Twitter users in the UK have been angry today over the conviction of a Doncaster (South Yorkshire) man who threatened to blow up Sheffield/Doncaster Robin Hood airport in a joke tweet.
His appeal against his conviction failed today and the 27-year old accountant is now the first person in the UK to be convicted of an offensive Tweet.
The verdict has caused a great deal of anger on Twitter with the hashtags #twitterjoketrial and #Iamspartacus (a reference to the 1960′s movie where slaves all stood up to claim they were Spartacus to protect him) and people are re-tweeting his original message.
I was appearing on BBC Radio Sheffield today, literally just down the road from Doncaster and Robin Hood Airport and was asked about the verdict. I believe that Paul Chambers, the man convicted, exercised poor judgement because, as I said on the radio, anything that’s written text has no context, i.e. you can’t look at their face to see if they’re being serious or not, and as such the context will always be assumed by the reader. If you’re interested the radio interview is available here http://www.thelongclimb.com/audio-video/BBC_Radio_Sheffield_12.11.2010.mp3.
Free speech advocates have called this censorship and have said the UK judiciary is “out of step” with social networking. The BBC reported The verdict demonstrates that the UK’s legal system has little respect for free expression, and has no understanding of how people communicate in the 21st Century,” said the organisation’s news editor Padraig Reidy. Though this is probably a exaggerating the facts a bit.
The plain truth in this is that UK law, and most other laws around the world, treat an offensive online message the same way they would a treat a threatening telephone call, and thus a man has been prosecuted.
Does UK law need to be amended to take into account social networking and communications in the 21st Century? That’s not for me to say, but it’s clear that a great many people don’t understand what the Internet really is and how it works. This poor man’s life and future career prospects are now threatened because something posted online can prove impossible to remove.
These two hashtags are still trending topics on Twitter tonight in the UK and it is clear that a debate needs to be had to clarify for the public exactly where the law intends to stand in the future.
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Mr Chambers is a bloody fool – but not as big a fool as the UK legal system, which like almost everything else in Banana Republic UK Plc has been overtaken by the jobsworth culture – common sense, initiative and discretion are foreign to these clones.
I’ve a feeling the social-network reaction to this verdict may have the establishment wishing they’d had the sense to quietly bury this affair.