Remember the
case of Paul Chambers? He was the tweeter who ended up in court because Robin Hood
Airport was closed!
He had to
fight his way through two appeals before it was accepted that his comment was
no more than a harmless joke.
More
recently there has been the more difficult case of the comments made about
diving star Tom Daley. The offending tweet was posted by a football player. It
was homophobic and offensive but never intended for a wide audience. It
ended up being read by thousands. He has been told that he will not face
prosecution because it had never been intended to reach the diver, and he had apologised. Apparently Daley himself had stated that he did not
think criminal proceedings were necessary.
So it is
all very confusing. You might be dragged into court for saying you will blow up
an airport but not for sending an offensive, homophobic tweet.
The
Director of Prosecutions has now announced that he is to issue guidelines about
what might or might not lead to criminal proceedings. Kier Starmer has
acknowledged that there are millions of posts each day and that communication
is almost instant. There are to be interim guidelines followed by a full
consultation process.
This should
make things a bit clearer but social networking is so vast it is difficult to
see how it can be properly policed.
Of course
the easiest answer to the problem is to be very careful what you tweet. If you
stop and think that this could be read by half the population – whether you
mean it to or not – then that can concentrate the mind.
Think
before you tweet is the best guidance there is.
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