A recent High Court judgement didn’t seem to get much attention. Paul Chambers, who had been found guilty of sending a menacing tweet in which he joked about blowing up East Midlands Airport, had his appeal upheld.
In their judgement, the Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, Mr Justice Owen and Mr Justice Griffith Williams delivered some welcome and sane clarification on the status of a tweet
Tweets’ include expressions of opinion, assertions of fact, gossip, jokes (bad ones as well as good ones), descriptions of what the user is or has been doing, or where he has been, or intends to go. Effectively it may communicate any information at all that the user wishes to send, and for some users, at any rate, it represents no more and no less than conversation without speech.
Barely week later we see the same ‘mix of rage, portentousness and crassness that is the hallmark of the medium’ (as John Kampfner in the Guardian put it) in the wake of some ill-considered but highly publicised tweets about Olympic diver Tom Daley.
As Kampfner puts it: ‘The best response to cruel, offensive or disgusting tweets, like the one about Tom Daley’s father, is simply to ignore them’.
I don’t think this gives carte blanch to say whatever you like on Twitter: civil law on libel and defamation still applies, as does criminal law on discrimination, but the judgement does suggest that the police and courts ought to be able to distinguish between direct incitement to violence and ‘frustrated silliness’.
Bit late to this post – but a discussion today prompted me to come back to it.
Anyway – Graham Linehan (writer of Father Ted and IT crowd, as well as social media commentator, @glinner on twitter) wrote this about the ‘just ignore it’ response:
http://glinner.posterous.com/150341452
several (particularly female) bloggers have come out about the horrific levels of abuse that they are subject to online, ‘just ignore it’ really isn’t a solution.
Thanks Gavin – I don’t think anyone is saying ‘just ignore it’ is of itself a solution. Rather it’s a wise first response as the abuse may go away. If it does not, then the response should escalate to the point where legal intervention might be necessary. I think the point that Kampfner is making is that law enforcement should try to exercise common sense in deciding when a comment is ‘frustrated silliness’ or a real threat (as in the East Midlands Airport case).
On a personal level i think that’s right. But we know that the impacts of bullying in the face to face world vary dramatically and so we can expect that the impact of ‘virtual violence’ will also vary.
a couple of points – if we think that social media is here to stay (and i do):
personal use – it kind of defeats one of the purposes if social media becomes the preserve of the confident and thick skinned – some of the comments on the Kampfner article suggest just this. Perhaps not in the same league, but that to me is like saying, ‘don’t come to a Bernard Manning gig if you can’t handle a bit of ‘banter”
Business use – how do we decide if a comment is constructive criticism or abuse?
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