Online abuse to be treated as seriously as offline abuse in Britain

Online abuse will be treated as seriously as offline offences, Britain’s prosecution service said on 21 August in new guidance on handling **hate crimes** .

[caption id=“attachment_3956319” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Reuters[/caption]

The rules, which included guidelines on helping disabled and bisexual victims, were meant to encourage more people to come forward and press courts to impose longer sentences, the Crown Prosecution Service said.

“This is a crime that’s under-reported. Sometimes people feel that they just have to put up with it … That’s absolutely not the case,” Alison Saunders, the director of public prosecutions, told the BBC.

The new advice was in response to the growth of social media, the CPS said. There have been several high-profile instances of successful prosecutions of people who had abused lawmakers and other public figures online.

This news comes after on 20 August a report came where a **Google website** using artificial intelligence showed hate crime is more rampant in US.

Google had launched The Documenting Hate News Index in partnership with its News Lab and the data visualisation studio Pitch Interactive, collecting news reports on hate incidents and makes them searchable by name, topic and date, Fortune reported.

The AI-based Google website uses machine learning to understand both the content of news reports about hate crimes and subtler things like intent and sentiment.

With inputs from IANS