Twitter Tirades Test Limits Of Freedom Of Speech

[cortés]

Twitter Tirades Test Limits Of Freedom Of Speech
AP - JILL LAWLESS - Tue Nov 23 2011

LONDON: What's a tweet, between friends? The law says sometimes it's a threat.

One man thought he was just bantering with his pals when he joked about blowing
an airport sky-high. Another was reacting to a radio phone-in when he mused about
stoning a journalist to death. Because they made their throwaway comments on Twitter,
both are in legal trouble.

Their cases have outraged civil libertarians and inflamed the debate about the limits of
free speech in a Web 2.0 world. The Internet increasingly makes private jokes, tastes
and opinions available for public consumption, blurring the line between public and private
in a way that has left the law struggling to keep up.

"I think people don't have any idea of the potential legal ramifications of things they post
on the Internet," said Gregor Pryor, a digital media lawyer at Reed Smith in London. "Anything
you post on Twitter can come back and haunt you."

[cortés]

Seriously.
Underscores a long held theory that some people spend waaaaaaaaaaaay too much time online.

Twitter Sets Off Jitters As Site Goes Down

The widely popular Twitter website went offline for many users Thursday, prompting a flurry of
complaints on rival sites. "Users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter," a company statement
said. "Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue."

That did not stop some panicked users from launching complaints. "Twitters broke, my life has no
meaning anymore," one user wrote on the social media website Tumblr.


Another wrote, "twitter is down and my life is over."

[Rover]

We really do become dependent on these social networking sites. I am always amazed at how people complain whenever Facebook makes a change. This is something that we don't even pay for, yet our lives seem to depend on it.

[cortés]

Twitter Prepares Curbs On Hate Speech - FT.com
Twitter is preparing to introduce new measures to reduce the visibility of “hate speech” or “trolling” on the site.

“The reason we want to allow pseudonyms is there are lots of places in the world where it’s the only way you’d
be able to speak freely,” he said. “The flipside of that is it also emboldens these trolls ... how do you make sure
you are both emboldening people to speak politically but making it OK to be on the platform and not endure all
this hate speech? It’s very frustrating.”

But at the same time, online abuse of celebrities and bullying on social networks has become a more prominent issue
in other markets, with a number of recent court cases in the UK prompting the government to propose tackling “trolling”
through its new defamation bill.

[Outta Here]

Freedom of speech does not mean that a person can choose to say anything and there will be no consequences. It just means one is free to choose and is willing to take their chances on what the consequences will be.