UK.gov To Treat Online Abuse as Seriously as Hate Crime in Real Life (theregister.co.uk)

The UK's Crown Prosecution Service has pledged to tackle online abuse with the same seriousness as it does hate crimes committed in the flesh. From a report: Following public concern about the increasing amount of racist, anti-religious, homophobic and transphobic attacks on social media, the CPS has today published a new set of policy documents on hate crime. This includes revised legal guidance for prosecutors on how they should make decisions on criminal charges and handle cases in court. The rules officially put online abuse on the same level as offline hate crimes -- defined as an action motivated by hostility or prejudice -- like shouting abuse at someone face-to-face. They commit the CPS to prosecuting complaints about online material "with the same robust and proactive approach used with online offending." Prosecutors are told to consider the effect on the wider community and whether to identify both the originators and the "amplifiers or disseminators."

Comments

Re:Good, nazis need to pay

[MightyMartian]

Since when did being Neo-Nazi get downgraded to merely a "political opinion"? I'm fascinated by the efforts by some of the Alt-right and their fellow travelers to basically rehabilitate Nazism. I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to defend, overtly or tacitly, an ideology that is based upon racial superiority and cleansing a polity of certain ethno-religious groups. This normalization of Nazism as if it were the equivalent of say, Marxism, has me shaking my head. Marxism has its flaws, dire and numerous, but it certainly is not a nationalistic or racist ideology, just a terribly naive ideology. Nazism, white supremacy and white nationalism, on the other hand, ARE specifically racist ideologies, and I'd argue they are all the same ideology, it's just that the white nationalists have learned to couch their white supremacy and racism in clever terms like "European culture" and "immigrants", rather than outright saying the Aryans are the master race and the brown skinned people should either be eliminated, enslaved or exiled.