UKC

Wondered what people thought about the Tom Daley Twitter thing

Basically somebody tweeted to TD that in coming 4th he'd let his father down. He then got lots of 'your out of order' tweets back to which the original tweeter responded with insults and a "I'm going to drown TD for being a trumped up X"

It now appears according to the BBC news website he's been arrested.

In reply to Indy:


We can't keep applying our existing laws for real world offences to online stuff. In the real world it takes a lot more effort and planning to get a message to many people. Twitter let's you share inappropriate and stupid remarks easily. Like the airport bomb twitter idiot.

Perhaps virtual stupidity should be punished through loss of virtual privileges such as banned from phones / computers for a few months.

In reply to Philip:

I like that as an idea.

To the OP - I think this current fad for arresting anyone who tweets anything unpleasant is d@mn foolish. The police I'm sure have better things and bigger crimes to worry about, and I'm sure the courts have too.

Obviously what the guy posted was crass and unpleasant, but it doesn't appear (to me) to warrent the inclusion of the law.

In reply to Philip: He was actually arrested (according to the Beeb) for malicious communications which has been on the statute book since at least 1984 in form or other, so it pre-dates Twitter.

On the more general point if we have laws and they are not upheld then what is the point in having them? The police suspect a crime may have been committed, presumably next the CPS will decide whether to prosecute and then a judge or jury will determine the outcome.

In reply to John_Hat:

Did the Twitter appeal set legal precedent, I wonder?

I agree it was over the top to make an arrest, though a suitable course of action might have been to send a friendly police officer over to "strongly suggest" (but without any other action) that a suitable public (via Twitter) apology should be made.

That said, of course we don't know that that course of action wasn't taken and was perhaps met with a refusal.

Neil

In reply to Indy:
I get the impression there were a lot of unpleasant comments several of them were threatening. While I'm definitely anti-censorship I do think people need to accept that making abusive or threatening comments on Twitter is idiotic, I assume the person who posted them wouldn't have made the comments to Tom Daley in person if there were a couple of hundred thousand observers?

In reply to Reach>Talent:

Quite. Someone yesterday evening made a very offensive remark to the South West Trains Twitterer (it's still there if anyone wants to see it), I bet he wouldn't have done that in person, or if he had and a police officer had heard it I imagine he'd have been arrested on the spot for threatening behaviour or somesuch.

Neil

In reply to MJH:

You've missed my point. Applying laws that predate the technology used for the crime might not be the best way of handling things.

The law and punishment needs looking at to ensure it is appropriate and effective.

In reply to Reach>Talent:

The message was neither abusive or threatening from what I understand.


If he did, would he still have been arrested? I suspect not.

In reply to higherclimbingwales:

"i'm going to find you and i'm going to drown you in the pool you cocky tw*t your a nobody people like you make me sick."

If nothing in that strikes you as either abusive or threatening then we have rather different standards in these matters.

http://tinyurl.com/c2fd4bo

In reply to Nick B, Another One: Ahh, you see, the news report on the BBC news @ 6 failed to mention the final statemnt!

In reply to higherclimbingwales:

Fair enough. I've just been having a read through a few different news sites and noticed a few of them avoid mentioning anything beyond the one about letting his dad down. I understand the content of the later messages is unpleasant but leaving out specific mention of them leaves the story making no sense.

In reply to Nick B, Another One: Yeah, I suspect the reports ommiting the most damning quote are trying to stir more of a reaction given they are hardly threatening.

In reply to Philip:

I agree with that. The field of play has changed and we need to think how we are going to use it. The internet makes it hard to lose the stupid actions we make in daily life. As a teenager I did some really stupid things that if I did them now would be there for all the world to see and for as long as the internet exists. It is not so much about thinking about what we do ourselves as developing tolerance and compassion for the deeds of others. If the drunken dance we did with a traffic cone at the age of seventeen gets us the sack when we are 36 or stops us getting a job because the potential employer found it on Google then something is wrong.

In reply to Duncan Bourne:



Hmmm, interesting and wide ranging.

I have somewhere written a review of the Foo Fighters second UK gig, in a Marquee tent at Reading Festival, whilst Bjork was lighting up the skies with fireworks as part of her show on the Main Stage, and I can probably locate that review.

(I'll have a go at that in a bit)

On the other hand, sorry, but there is a point at which we have to admit that some people are too f*cking stupid to be allowed to use computers / social media networks and so on and so forth.


I've just done some work in a school, setting up a wi-fi system, and although I spent most of that time in the IT Technical Support office, when we went out to install APs and POE switches, I saw (on every notice board) warnings about bullying, and bullying via mobile phones and bullying via Social Media. Warnings telling people to be aware of how their actions now will be on their "permanent record" as such.

People want the liberty of "free speech" without - apparently - realising that it implies that whatever you say is going to be open to the scrutiny of the whole world, and that scrutiny might use your own words to demonstrate that you are a nasty, horrible person.

See my rant thread about Frankie vs Rebecca

I'm sorry, but in the case of the post about Tom Daley's dad, the poster was very clearly a very stupid person making an very insensitive and personally nasty remark to someone who has suffered a bereavement.

The least possible response to the twitterer is pointing out how utterly contemptible his comments were.

Was he somehow asleep through the whole incident about the racist comments directed at other twitterers who replied to Liam Stacy's comments about Fabrice Muamba?

