Interesting case: drunken tweet to a small follower count, deleted after 20 minutes, leading to prosecution and conviction. The Online Safety Bill which is due to be passed, with further empower institutions to police 'harmful messages'. I guess ideological conformity is a good thing for stable society?
It’s also disturbing that the police complains it is not given the means to combat knife crime but thinks it is a good use of their resource to police politeness on twitter.
What is typical for organization like police is that they prioritize things that gets the best statistics in a spreadsheet, not the best result for society.
Which only shows their activities are graded with wrong criteria. But as we all know from office life, picking valid criteria for performance ratings is an adventure by itself...
Are the police really motivated by this? Or are specific senior figures who are in they public eye and thus don’t want their “reputation” shamed on social media the real individuals pushing for these kinds of legislation?
I’d wager most police officers couldn’t give a rats arse what someone posts online given the barrage of verbal abuse they likely get each day. They would much rather see the streets safer.
The police like to chase easy targets and social media offers up lots of opportunities to prove how well they are doing their job.
The only people who are scared of the police in the UK are middle class, normally law abiding citizens. One minor slip-up and they will be on you like a ton of bricks.
Yeah, they really like their soft targets, don't they? On the other hand, a gathering of young men who believably signal that they're totally down for a bit of street violence, now that's not such an attractive target to confront.
The fact he was drunk doesn't really have much to do with it. It wouldn't be an excuse for running somebody down in his car or stabbing someone and shouldn't be here.
Drunk in charge of a communications device is hardly on the same scale as driving a vehicle. One is likely to cause actual bodily harm. The other is most likely to result in minor embarrassment, except in a few wild outlier cases.
It actually might be an excuse to some degree. Diminished capacity is considered in many jurisdictions, and defendants who can demonstrate diminished capacity at the time of the offense can often get lesser sentences.
> Where the defendant is on trial for a crime of specific intent, his state of intoxication will be relevant to whether he formed the required intent.[8] This may prevent the defendant from having the required mens rea. If the defendant's intoxication is so significant as to prevent any sort of intent, this can lead to acquittal.
I guess ideological conformity is a good thing for stable society?
I don't think this is about "ideological conformity". No one is stopping you thinking, or saying, whatever you want at any time. The problem is when you use a platform to broadcast that message to a wider audience, especially one like Twitter that will show your posts to people who don't follow you.
Only if you think there's no difference between saying something and publishing it on the internet. When I said "saying" I mean that in a literal sense - speaking to people face to face. That is not the same as publishing something.
FYI, and this is in the article, the law used to prosecute the man was written to prevent you from saying offensive things over the telephone. This distinction between a voice and a megaphone doesn't apply to this particular situation because the law itself makes no such distinction.
The problem is that that is never, ever, where it stops. There's always people that society suddenly decides are "really important", usually the most dumb-witted, cruel abusers you can come up with.
And of course, the rules don't apply to them. Just look at the president of France, if you want to see a particularly bad fuckup. He, and his wife, have confessed, publicly, on TV, repeatedly to having a paedophilic relationship, where she abused her job to fuck children (she was even cheating on her husband doing it). He was 15, she was 40 years old at the time. Not only have they not been sued (in France, both would be punished)
Needless to say, a whole bunch of people were sued for stating this during the campaign, as well as for a bunch of other negative things they said about him.
> He was 15, she was 40 years old at the time. Not only have they not been sued (in France, both would be punished)
That's not quite as clear cut as you put it. Sexual majority is 15 years old in France.
Now, since she was his teacher, it could be argued that it was not a consensual relationship (if there even was an actual act, I don't pretend to know), but that would be something for courts to decide.
In short, this is a terrible example of your point.
People digging up old stories on Macron's and his wife are anything but concerned about helping justice. They're only interested in proving Macron was abused by his wife so she can get convicted and then he (the victim!) gets hit as a side effect.
People doing that kind crap have no limit to how low they're willing to drop their common decency to promote their shitty political agenda: They spread their lies over social networks, alienate the debate with inane affairs and waste valuable resources from the judicial system.
a whole bunch of people were sued for stating this during the campaign
The burden of proof for libel action is very different to the burden of proof for criminal liability. It's the difference between civil and criminal law - they're worlds apart. You can't really compare the two, despite them both being based around the act of writing something on the internet. Posting something potentially libellous on Twitter won't get you convicted of a crime, but it absolutely could get you sued.
They both said on TV they fucked when he was 15/16, and while she was in a power relationship over him (as his French teacher). Pointing out there might be a problem with that doesn't violate libel laws for a whole host of reasons.
Likewise, public confessions satisfy the standard of proof for criminal liability. If you say "I'm glad I killed this guy" next to what looks like a corpse with 100 people watching, you can be convicted of murder without the police so much as checking it's indeed a corpse, based on testimony (does not even need to be direct testimony, done in court, it can be a police officer saying one of the hundred confirmed this to them) of one person. If you say it on TV, well the laws on this predate TVs, I'm sure it will work the same.
And, technically, since he was a minor, French law says the public prosecutor HAS to sue the adult (ie. her), no choice. Don't you love "someone think of the children" laws? Needless to say, this didn't happen.
I wish people would stop misusing the word pedophilia. Most normal adults can be sexually attracted to 15 year olds. Pedophilia is something completely different.
> No one is stopping you thinking, or saying, whatever you want at any time.
They literally arrested and prosecuted someone for an off color joke. This is as straightforward a case of “them” stopping you from saying what ever you want at any time as it gets.
