Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many cases of online abuse on (a) Facebook, (b) Twitter and (c) all other social media have been reported to the police since 2010.

The Home Office do not hold the information requested.

However, we have introduced an ‘online flag’ as part of the police recorded crime data collection. This allows police forces to record online instances of abuse and other crimes such as stalking, harassment, sexual offences and others. These offences could have taken place solely online, or had an online element to them. These data are currently still in development but will be published in due course. However, it will not be possible to split the data according to type of social media used (if any).