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发帖数: 27535 | 1 LONDON (AP) — What's a tweet, between friends? The law says sometimes it's
a threat.
One man thought he was just bantering with his pals when he joked about
blowing an airport sky-high. Another was reacting to a radio phone-in when
he mused about stoning a journalist to death.
Because they made their throwaway comments on Twitter, both are in legal
trouble.
Their cases have outraged civil libertarians and inflamed the debate about
the limits of free speech in a Web 2.0 world. The Internet increasingly
makes private jokes, tastes and opinions available for public consumption,
blurring the line between public and private in a way that has left the law
struggling to keep up.
"I think people don't have any idea of the potential legal ramifications of
things they post on the Internet," said Gregor Pryor, a digital media lawyer
at Reed Smith in London. "Anything you post on Twitter can come back and
haunt you."
Paul Chambers found that out with a vengeance. The 27-year-old trainee
accountant was convicted and fined after tweeting in January that he'd blow
up Robin Hood Airport in northern England if his flight was delayed.
Chambers — who lost his job and faces several thousand pounds (dollars) in
legal costs — said Monday that he has instructed his lawyers to take his
case to the High Court, setting the stage for a major test of free speech
online.
"Probably to the detriment of my mental well-being, I am appealing the
decision as best I can," Chambers tweeted Monday.
Chambers is already an online cause celebre. After he lost an appeal earlier
this month, thousands of Twitter users repeated his offending message — "
Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week ... otherwise I'm blowing
the airport sky high!" They added the tag "I Am Spartacus" — a reference to
the 1960 movie epic in which the titular hero's fellow rebels all assume
his identity in a gesture of solidarity.
To many Twittizens, the outrage is obvious — Chambers was no threat to
anyone, just a frustrated traveler blowing off steam.
"It's worrying," said Evan Harris, a former British lawmaker and free-speech
campaigner. "The judgment seemed to misunderstand that something said
across Twitter was not a serious threat. This is not the mode of choice for
any suicidal jihadist."
Twitter, he said, "is like chat in a pub."
"There is sarcasm in the pub," he said. "There is sarcasm on Twitter, which
is understood by everyone on Twitter — but not by that judge."
But others argue that it's not so simple.
The judge who rejected Chambers' appeal, Jacqueline Davies, said that "in
the context of the times in which we live," with an ever-present threat from
terrorism, Chambers' message was "obviously menacing."
Another ill-fated tweeter has received less sympathy than Chambers. Gareth
Compton, a Conservative councilor in the English city of Birmingham, was
arrested this month on suspicion of sending an "offensive or indecent
message" after tweeting an invitation for a journalist to be stoned to death
— a comment he insists was a joke.
The subject of his tweet, newspaper columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, reported
him to police. He was arrested and questioned, but has not been charged. He
later released an apology for his "ill-conceived attempt at humor."
Sympathy for Compton was relatively muted. Liberal Twitterites may have felt
less comfortable supporting a Tory politician who'd attacked a Muslim woman.
But Harris said Compton's arrest is equally unfair. He said Compton's
message — "Can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan't
tell Amnesty if you don't" — was "obviously not a serious menace."
Legal experts agree that the law is not keeping up with technology and the
ways it is changing communication. Chambers was convicted of sending
menacing electronic communication, under legislation originally introduced
to protect telephone operators from indecent calls.
Many people have learned that unguarded online comments can be embarrassing.
Just ask Peter Broadbent, the Church of England Bishop of Willesden, who
apologized Monday for greeting news of the engagement of Prince William and
Kate Middleton with a tweet about taking a "republican day trip to France."
Broadbent apologized and said he'd been unwise to get into a debate "on a
semi-public Internet forum," but his boss, the Bishop of London, said
Tuesday that he was being suspended from public duties "until further notice
."
Around the world similar cases, though in different contexts, are testing
the limits of what can be said online.
In China, where the Internet is restricted and Twitter is blocked, a woman
was recently sentenced to a year in a labor camp for "disrupting social
order" by retweeting a satirical message urging Chinese protesters to smash
the Japan pavilion at the Shanghai Expo. Her supporters said the retweet was
meant as satire.
In the United States — where the First Amendment right to freedom of speech
is seen as a beacon by British civil libertarians — the National Labor
Relations Board is challenging a case in which it claims an ambulance worker
was fired for criticizing her boss on Facebook. The board's lawyer said
such comments are "the same as talking at the water cooler," and so
protected by law.
Pryor said such cases show that the legal balance between freedom and
responsibility is still being worked out.
Julian Glover, an editorial writer with the Guardian newspaper, thinks it
will be a while before things settle down.
The Internet, he wrote recently, is a "life-changing invention that will
take time to develop civilized rules of its own" — just as automobiles were
followed by highways and then, after time and pileups, by speed limits.
"The Internet is nearing its speed-limit stage," Glover wrote. "We can't
guess where this will end, only that the skirmishes have only just begun." |
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