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More than 1,100 people have been charged in connection to the summer 2024 riots. A small number of them were charged for offences related to their online activity.

Their jail sentences – which ranged from 12 weeks to seven years – became a flashpoint for online criticism. The people behind the posts were variously defended, held up as a cause célèbre and cast as “political prisoners”; their posts minimised and repeated; their prosecution misrepresented as an attack on free speech (the majority of those prosecuted for online offences faced charges of stirring up racial hatred).

Accuracy (percentage of correctly classified instances): 94.7%.

Precision (percentage of times the True labels assigned by GPT are correct): 79.5.

Recall (percentage of instances classified as True by the humans that were also classified as True by GPT): 86.1%.

F1 (a single percentage that combines precision and recall, higher when GPT both finds the True cases and avoids false alarms): 82.6%.