Two years and nine months: that’s the period of time from my arrest for a tweet — the first of its kind at the time in the UK — to yesterday’s statement by the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) in relation to a homophobic tweet sent to Tom Daley earlier this year. Having taken the decision not to prosecute Daniel Thomas, Keir Starmer QC has decided this is the time to apply common sense to social media, and to issue guidelines for prosecutors, hopefully to avoid frivolous and nonsensical prosecutions in the future. That’s great. Really great. Its what we all fought for, and it is only right. (more…)
The Director of Public Prosecutions has announced a consultation to establish clear guidelines on prosecutions involving social media . In a statement on The Crown Prosecution Service website announcing that footballer Daniel Thomas — investigated for allegedly homophobic tweets about Olympic divers Tom Daley and Peter Waterfield — will not be prosecuted, Keir Starmer QC said:
“To ensure that CPS decision-making in these difficult cases is clear and consistent, I intend to issue guidelines on social media cases for prosecutors. These will assist them in deciding whether criminal charges should be brought in the cases that arise for their consideration. In the first instance, the CPS will draft interim guidelines. There will then be a wide public consultation before final guidelines are published. As part of that process, I intend to hold a series of roundtable meetings with campaigners, media lawyers, academics, social media experts and law enforcement bodies to ensure that the guidelines are as fully informed as possible.”
Starmer and the CPS faced severe criticism for the handling of Paul Chambers’s “Twitter joke trial“. Chambers, who was found guilty of sending a “menacing communication” after he joked about blowing up Robin Hood Airport in Doncaster, had his conviction overturned in July of this year.
It emerged today that a man has been arrested under the Communications Act 2003 for allegedly setting up a Facebook page praising Dale Cregan, the Manchester man accused of killing two police officers.
Paul Chambers, the man at the centre of the “Twitter Joke Trial”, has had a torrid two-and-a-half-years since he joked that he would blow Robin Hood airport “sky high”. He was back in court on Wednesday. This Al Jazeera report sums up the issue nicely.
Anyway, in spite of his woes, Paul hasn’t lost his sense of humour, as demonstrated on Twitter last night. Former Conservative minister Edwina Currie, discussing the case on Twitter, wrote: “I’m blowing the airport sky high” is not a metaphor. Can be construed as a threat. [Chambers] was a damn fool, paid dearly for it.”
Clear cut then: making what are obviously jokey “threats” on Twitter is the action of a damn fool. But it didn’t take long for damn-fool Chambers to dig up this tweet from Edwina Currie herself: “oh I’d shoot tax exiles! When they need high quality health care they’re back in the UK double quick. Never make connection”.
This is funny, but it does illustrate the whole problem of the Twitter Joke Trial: everyone uses over-the-top language, and we often express our anger, outrage and frustration with words alluding to violence. What’s happening to Paul Chambers could happen to any of us, even Edwina Currie.
The pile-up of the news agenda led to something quite odd this week. On Monday, Frank Zimmerman was given a suspended jail sentence for sending abusive, threatening emails to MP Louise Mensch among others.
On Tuesday, the defamation bill had its second reading in parliament.
Somehow, the two issues were treated as one.
The cause of the apparent confusion was clause 5 of the defamation bill, which many represented as forcing Internet Service Providers to hand over details of anonymous “trolls”. This despite the fact that, as Labour’s Sadiq Khan pointed out in the Commons debate, Clause 5 specifically relates to libel and not general cases. Julian Huppert, the Liberal Democrat MP, stressed that any steps concerning ISPs and anonymous posts should be voluntary (a concern shared by Index). The guidelines on these steps have not yet appeared, quite probably because they have not been drafted yet.
The term troll seems now to mean “anyone saying anything unpleasant on the internet”. But that simply isn’t correct. Trolling is the deliberate use of inflammatory language in order to provoke a reaction on a message board, or, increasingly, on a social media network. Sending emails to someone threatening to kill their children (which is what Frank Zimmerman did) is not trolling. Nor is it defamation. It is harassment, and already illegal under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 — a law that has its problems, as Paul Chambers of the Twitter Joke Trial will tell you — but is designed for this sort of thing.
Trolling is an issue on the web, as is bullying and harassment. But to conflate either with the matter of libel reform is to seriously confuse the issues.
Update 13/06/12 : The Commons debate on the defamation bill is online now, and worth watching, if only to see how so many issues got thrown into the mix that had absolutely nothing to do with libel. The tone was set by the Democratic Unionist Party’s Ian Paisley Jr, Conservative Nadine Dorries and Labour MP Steve Rotheram, who brought not just what they perceived as “trolling” into the mix, but also, in Dorries case, even alleged copycat suicide groups. Rotheram, bafflingly, warned the house of “professional trolls” learning their trade at “troll academy” (no, me neither).
There’s something about the web that brings out an extraordinary level of somethingmustbedonery in a certain type of politician. As has been remarked on this blog many times, the knowledge that it is possible to shut down or block a website or web page easily seems to make some people think that it is also desirable, and a simple solution that does not seem to carry any of the qualms that, say, supressing the publication of a book would. This view covers not just the illegal but also the merely unpleasant.
