"You are free to tweet - he is free to sue you" Topic

Part of the fallout in the UK from a rather nasty scandal is this stance on Twitter usage :

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He's got a list of 10,000 twitter uses he expects to apologise and also make a financial settlement :

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Looking for a nominal £5.00 GBP from nobodies, and a bit more from those with tens of thousands of followers.

Too many people seem to think that free speech includes immunity to libel or slander suits.

They interviewed his lawyer the other day on the flagship morning BBC radio news show – very calm, and very certain (near as I can recall a verbatim quote) :

"we have a list and we we will get to you eventually. It would save time and your money if you just contact us now and settle out of court"

Seemed to be content to have 10,000 people to pursue.

Could well be the first of many such responses I'd guess. Better than going and crying to the newspapers.

The lawyers win again…

Good luck if some of the tweeters don't happen to live under whatever Libel law England uses…

English law is the basis of law in many nations around the world (including the US). He might indeed be able to press the case even outside the UK and the Commonwealth.

Really, this is an eye-opening case. Makes you think about the sort of flippant things you might post online. Whether posting, tweeting, blogging, facebooking or whatever, it legally counts as publishing (you are disseminating your words to the public), and therefore libel laws do apply to your words. Of course, in the US at least there are allowances for comments regarding public figures, which places a higher burden on someone like a politician as to what constitutes a viable claim. But that doesn't mean that certain circumstances would not meet such a standard— I would think accusations such as were raised against this man would indeed be sufficient cause.

So, watch what you tweet. If it ain't true, or you can't prove it, best to keep silent.

Agree with Parzival, this is a landmark case in the UK (and the rest of the world) as it will set a precident on publishing stuff through internet media.

I don't know what the situation in the States is, but recently in the UK we have had a number of 'Trial by Twitter' cases where people have been so heavily attacked using internet media that it has either resulted in the person's reputation being completely destroyed (when they subsequently proved to be entirely innocent) and in one case recently (wish I could remember the details), the case effectively fell apart because the amount of vitriol online about the defendent (who was pretty much bang to rights) meant that the case has been unfairly prejudiced and therefore a fair trial was impossible.

We've also had multiple recent cases where the cases have fallen apart because a juror was in contact with/did independent research on the defendant and therefore prejudiced the case.

If Lord McAlpine wins (and I hope he does) against the likes of Sally Bercow, then it will be a very good thing as it will send a message that you should be sure of your facts before you publish, and that publicly attacking someone in the way she frequently does and then claiming it was 'merely banter' is not acceptable.

The banter defence does seem weak when you have 50,000 followers like she does – and even worse for the likes of Alan Davies with getting on for half a million.

Interestingly he got a settlement from the BBC, even though they didn't name him at any point.

I feel quite sorry for the BBC – they got a lot of stick for not running a story a year ago that they couldn't prove….and it rather sounds as if they jumped the gun a lot on this one so as to avoid another kicking for being slow.