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Contempt Of Court Applies to Twitter Too

The UK's attorney general warns that tweeting about court cases can threaten the justice system, because hey, we're all journalists now.
Accidentally breaking the law with a tweet is a big Twitter fail. Image via Flickr/Tom Raftery

Ah, Twitter. The perfect place to tell the world what you’re eating for breakfast, stalk Bill Nye, or start a revolution. Or, you know, to make prejudicial comments on court cases that force trials to be abandoned and completely undermine the justice system.

UK Attorney General Dominic Grieve today announced plans to crack down on this kind of contempt of court. Because that’s what it is: If you tweet (or broadcast via social media in any way) information that could prevent a fair trial, you risk running afoul of the Contempt of Court Act 1981. Your oh-so-insightful comments on the guilt or innocence of someone you probably don't even know could, in fact, be illegal.

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The problems with tweeting this kind of comment is that juries could be swayed by the views of the Twittersphere or influential voices in it, resulting in an unfair trial. And as everyone has the right to a fair trial, no matter how heinous their alleged crime, the judge might have to discharge the jurors and bring everything to a halt.

The website of the Attorney General’s Office defines this kind of “Publication Contempt” thusly:

The material could have broken the laws concerning contempt of court if it could affect the way a jury thinks about a case, or prejudice it so much that a trial cannot take place or has to be stopped.

So how does the Attorney General intend to stop this social media-fuelled contempt of court? Quite simply, by telling people not to do it.

Grieves announced that his office will now publish advisory notes about legal proceedings on their website and Twitter account, to help inform the public about the law. In the past, these notes have only been sent out to print and broadcast media outlets. But as the office acknowledged in their Twitter feed, “When our contempt of court laws were passed (1981) Britain only had three television channels and 15 million people read a daily newspaper.”

Expanding their advisory to the broader public is an interesting comment on today’s media landscape. The measures effectively acknowledge that we’re all now journalists in the sense that we’re all capable of publishing information to a large readership. And that means that we need to take into account the same kind of ethical and legal questions as traditional mass media outlets, whether we have journalistic training or not. This new measure is essentially an attempt at giving tweeters a little basic journalistic education.

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Disseminating the advisory notes further doesn't change the law in any way or affect freedom of expression as it currently exists in the UK, and Grieves was keen to emphasise that he’s not trying to stifle discussion.

“This is not about telling people what they can or cannot talk about on social media; quite the opposite in fact, it’s designed to help facilitate commentary in a lawful way,” he said in the announcement. “I hope that by making this information available to the public at large, we can help stop people from inadvertently breaking the law, and make sure that cases are tried on the evidence, not what people have found online.”

The advisory notes are only issued for sensitive cases—“when it's clear that things are starting to go wrong … [and] when I have a clear sense that problems are developing,” Grieves told The Guardian. He usually issues about five a year. In 2013, there have been 10.

Twitter vigilantism has been a hot topic in the UK this week, after British celebrity Peaches Geldof took it upon herself to tweet the names of two mothers whose babies were abused by Lostprophets singer Ian Watkins. In doing so, however, she essentially revealed the identities of the victims. The issue here is that victims of sexual offences have automatic lifetime anonymity, and revealing their names is an offence (Geldof claimed she thought the names were already public knowledge as she'd seen them elsewhere online). By the time she had deleted the message and went on to tweet a lukewarm, sorry-not-sorry apology, the damage had of course already been done. It's just too easy to forget how one inappropriate comment online can affect people's lives in the real world.

Of course, the new measures won’t do anything to stop Twitter’s most committed self-appointed arbiters of justice—but at least they might stop regular people and hapless celebs from accidentally breaking the law quite so often.  Think before you tweet, people. With many followers comes much responsibility.