LEGAL UPDATE: British Prosecutors Clarify Offensive Online Posts Law

BBC
Dec 19, 2012

New guidelines could see fewer people being charged in England and Wales for offensive messages on social networks.

The Director of Public Prosecutions said people should face a trial only if their comments on Twitter, Facebook or elsewhere go beyond being offensive.

He said the guidance combats threats and internet trolls without having a “chilling effect” on free speech.

The guidance means some people could avoid trial if they are sorry for criminal comments posted while drunk.

The guidance comes after a string of controversial cases, including the prosecution of a man who tweeted a joke threatening to blow up an airport.

Case law

Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer said the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) had now dealt with more than 50 cases relating to potentially criminal comments posted online – but there was so far very little case law set by senior judges to guide which trials should go ahead.

“These interim guidelines are intended to strike the right balance between freedom of expression and the need to uphold the criminal law”

Keir StarmerDirector of Public Prosecutions

He said the interim guidelines, which come into force immediately, clarified which kinds of cases should be prosecuted and which would go ahead only after a rigorous assessment whether it was in the public interest to prosecute.

“The scale of the problem that we are trying to confront should not be underestimated. There are millions of messages sent by social media every day and if only a small percentage of those millions are deemed to be offensive then there is the potential for very many cases coming before our courts,” Mr Starmer told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

The guidance says that if someone posts a message online that clearly amounts to a credible threat of violence, specifically targets an individual or individuals, or breaches a court order designed to protect someone, then the person behind the message should face prosecution.

People who receive malicious messages and pass them on, such as by retweeting, could also fall foul of the law.

However, online posts that are merely “grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or false” would face a much tougher test before the individual could be charged under laws designed to prevent malicious communications.

Mr Starmer said that many suspects in this last category would be unlikely to be prosecuted because it would not be in the public interest to take them to court.

This could include posts made by drunk people who, on sobering up, take swift action to delete the communication because they are genuinely sorry for the offence or harm they caused.

Individuals who post messages as part of a separate crime, such as a plan to import drugs, would face prosecution for that offence, as is currently the case…

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Facebook and Instagram’s New Ad Policy Change ‘Could Compromise Privacy for Teens’

21st Century Wire says… this story appeared only yesterday in the Washington Post, and it’s uncanny how neatly this ties into the Instagram riots in Sweden on the same day. It would be uncanny – unless you believe that’s it’s part of a larger step by step plan. Hegelian dialectic: Problem+Reaction=Solution… their solution, of course. This latest artificial crisis was created by the corporations behind closed doors, who have now created digital cartels between many of these platforms online.

The solution will be some form of global governance-administered restriction of privacy or anonymity online. There would be no crisis if the corporations were not so hell-bent on using people’s photographs and data as free content for generating ads no one needs…

Washington Post
Brian Womack

(Bloomberg) – Facebook Inc.’s Instagram policy changes, announced yesterday, may let advertisers use teenagers’ photos for marketing, raising privacy and security concerns, said Jeffrey Chester, executive director for the Center for Digital Democracy.

The new policies, which now apply to users as young as 13, enable Instagram, a photo-sharing service that Facebook bought in August, to use members’ names, text, photos and other content with marketing messages, the company said on its site. The new terms of use, set to take effect next month, could be exploitative, Chester said.

Facebook, operator of the world’s largest social network with more than 1 billion users, is changing policies for its Instagram unit as it looks for ways to increase revenue across its services. Instagram, popular with teens and young adults, reached more than 100 million users, Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said in September.

Facebook “sees teens as a digital goldmine,” said Chester, whose group is focused on privacy issues. “We will be pressing the Federal Trade Commission to issue policies to protect teen privacy.”

If users are younger than 18, then they “represent” that at least one parent or guardian has also agreed to content being used in marketing, according to the updated usage terms. The changes are aimed at protecting members while preventing abuse, Instagram said in a blog.

In the updated policy document, Instagram also said it may not always identify paid services or sponsored content. The company said it doesn’t claim ownership of any content on the service, though some businesses may pay to display users’ names, likeness or photos in connection with sponsored content.

“Our updated privacy policy helps Instagram function more easily as part of Facebook by being able to share info between the two groups,” the company said. “This means we can do things like fight spam more effectively, detect system and reliability problems more quickly, and build better features for everyone by understanding how Instagram is used.”

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‘Trial by Twitter’ Talking Point Now in Full Swing…

Peer’s revenge over Twitter slurs: McAlpine will sue internet gossips 

• Tory peer ‘terrified’ by BBC’s false implication that he abused children
• Terms of the agreement will be announced in court in a few days’ time
• And lawyers will sue ANYONE who named him on Twitter

Mail Online

Lord McAlpine is taking landmark legal action against internet gossips who falsely branded him a paedophile.

Lawyers for the Tory peer warned Twitter users ‘we know who you are’ and urged them to come forward voluntarily or face being pursued through the courts.

His action is intended to stop so-called ‘trial by Twitter’ and, if successful, could radically change the way the internet is policed and make those using social networks more directly accountable for defamatory comments.

Lord McAlpine, the former Tory party treasurer wrongly accused of being a child abuser following a botched Newsnight report, yesterday agreed a £185,000 compensation settlement with the BBC – funded by licence-payers.

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The Truth About Media Ownership

So you think your media is free and unbiased? So you think that the internet and independent media are dangerous?

Consider this fact…

White House Hires ‘Terminator’ To ‘Squash Negative Stories’ About Obama

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
May 24, 2011

In a bid to ‘squash negative stories’ about Barack Obama that appear on the Internet, the White House has hired a dedicated propagandist whose role will be to savage people who tell “lies” about the President, in a chilling reminder of how prosecutors threatened people with jail time during the 2008 campaign if they criticized Obama.

