The astonishing rise of social networking in the last few years has taken many by surprise. One institution that has failed to keep up is the law. Watching your dad struggle with Twitter may be quite endearing, but people having their liberty taken away due to an out-of-touch judiciary is extremely serious.
Matthew Woods, an unemployed 19 year old man from Lancashire, is currently serving a 12 week jail term for posting grossly offensive Facebook comments about missing schoolchild April Jones. Without question, Mr Woods is a moron (to put it generously) and the remarks were distasteful in the extreme. But there is no way he should have gone to jail. The law should not have been involved at all.
To put the matter in perspective, comedian Justin Lee Collins was given only 140 hours of community service for a sustained campaign of psychological and physical abuse against his girlfriend. Comparing the two cases, Ian’s Hislop’s famous remark comes to mind; “if that’s justice, then I’m a banana”.
Ultimately, it’s a question of freedom of speech. Broadly, freedom of speech is restricted (and the author or speaker guilty of a criminal offence) where a comment threatens national security or incites hatred. Mr Woods certainly didn’t threaten national security. A case could be made that he was inciting hatred, but no right thinking person would have been incited to anything but revulsion. The remarks were distasteful and no more. Aside from the exceptions outlined above, freedom of speech should defend distasteful and offensive remarks.
Coming across Mr Woods’ remarks on your computer screen would certainly be unpleasant, but it’s a price we must pay to live in a largely free society. In the social media age, where publication takes only a click and distribution is wide and swift, we all need to grow thicker skins and get used to seeing more distasteful material.
Mr Woods is the latest in a series of high profile cases where people have been charged for publishing supposedly offensive messages, mainly but not exclusively on social media. Thankfully, most have been dropped before prosecution but it’s still worrying and wrong that criminal proceedings were initiated at all. Aside from freedom of speech concerns, to monitor every comment made on social media is impossible. To pick out just a few individual instances is arbitrary and inconsistent.
Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions, has acknowledged the current system isn’t working and is making new, more feasible guidelines regarding social media. Yet the law should be ahead of the curve, not behind it. In the meantime, innocent people like Mr Woods suffer.
The punishment of nine people for naming the woman raped by footballer Ched Evans on Twitter is different. It dealt with contempt of court, not freedom of speech. Their (relatively lenient) fine is justified, though monitoring contempt of court online will be a challenge.
The great irony is that all this isn’t really about social media. Rather, social media has accelerated pre-existing legal dilemmas. Where the legal system has failed it is because it has treated social media as a special category instead of an ordinary channel of publication. Mr Woods’s conviction is wrong because the law has been misinterpreted. That he made the comments on Facebook is incidental.
Photo: Isaac Mao
Full time banana enthusiast. Part time subversive