More than 1,000 hate speech comments are posted in Greek on Cypriot online sites every 24 hours, House human rights committee chair Christos Christofides said on Monday.

He told the committee that 48 per cent of the comments contained Nazi content, 21 per cent involved Holocaust denial or distortion, 11 per cent were homophobic and 10 per cent targeted refugees, yet despite the amount of comments, prosecutions remain rare.

Head of the police cybercrime unit Andreas Anastasiades said two officers per district had been assigned to cases involving incitement to violence online or offline, though no dedicated unit exists for the issue.

Cyprus recorded 57 hate speech incidents in 2023, of which 32 led to criminal cases.

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In 2024 there were 54 incidents and 30 criminal cases, falling to 44 incidents and 18 criminal cases in 2025.

Anastasiades said police pursuing anonymous accounts must request identifying details from companies based in the United States, a process he described as time consuming, with accounts frequently difficult to close.

“The companies reply that it’s ‘freedom of expression’ and refuse to close the account, while they often tell us that a VPN is being used and the user cannot be traced,” he said.

Representing the justice ministry, Anthi Papoutsidou said hate speech appears online, in workplaces and in daily life, with vulnerable people usually the target.

She said Cyprus had introduced several laws on the issue, most recently last year, alongside a national strategy adopted in 2021 covering racism and violence against women.

Papoutisdou said cabinet had approved a plan launched by the deputy research ministry to protect minors that would restrict access to social media to those aged 15 and under, alongside a regulatory instrument, an age verification tool.

Journalist’s union president (ESK) Giorgos Frangos said the union had intervened in 26 cases of threats against journalists over the past decade, six of which involved threats to life.

He said journalistic content needed to be clearly separated from other online speech, recalling public opposition in 2023 to a proposed defamation law that was ultimately withdrawn.

“In the effort to control hate speech, journalism should not be put on hold and the criticism it makes should not be censored,” he stressed.

Director of the radio and television authority (CRTA), Irini Loizidou Nikolaidou said the authority currently has oversight of 117 online platforms based in Cyprus, while responsibility for larger international platforms such as YouTube and Facebook rests with the European Commission.