Given the free flowing nature of Twitter, not to mention the amount of times we hear words like “freedom of speech”, one would be lost to think you can land £15,000 in fines for re-tweeting someone else’s message to your followers, but that is exactly what is happening.
People re-tweet lies, misinformation and more on a daily basis, it is pretty much a fact of the internet that this will happen, but one British Lord is targeting over 20 of the 10,000 people who re-tweeted a message that wrongly claimed the Lord was a child molester, Alan Davies was one of those 10,000 people and has since paid up £15,000 ($25,000) to settle the lawsuit with the Lord in question.
Now that is a serious accusation, but where do you draw the line on what can be fined and what cannot, how do you discriminate the 20+ people out of the other 10,000 who sent the message, how can £15,000 be a suitable fine for a simple re-tweet (regardless of its contents). Should the fine not be stuck to the person who actually wrote the tweet? Not just some people who believed it?
One thing is for certain, this case raises more questions that it answers and it certainly puts Twitter in a difficult position as it’s becoming harder and harder to keep track of what you can and cannot do on social media channels, especially when it comes to expressing personal opinion.
Thank you Gigaom for providing us with this information.
What if the man in question is really a Child Molester?
He isn’t hence the legal proceedings,
bet he picked the 20 people with the most money. No point trying to sue somebody who is skint.
£15000 != $2500
hell of an exchange rate i’d pay in dollars haha
I think they should fine EVERYONE who uses Twitter for typically tweeting tedious twaddle, and also journalists who give credence to the Twitterverse in the first place by printing tweets as news, when they’re just the digital version of verbal diarrhoeia and virtual toilet-wall scrawls.
he must be a child molester.