about 9,340 convictions in the year to March 2024 (which include in-person and online-origin cases but are not disaggregated by channel) ^[2], and separate reporting on the Online Safety Act records nearly 300 charges and 67 convictions under that Act’s online-communications offences by early 2025 ^[3]. Any precise statement linking only online-origin arrests in 2024 to a prosecution/conviction tally cannot be supported from the sources provided because official datasets do not break outcomes down by “online arrest” as the initiating category ^{[1] [2] [3]}.