It was fairly major headline news, but it's possible that someone who is totally ignorant could be unaware of the possible legal consequences of being publicly nasty to someone in the media spotlight.

Not that the fact that Tom Daley is a "celebrity" should make any difference. That should be irrelevant, it's just that such incidents tend to become media feeding frenzies, as the papers have to sell advertising, and thus making such incidents into a "cause celebre" makes them money.

You have to be fairly stupid - Frankie Boyle? - to do things like this and think it's funny, but even Frankie's comments about Becky Adlington's nose pale into significance when suggesting that someone's recently deceased dad had been let down by someone competing at the Olympic games.

In reply to Dominion:

By the way, if anyone thinks Tom Daley's dad would not have been as proud as it is possible for any father to be that his son got to an Olympic Games, and into the final, and got 4th place, then they have little or no empathy with what it is like to be human.


Perhaps it is the nasty minded people like Frankie Boyle that suggest to us "normal" people that we can spout bile and vileness to the whole world about people in the public eye, and they get away with it.

Whereas this twitterer has been arrested.

Is is all the fault of Frankie Boyle? Should he be held responsible?

In reply to Dominion:

He said quite a lot more than just a nasty comment about Daley's dad.

>

In a way, yes. On a comedy TV programme or a stand up night Boyle is supposedly a comedians. There is context to is brand of humour. If Twitter statements are to be considered in the same manner as say addressing a rally in a city (a real world situation where inciting violence or racial hatred would be prevented by law) then Boyle shouldn't be allowed to get away with his remarks any more than knob who abuse Tom Dayley. Alternatively, Twitter is considered the equivalent of graffiti for these scum and we just ignore them.

Twitter has it's uses - and blocking people like these would not diminish it. It's as much up to twitter and it's users to demand more of a social conscience. Using the police and the law to improve society doesn't seem to work elsewhere.

In reply to Philip:

I apologize for the spelling. I find it hard to type accurately on my phone.

In reply to off-duty:

The idiotic comment about Tom Daley's dad was - to put it into the nicest possible context - just very, very insensitive, and nasty.

The rest of what he said was, I believe, reaction to people who pointed out the above?

Same as the Fabrice Muamba situation.

What Liam Stacy said about Fabrice Muamba was not - particularly - a real problem other than it was a (lot) insensitive - it was his responses to people who replied that was the issue. I don't think - from what I can recall - that he made a racist comment about Muamba, just about other people (and what he suggested their parent's to have been doing)

and it would appear that the "Tom Daley" incident is the same.

Say something daft (nasty, insensitive, stupid) and then assume that what you say afterwards to people who reply is a private row, and not being played out in public.


No excuses for the poster, I'm just surprised that the massive publicity about the Muamba incident didn't seem to sneak into his consciousness.

In reply to off-duty:

Aye, have a look and make your own minds up: https://twitter.com/Rileyy_69

In reply to the thread:

Am I right in thinking that users of Twitter would not see this person's tweets unless they chose to "follow" him? (Or, perhaps, see re-tweets of them by others they've chosen to follow.) Or is it the case that anyone send someone tweets that they then see? (Sorry for asking, I'm not a Twitter user.)

It is usually the case that celebrities do not have publically known telephone numbers nor publically known email addresses precisely because of nuisance calls/emails from members of the public. It seems to me that Twitter needs to go the same way, with people being "ex-directory". That way anyone who wants to "follow" someone like this kid can do so, otherwise no-one sees it. It seems to me that that's a better way of dealing with this issue than the criminal law.

In reply to Coel Hellier:
Kind of, but it was retweeted widely across the site. You can still see someones tweets if you seek out their account and view what they've written, provided they've not protected their tweets...


You can protect your tweets so that only people you allow can view your account. You have to send a follow request which then gets approved (or not) by the account holder. You

In reply to John_Hat:

There's nothing foolish about this. The idea is to raise an attitude of social disapproval to get the public to self police. There are more than enough examples that there doesn't need to be any conspiratorial talk about "are you saying that [the ubiquitous] they did this just to cause that?" no tin foil hat here! But if you want to change an attitude among the public then it's either war or socialisation that will be the vehicle. Either terrorism or social disapproval. The ubiquitous 'they' do however appear to be very good at both of those.

Welcome to the panopticon :-O

In reply to Coel Hellier:

I'm not a massive twitter user, but hashtags (and probably other features) allow you to see what's being tweeted about a certain subject. Twitter wouldn't work so well if you only ever saw stuff you chose to - it's set up so you can set about broadcasting your 'views' in a fairly nutter-with-megaphone manner.

I think the best way of dealing with nasty stuff being posted like this is public humiliation, which has occurred here but with the additional expense of police involvement. I'm sure it's possible to set the system up so that when stuff's posted that loads of people find offensive, it's reflected in the 'conversation'. I don't use social media enough to make any detailed suggestions, but I'm sure someone could think of a way of getting these things to work a little bit more like real social situations, whereby if you say something that makes everyone think you're a dick, you're ostracised/get your head kicked in.

In reply to Dominion:


I tend to agree with you that some people should be kept away from social media for their own good, but they aren't and there will always be stupid people about. Really the "wild west" days of the internet, when you had complete freedom are numbered. Anything we do there can be seen by the whole world if you are not careful about your privacy settings and laws perhaps should reflect that change. Thing is people may be stupid now but 20 years down the line they don't want to still be regretting the indiscretions of youth (apart from murder and such)

In reply to Jon Stewart:


Q.E.D.