How many people were prosecuted for online hate speech in the UK in 2024?

1. No neat number: official statistics don’t single out “online” prosecutions

National statistics for hate crime and criminal justice performance focus on recorded offences, prosecutions and convictions across jurisdictions (England & Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) but the supplied government and Commons Library materials present hate crime prosecutions in aggregate and do not publish a separate, validated count solely for prosecutions that originated from online messages in 2024 ^{[1] [5]}. The Crown Prosecution Service explains it decides which cases go to court and can apply hate crime sentence uplifts, but the CPS pages in these results do not provide a single nationwide tally for “online” prosecutions in 2024 ^[2].

2. Policy and law treat online and offline hate the same — which complicates counting

The CPS and other agencies have explicitly stated that offences committed online are to be treated no differently from offline offences; guidance and policy updates over recent years encourage prosecutors to take online abuse seriously, which means many hate prosecutions are classed simply as hate crime prosecutions regardless of medium, making it difficult to extract an “online-only” number from standard statistics ^{[3] [2]}.

3. New laws and guidance in 2024 reshaped the landscape but not the statistics

Two legal changes in 2024 changed how online harms are regulated: the Online Safety Act came into force and Scotland implemented its Hate Crime and Public Order Act provisions on 1 April 2024; prosecution guidance was updated in 2024 and October 2024 in different UK jurisdictions — steps that increase scrutiny of online speech but do not, in the sources provided, include a discrete prosecution tally for online hate speech in that year ^{[6] [7] [8]}.

4. Civil society and advocacy groups flag high enforcement activity — arrests vs prosecutions

Independent groups and free‑speech advocates have published figures suggesting very active policing of online speech — for example, reporting that police made “more than 30 arrests a day” for offensive online messages in data they compiled — but these reports focus on arrests and FOI outreach rather than final prosecutions and acknowledge incomplete responses from police forces, limiting reliability as a national prosecution count ^[4]. Arrest numbers are not the same as prosecutions; available sources do not provide a confirmed conversion rate to prosecutions for 2024 (not found in current reporting).

5. What the Commons Library and official datasets do provide

Parliamentary research and Home Office/ONS-style outputs supply overall hate crime statistics and note prosecution/conviction strands and trends (Commons Library summary Jan 2024; Home Office hate crime publication), including that racially motivated offences form the majority of hate crime; these sources are useful for context about volume and types of hate crime but they do not parse out “online” origin prosecutions in the material provided ^{[5] [1]}.

6. Two competing interpretations in reporting

Prosecutors and official bodies present a view that online hate should be prosecuted seriously and consistently with offline offences ^{[2] [3]}. Civil liberties groups warn of over‑policing online speech and cite high arrest figures and vague law as causes for concern ^[4]. Both positions appear in the supplied sources; neither provides a definitive national prosecution count for online-only hate speech in 2024 ^{[2] [4]}.

7. Bottom line and how you can verify a precise number

Based on the supplied reporting, you cannot cite a single, authoritative figure for the number of people prosecuted specifically for online hate speech in the UK in 2024 because official published statistics aggregate hate crime prosecutions without consistently marking the medium of the offending communication; specialised FOI requests to police forces or the CPS, or a bespoke breakdown in future CPS/HMCTS datasets, would be necessary to produce a reliable nationwide prosecution total for online-origin offences ^{[1] [2] [4]}.