Scotland Yard to open £2 million ‘thought police’ unit to hunt online bullies
Campaigners say the new drive undermines freedom of speech and have compared it to Orwell's classic 1984
SCOTLAND Yard is set to plough £2 million into a new "thought police" unit to target online trolls.
Police will rifle through comments made on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook in a bid to control online bullying.
Campaigners have slammed the new drive as an infringement on freedom of speech and compared it to Orwell's classic 1984.
An army of trained volunteers will flag up any comments they deem offensive on social media and police will then attempt to track down the culprits and prosecute them, the reports.
It is thought the force is spending £1.7 million setting up its Twitter squad, which will have five detectives.
Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron compared the team to brutal "thought police" from Orwell's 1984.
He said: "We want more police on the street, not thought police.
"Online bullying is an increasingly serious problem but police should not be proactively seeking cases like these and turning themselves into chatroom moderators.
"With such measures, even if well-intentioned, there is a real danger of undermining our very precious freedom of speech."
Scotland Yard set up the new drive in response to a surge in racist and sexist abuse online.
But while some trolls have been hunted down and jailed for online bullying - police also have a history of taking social media "jokes" too seriously.
Derbyshire Police visited the home of the Muslim Siddiqi family, who regularly appear on Gogglebox, after a photograph of them dressed in army-gear for a day paintballing was uploaded to Facebook with the caption "ISIS training day."
On another occasion police questioned mum-of-two Debra Burt after she wrote she wanted to throw an egg at David Cameron on a friend's Facebook page.
It is worried having a team of investigators looking into people's online comments could lead to further "jokes" being taken too seriously.
Robert Sharp, of the anti-censorship group English PEN, warned: "Threats of violence must of course be investigated and prosecuted, but police need to tread carefully."
Andrew Allison, of The Freedom Association liberation group, said: "There's a risk of online vigilantism, where people who are offended by the least thing will have a licence to report it to the police."
After forking out £1.7 million on setting up the Online Hate Crime Club, the Home Office is then set to pour an extra £452,756 into the drive - which will run for two years.
Volunteers will seek out bullying comments and pass information on to a detective inspector, detective sergeant and three detective constables.
Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook will be asked to cooperate with officers to help identify the trolls by paying volunteers.
The London Mayor's City Hall headquarters have advertised for a civilian programme manager to head up the project on a wage of £52,455.
Sadiq Khan's office is backing the new project as it believes "social media provides hate crime perpetrators with a veil of anonymity, making it harder to bring them to justice".
Almost half of hate crimes against Muslims and nearly one in five anti-Semitic incidents have occurred online.
There was a 42 per cent surge in reported hate crimes in the wake of the EU referendum.
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