Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to help protect (a) police officers, (b) immigration officers and (c) other public sector workers from online harassment by people who film and publish deliberately confrontational encounters with them on social media platforms.

Nobody should face harassment in person, on social media or anywhere online.

The Online Safety Act (OSA) introduced a number of communication offences, including the false communications offence and which could include videos uploaded online. This offence captures communications where the individual knows the information to be false but sends it intending to cause harm, or intending for it to cause non-trivial psychological or physical harm to a likely audience.

The Act requires services, including social media platforms, to implement robust measures to reduce the risks that users post illegal content, and to reduce the risk of users coming across this content. Moreover, platforms should also have their own terms, community guidelines or options for people to submit complaints to them and potentially have content removed, even if it may not be in breach of the Online Safety Act.

Anybody who believes online material may be in breach of the Online Safety Act or falls short of the social media provider’s policies should report it to the relevant company. We expect companies to take their legal obligations seriously.

It is a criminal offence to engage in behaviour that intentionally causes another person harassment, alarm, or distress, or for a person to pursue a course of conduct which amounts to harassment. In some circumstances, the repeated filming of an individual could be captured under these offences. It is for the police to decide whether a particular offence applies in any given circumstance.