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Vice Blog

LONDON - THE MOST MISLEADING HEADLINE OF THE WEEK

This week, The Telegraph ran a story with the headline "Criminals traced by text message grammar". Amazing, I thought, we are now entering the future of crime fighting. I pictured hundreds of screens in a top secret pre-crime division picking up every text message in the UK as it was sent while teams of experts decided whether or not someone was about to commit a crime by how poor their morphology and syntax was. (Kind of like what they did in Minority Report, but with more LOLs.)

I thought once this special unit had detected a message like: "C u daan da cinema l8r gemma babez. kev", they'd know from the grammar that Kev was planning to bludgeon Gemma's ex-boyfriend to death with a garden gnome later that night, and send out Tom Cruise to go and take him down.

But no. It turns out you have to abduct and murder someone, steal their phone and then text all their friends before the police possibly work out that there is something wrong and arrest you.