PEOPLE in Swindon must not be afraid to report online abuse, Wiltshire Police have stressed.

It comes after recent news that online hate crimes are to be treated as seriously as abuse committed face-to-face.

Under new guidelines issued by the Crown Prosecution Service, people are being encouraged to report to the police any abuse they receive on the internet.

The CPS claimed the impact of tweeting abuse can be as “equally devastating” as shouting it.

As a result, the Wiltshire force has promised to clamp down on web-based hate crime.

Adrian Burt, the force’s superintendent head of crime standards and justice, said: “Wiltshire Police encourages the reporting of all forms of hate crime. Online abuse has as significant an impact on victims and witnesses as any other form of hate crime.

“As part of a multi-agency joined up approach, the Wiltshire and Swindon Hate Crime Group was formed to develop a collaborative approach to increase awareness, promote community cohesion, increase reporting of all forms of hate crimes and incidents and improve the response to hate crime; the Crown Prosecution Service are a key member of this group.

“We encourage anyone that either experiences hostility towards themselves or witnesses hostility in any form to report it.

“While some people are reluctant to report hate crimes and incidents, we would like to reassure the public that we want to hear from you. Without your information we are unable to truly identify the scale of the issues faced by our communities and are therefore unable to respond appropriately.

“Every report is taken seriously and could help to stop you and others suffering from hate crime.”

However, it is not entirely clear as to just what would constitute an online hate crime.

Writing in the Sun, Brendan O’Neill, editor of free speech website spiked-online.com, described the new guidelines as “Stalinist” and claimed the CPS had opened up “a Pandora’s Box of authoritarianism”.

But the CPS have made it clear that prosecutions for online hate crime will not be as easy as some people might assume.

The guidelines read: “There is a high threshold that must be met before the evidential stage in the Code for Crown Prosecutors. Furthermore, even if the high threshold is met, in many cases a prosecution is unlikely to be required in the public interest.”

South Swindon MP Robert Buckland said: “Hate crime can have a deep and long lasting effect on victims.”

He urged people not to “suffer in silence,” but to “come forward and talk to the police, your friends and family or other agencies” in a bid to “take action against hate crime”.