You Fight Twitter At Your Peril
It has been reported on the BBC that South Tyneside Council have obtained an order in a US Court to indicate who has been posting possibly defamatory statements about councillors and officials.
Type the name of the poster into Twitter and you’ll find a large amount of posts about the postings, most of which support the poster of the statements.
This one will run and run and the only winners will be the lawyers. When do people realise, that if you’re in a hole, the first thing you do is to stop digging.
I can envisage something like this happening in the not too distant future.
- Parliament passes a law that says that anybody who tweets about a superinjunction will feel the full force of the law.
- Someone important billionaire, who has done something he doesn’t want in the papers obtains a superinjunction.
- It is published on Twitter.
- The tweeter gets found guilty, but continues to tweet about the case.
- He goes to jail.
- Others would then tweet the story and be arrested.
So what do we do if hundreds of thousands needed to go to jail?
The Anonymous Widower 
It looks like South Tyneside have won the argument rather easily. Tweeters are still subject to the laws of libel and Twitter is considered as a publisher. If many people break the law then they are all guilty. How the police/judiciary deal with it is another matter. I don’t think it matters that someone anonymous tweets a libelous statement, providing that there is no loss by the person libeled (sticks and stones, etc,). Nor do I think it is the business of a public authority to take action on behalf of its employees. Perhaps the simple solution would be for Twitter to remove any libelous tweets and ban the tweeter. I know they could sign up again using another email address, but how many times would someone be bothered to do that.
Comment by John Wright | May 30, 2011 |
It’s at times like this I need C. She did her pupilage in the top defamation chambers at the time, and felt to sue for it was always a waste of time and money. The trouble is that defamation laws are being used to stifle free speech and more importantly scientific correctness. If we don’t watch it, saying that there is no God could be a libel in certain circumstances.
Comment by AnonW | May 30, 2011 |