You are what you tweet
Go beyond freedom of expression and you could end up in court.
From private citizens to corporations alike, the world is waking up to the fact that social media is beginning to be treated in legal terms in a similar way to newspapers and broadcast media. The rights and responsibilities, although technically somewhat different, are essentially one and the same. Go beyond freedom of expression and break the law on a scale that has a mass effect — which is comparatively easy on social media — and you could end up in court.
Today, two 20-somethings, Isabella Sorley, from Newcastle and John Nimmo, from South Shields, appear at Westminster Magistrates Court. They are charged with improper use of a communications network under Section 127 of the Communications Act in relation to allegedly sending offensive tweets to Stella Creasy MP and journalist Caroline Criado-Perez who lead the successful campaign calling for Jane Austen to appear on bank notes.
Keir Starmer QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions, published the guidelines that the Crown Prosecution Service used to make a decision about the prosecution. The CPS sensibly decided to target those who had allegedly been most vociferous with their use of Twitter but avoided allowing the Metropolitan Police to charge many others who expressed similar views through written content on Twitter, retweets or expression via other platforms such as Facebook. One young person, for whom the CPS said there was enough evidence to charge, avoided prosecution, as it was ‘not be in the public interest’ due to their age and personal circumstances. This reflected Starmer’s advice to ‘avoid the potential chilling effect that might arise from high numbers of prosecutions in cases in which a communication might be considered grossly offensive.’
Corporate and brand communicators, like all users of social media, should take note. When practitioners are involved in publishing to social media on behalf of their clients, organisations or themselves, they must avoid communications which may be considered grossly offensive, that could be seen as amounting to a credible threat of violence, steer clear of what may be viewed as a targeted campaign of harassment. They should also not breach court orders — for example naming someone subject to a privacy injunction. The risk is perhaps bigger for those of us who have not been schooled through the NCTJ or spent significant time on a newsdesk.
That’s the advice of the CIPR, which recently integrated Starmer’s guidelines into its social media best practice paper. The section on defamation seeks to advise PRs, as publishers, about the principals from civil and criminal law that have guided the bastions of old media for generations. As Tom Standage explained in his talk at Hanover in November, social media is taking over from old, mass media forms. Social media is re-establishing itself as the main mode of communication. It is justifiable that people and organisations should take responsibility for what they share digitally. You are what you tweet.
I wrote this article for my consultancy’s website (Hanover communications).
