Watch what you tweet — in the UK, at least.
, with those figures trending down from a peak in 2013-2014. So: not everyone being nasty on Twitter in the UK is facing jail time, but hundreds of successful prosecutions every year is obviously still quite significant.This is the big, huge, overwhelming problem with Section 127: its wording is incredibly ambiguous, and it’s hard to say when and how it should be applied.
Looking at past prosecutions, though, it does seem that the context of messages plays a role. In 2012, then-head of public prosecutions Starmer. He noted that prosecutors should be careful about what cases they bring to court and that it should be taken into consideration whether those accused were apologetic, if they removed their offending posts quickly, and the intended audience of a message.
Of course, deciding the criminality of speech based on such nebulous notions is incredibly dodgy, to say the least. “It’s not a valid reason in human rights law for somebody’s speech to be curtailed,” says Killock. “You can imagine many circumstances in the past where things have been sent that could be regarded as ‘grossly offensive’ that nevertheless had to be said. For instance, ‘the bible is wrong’ or ‘homosexuality is acceptable.
In other words, while earlier prosecutors may have preferred a relatively low threshold for what is “offensive” to better convict that idiot who rings you up every day and shouts nasty things at you down the phone, those standards have now become outdated when applied to modern platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which allow rude messages to be blasted into the ether with all the casual malice of a fart.
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