Be care what you tweet! Defamation case

[AdminAdmin is verified member.]

High Court: Sally Bercow's Lord McAlpine tweet was libel

A tweet published by Sally Bercow about Tory peer Lord McAlpine was libellous, the High Court has ruled. Mrs Bercow said her tweet was meant to be "conversational and mischievous".

Mrs Bercow tweeted: "Why is "the complainant" trending. *innocent face*."

She settled his claim as did the BBC, for £185,000

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-22652083

Be careful what you tweet, those few text characters could cost you!

Admin

 

[MikeJDS]

Even jokes can land you in trouble..
Crazy bandwagon!

Just been reading this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-22639720

 

[EdwinEdwin is verified member.]

Some of these cases are a bit extreme, but it's about time something pulled the fangs of the cyberbullies. The "anonymity" and depersonalisation afforded by the online medium are not valid excuses for abusive behaviour.

 

[namealot]

More a case of what legal jurisdiction you are in so you can tweet what you like in x but not in Y there's democracy and free speech for you?

 

[EdwinEdwin is verified member.]

More a case of what legal jurisdiction you are in so you can tweet what you like in x but not in Y there's democracy and free speech for you?

I imagine we'll start to see "libel holidays" (i.e. foreign entities bringing cases to the UK to take advantage of our libel laws) taken against tweets at some point, if people sense the potential damages are worth the expense/effort. And once that happens, the concept of "free speech" in the "hey, I can say EXACTLY what I like" goes away...

 

[websaway]

You can say anything you like as long as you stay within the legal limits .
Its the same as in the physical world, you can do as you like so long as you don't break the law. People just need to think about what they are saying, the audience is unimaginably wide and there is of course a price to pay for that.
If people want to go down the pub and act libelous then they will mostly get away with saying anything but the internet reaches out to far too many people to permit that to continue online.

 

[AdminAdmin is verified member.]

I agree but IMO what she wrote wasn't that obvious unless you had been following what was going on in the news around the same time and put 2 and 2 together.

Admin