“The Obama administration has created and staffed a new position tucked inside their communications shop for helping coordinate rapid response to unfavorable stories and fostering and improving relations with the progressive online community,” reports the Huffington Post.

NIXON TENDENCIES: Obama will play dirty in the 2012 Election. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

The man tasked with the role of “disseminating push back” against Obama’s online critics by direct order of the White House will be Jesse Lee, a blogger who has previously put out White House spin in response to claims made by Glenn Beck.

“The post is a new one for this White House. Rapid response has been the purview of the Democratic National Committee (and will continue to be). Lee’s hire, however, suggests that a portion of it will now be handled from within the administration. It also signals that the White House will be adopting a more aggressive engagement in the online world in the months ahead.”

Lee’s first Tweet as an official mouthpiece for White House propaganda and the Obama administration’s move to launch an “aggressive defense of the president and his policies” gives us some indication of what we can expect – the post includes a picture of the Terminator robot.

“If you’re going to post something online about Obama that isn’t true, Lee is going to be the one to handle you,” reports Chris O’Shea, noting that the move is about “squashing any negative stories” that could derail Obama’s re-election bid.

Lee obviously sees himself taking the role of ‘Terminator’ in destroying ‘conspiracies’ and ‘disinformation’ about the Obama 2012 campaign, similar to how Obama-supporting prosecutors and sheriffs in Missouri threatened people with jail time for telling “lies” about Obama during the 2008 campaign…

READ FULL REPORT HERE

Exclusive: “Internet was never free or open and never will be…”

By Nathan Diebenow
RAW STORY
December 14, 2010

Author: If Americans want a truly free network, ‘we’ve got to build it from scratch’

Secrets outlet WikiLeaks’ continuing struggle to remain online in the face of corporate and government censorship is a striking example of something few truly realize: that the Internet is not and never has been democratically controlled, a media studies professor commented to Raw Story.

“[T]he stuff that goes on on the Internet does not go on because the authorties can’t stop it,” Douglas Rushkoff, author of Program or be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age and Life, Inc.: How Corporatism Conquered the World and How to Take it Back”, said. “It goes on because the authorities are choosing what to stop and what not to stop.”

Rushkoff told Raw Story that the authorities have the ability to quash cyber dissent due to the Internet’s original design, as a top-down, authoritarian device with a centralized indexing system.

Essentially, all one needs to halt a rogue site is to delete its address from the domain name system registry.

“This is not rocket science,” said Rushkoff, who also teaches media studies at The New School University in Manhattan.

For example, the Dutch teenager arrested Thursday for helping to organize a denial of service attack on an ‘Operation Payback’ online chatroom: “They just took him off. He had his own server, and they just go, ‘Oh, nip this one!'” Rushkoff said.

This is why, he noted in a recent CNN editorial, the actual threat to PayPal, Visa, MasterCard and Amazon last week were “vastly overstated” in most media.

The best I.T. talent may soon gobble the red pill and test their skills down the rabbit hole.

“The forces of bottom-up anarchy have reached a similar impasse, and the authorities of the Internet have once again demonstrated their ability to fend off any genuine peer-to-peer activity,” he explained. “This is a tightly controlled network, and you know, that’s why I think the Chinese do have it right in that they understand, ‘Oh, we can control this thing. We just censor the fuck out of it… ”

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE HERE

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RELATED STORY:

Who is Behind the Demonization of the Web?

 

Obama’s Internet Czar Dr. Cass Sunstein wants to turn off the lights on Free Speech

EDITOR’S NOTE: The rhetoric and the planning coming out of Obama’s administration is a continuation of the same which proliferated under President Bush Jr.  Controlling the internet has long been a goal of the New World Order, and the US have taken their lead from countries like China who currently employ 30,000(conservatively) dedicated full-time net police. Like US and UK companies outsource their call centers to India, perhaps Washington plans to outsource its free speech patrolling to China at a fraction of the cost. Whatever your concerns might be, readers should pay attention to this issue at it affects all of us who read, as well as electronically publish material out here in virtual space. – PH  

Jerry Mazza
Infowars.com
May 21, 2010  

Paul Joseph Watson, a writer at Prison Planet whom I greatly respect, gave us a reminder Monday May 17th that Obama Czar Wants Mandatory Government Propaganda On Political Websites. The Big Brother Czar is also a Harvard Professor currently dishing up the pabulum for Obama’s White House that “conspiracy theories” should be banned from the Internet; so much for Harvard, Czar-Dr. Cass Sunstein and intellectual freedom.  

Obama’s internet Czar Dr Cass Sunstein resembles Hitler’s chief communications henchman Goebbels.

What’s more Sunstein wants to “legally force” Americans “to do what’s best for our society” and water down their free speech (granted by the US Constitution), by mandating websites with pop-up links to opposing government propaganda be “forcibly included on political blogs.” Could we have such pop-ups when the President is speaking, Henry Kissinger, Bibi Netanyahu, AIPAC, Larry Silverstein, NIST, Fox News, Lloyd Blankfein?  

Coincidentally, the also Harvard educated Constitutional lawyer now President, Barack Obama, agrees with Sunstein and has knighted him “Head of Information Technology in the White House for ‘Conspiracy Theories,’” i.e. any political thought that doesn’t regurgitate establishment views, like Obama’s ties to the CIA at Columbia University and after. Those who talk truth to power will be taxed or banned. I hear the clicking of boot heels as Sunstein speaks and I write…  READ FULL ARTICLE HERE