Slashdot Mirror
UK Twitter Users Declare 'I'm Spartacus'
An anonymous reader writes "Tweeters have joined forces to support Paul Chambers, the man convicted and fined for a Twitter message threatening to blow up an airport. A so-called 'I'm Spartacus' campaign encouraging users to 're-tweet' his words has also become a huge hit. The hashtag #IAmSpartacus is currently the number one trending topic on Twitter in the UK, with #twitterjoketrial in second place. Chambers is believed to be the first person convicted in the UK for posting an offensive tweet. After the hearing, actor and Twitter fan Stephen Fry tweeted that he would pay Chambers' fine. Comedian Dara O'Briain tweeted that the verdict was 'ludicrous' while Peep Show actor David Mitchell said it was 'punishment for flippancy.'"
I suspect not as many people will re-tweet on behalf of Garreth Compton.
The trial shows that our judiciary are a bit out of touch. And that our institutional sense of political correctness has gone a bit too far.
But expressing solidarity through protest, by repeating the same "crime" - admittedly with a very minor risk of prosecution? That nobility. That's the British spirit. There's a reason that the colloquial phrase for contravention of fair play is "not cricket". It isn't "not baseball", is it?
I view the whole sorry affair as the result of over-exposure to American culture, a culture of flying off the handle, an overinflated sense of entitlement, and above all, an almost complete lack of understanding of the concept of irony. We've lost our ability to cope with the ambiguity and the grey areas in life, instead taking the simpletons viewpoint that right and wrong are black and white, that there is a sharply defined line you must not cross. Deary me. Life is complicated. For those of us who can't cope without a truly rigid set of rules, might I suggest that you go back to kindergarten.
I view the whole sorry affair as the result of over-exposure to American culture,
Are you kidding me? People in the US look at most of the stuff that goes on in the UK... getting arrested for Tweets, getting arrested for flying certain flags, while guys in America get police protection to obscenely picket funerals. We know that this sort of thing would NEVER fly in America, not in spirit nor in the letter of the law. We've got the First Amendment for that.
a culture of flying off the handle, an overinflated sense of entitlement, and above all, an almost complete lack of understanding of the concept of irony.
Yeah, whatever.
It is more effective. The judge's ruling was based on the idea that an "ordinary person" would not recognize the joke, take it seriously, and be terrified. The point of this campaign is to demonstrate that that's nonsense.
Not only that, but the campaign potentially puts law enforcement in a quandary. They can either arrest, charge and convict hundreds of people (including several popular celebrities) for posting a line of trivial text that harms precisely nobody, or have Paul Chambers' lawyers demand that they explain why they are applying the law selectively and unfairly.
That's one of the biggest problems with taking speech crime this far: it becomes utterly trivial for an angry population to effectively DDOS the enforcement of it.