Policing the Net

Thesis finished, and ready to submit (yay!), and this seems like an interesting topic to get back into a more non-scientific mode; there was an intriguing development stemming from the wave of olympics-mania which has swept over the media this week. This was the arrest of a 17 year old individual for verbally assaulting the team GB diver Tom Daley over twitter. The diver came in fourth place – an exceptional achievement although obviously agonisingly close to the podium – for which the odious 17 year old suggested he would track Daley down and drown him in the pool. Not entirely a justified and reasoned statement, I think most would agree. However the boy was tracked down by his twitter account and arrested, under a malicious communications act, which makes it illegal to send threatening letter (or, of course, communications).

It is something of a turnabout, because earlier this week the man who was arrested for threatening to blow up humberside airport, Paul Chambers, was cleared after a long legal battle because the judge had eventually to accept that it was a joke. Or more accurately, it was not meant seriously – there was no chance that Mr. Chambers was actually going to acquire himself some semtex and jog down to the airport. The thing is that if he had called up the airport and said that he was going to return in a week and blow it up, that would have been a ‘bomb threat’, but deployed over twitter there a more vagaries involved. There is a permanence which accompanies writing a letter or making a phone call, but the same is not attached to digital communications which in fact are even more set in stone. Indeed the habit must be in thinking that few people actually read what is deployed to the interweb, so why worry. He included the hash tag of the airport it must be said, does this mean he was directing it actually at the airport, or was he simply in the habit of properly tagging, as a form of referencing. At any rate Mr. Chambers case was eventually settled, he was cleared and this seems like the right outcome. But in the case of Daley’s assailant it seems the boy had made a habit of sending insulting and downright abusive messages to those in the public sphere, this outburst was just the latest in a series. Again I suspect that the boy thought that because it was on twitter, it didn’t really count. The more cases of people being arrested for twitter comments, facebook statuses and blog posts there are, then this attitude will naturally change into a more cautioned, less open approach, which is precisely not what the web is for. We already have a legion of fleet street editors who are too timid to publish something which could land them into trouble, and the usual solution is to leak to story to Private Eye, and see if they get sued (which of course they invariably do).

There is a wider question which crops up when this sort of policing is enforced, which is at what point does the protection of individual’s sensibilities begin to infringe of the right to freedom of speech? Would we not rather live in a world where the occasional tweet / comment of this nature is said and ignored, given the obvious alternatives of though policing and totalitarianism? But the main policy question is really for twitter rather than the police in this these cases, it is for them to decide what is a violation of their usage agreement and for what they will strike peoples accounts, and it seems their current provisions are at the very least sometimes ineffectual. It is doubtless a gargantuan task, to go through the mountains of tweet published each day, most of which seem to deal with the unenviable decision of toast or cereal for breakfast, and decide which are offensive, and which are just downright boring.