Tweeter To Be Prosecuted, Twitter Now Censoring? 195
Andy Smith writes "Slashdot has already covered the super-injunctions furore in the UK, with one famous footballer going after an anonymous Twitter user who broke a court order and revealed his extra-marital affair. Now another footballer has asked the attorney general to prosecute a well-known journalist and TV personality, who went against another super-injunction and wrote about this footballer, again on Twitter. Meanwhile, going back to the first footballer, it looks like he's got Twitter running scared, as the site is apparently blocking his name from appearing on the trend list, despite him being one of the most tweeted-about people."
whats this all about then? (Score:2, Funny)
why would ryan giggs do such a thing?
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Dear everybody who is taking out these kinds of superinjunction, Read my sig
Imogen Thomas (Score:5, Funny)
Just heard former Big Brother contestant Imogen Thomas has got a secret singing career.
Apparently she's been doing gigs in Manchester for ages.
Slashdot is not UK based (Score:2)
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You're right, Slashdot is not UK-based. It's also Slashdot. Which means most of us probably don't follow sports celebrities. :)
Now that you've got me actually reading the linked blog, I see Andy Smith gives a "Round of applause for today’s Sunday Herald for identifying the footballer who is trying to sue a Twitter user for identifying him, in violation of a court order." But does he dare say the name, himself?
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Ryan Giggs. The genie is out of the bottle.
They made a good point about these injunctions on Radio 4. They are often used to prevent blackmail. Maybe Ryan Gifts didn't do it, but now everyone thinks he did.
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Ryan Giggs [...] Ryan Gifts
--
Sent from my iPad
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so talking about this might slightly change the society so that sex wouldn't be a reason for blackmail ? :)
yay. who fucked whom, again ?
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Which means most of us probably don't follow sports celebrities.
Some of us don't follow ANY "celebrities". They are all dissappointing, sooner or later. Hell, even John Wayne cashed in his chips some years ago. If the Duke let us down, all the celebs will, eventually.
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Like many things, don't get your hopes up indeed.
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He says it in the print edition of the paper, only available in Scotland; not on the web edition which is also available in England where the court order was made.
Re:Slashdot is not UK based (Score:4, Insightful)
for identifying the footballer who is trying to sue a Twitter user for identifying him, in violation of a court order.
What is the public benefit to prohibiting publication of some guy messing around? If someone finds out about something someone is doing, why would it be made illegal to talk about if it is true? Isn't this a violation of free speech? Oh, I forgot, this is in England, the most heavily 'big brothered' country outside of a communist block. No wonder an Englishman could envision 1984. Keep working at it. Soon you will indeed have the ministry of truth.
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If someone finds out about something someone is doing, why would it be made illegal to talk about if it is true? Isn't this a violation of free speech?
No, actually. Free speech protects political speech. There are non-political restrictions on speech in the US, too.
Another important right is the right to respect for private and family life [wikipedia.org].
I don't care about the celebrities, and I can see it's not simply a black/white question balancing free speech and privacy.
However, there have been "super injunctions" applied to Trafigura [wikipedia.org], a oil/energy/metal company, which has no right to privacy (or any other rights, it's a company). The media's obsession with celeb
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Who cares? This is no one's business but the person who committed the adultery and the parties involved. Why is it that people who would ordinarily say "but out of my life", demand that they know everything about other people and are horrified when someone says it back?
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Very much so, for instance Trafigura suppressing a report on toxic oil dumping [guardian.co.uk]. If you go to the superinjunction blog they have a spreadsheet with a list of supposed injunctions.
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Ok so it's Ryan giggs, we've got that. But who's the journalist? I figured it'd be Ian Hisslop but I'm not sure.
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Ok so it's Ryan giggs, we've got that. But who's the journalist? I figured it'd be Ian Hisslop but I'm not sure.
Giles Coren for tweeting about TSE - (Gareth Barry), another Player whose taking out an injunction preventing folk talking about an affair he had.
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I think I know who it is but I'm not 100% sure. I'll give you a clue - he's a former editor of a major national tabloid and widely hated. But he's not Piers Morgan.
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You mean Kelvin MacKenzie and no it is not him. Kelvin apparently told a Sun reader about Ryan Giggs.
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Ian Hislop clearly despises superinjunctions, but he prefers not to be sued. Just see the "Odd One Out" round on recent episodes of HIGNFY (IIRC series 41 episodes 4 and 5; possibly also 3; the OOO round is usually about three quarters of the way through the non-extended version, and you can find them on Youtube).
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Exactly. I think he gets sued enough already without going looking for lawsuits.
Re:Slashdot is not UK based (Score:5, Informative)
The journalist is Giles Coren and the footballer is Gareth Barry. So I read on a website.
http://www.information-britain.co.uk/tweeters/user/47583067/ [informatio...tain.co.uk]
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And now some sportsperson I never heard of is indelibly marked as an alduterer. Gotta love that Streisand effect.
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He is a midfielder for Manchester City. He is nowhere near as good as Ryan Giggs. Either on the pitch or in generating the Streisand Effect.
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superinjunctions are nothing new, they've become quite popular in the UK and sometimes they don't leak.
Even when they do they stop the big papers from publishing the info and getting it to 99% of the population.
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How does a court injunction against a reporter have any bearing on anyone else?
The injunction is against anyone who is aware of both the existence of the injunction and the precise information it is intended to protect. Which would now appear to be just about everyone. Which means Ryan Giggs could probably sue me if he cared that much...
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It's not Alan Shearer. I know who it is but there's no way I'm going posting it here. All I'm saying is that he's not very well known and if I tell you you'll shrug.
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There is, search for the superinjunction blog and have a look at their spreadsheet :)
Where is this going to end (Score:3)
Are you telling me that cheap gossip like extra-marital affairs of pro footballers will have to be leaked through wikileaks in the future?
Re:Where is this going to end (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm less concerned about cheating football players and more concerned with overthrowing [southjerseylocalnews.com] corrupt governments [techcrunch.com]. Can a corrupt judge in a corrupt government simply say "don't talk about revolution" and Twitter will simply roll over and play dead? How would the Egyptian and Tunisia revolutions gone without the communication that Twitter provided?
Looks like we need a replacement for twitter.
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Looks like we need a replacement for twitter.
Actually - Great Britian needs a few replacement laws regarding freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and repealing huge parts of their libel and defamation laws.
Also, a legal trick here in the US might help out over there. If you address an officer of the court (a cop), telling him that he's an asshole, he can file charges against you. However, if you use the prefix, "In my opinion, you're being an asshole!" he can't do anything. It's a matter of stating an opinion, versus phrasing the same thing as
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The European Convention on Human Rights has the right to privacy at No. 8, and the right to freedom of speech at No. 10.
Human rights are not an absolute thing, one right contradicts another, and you have to find a balance. He we have decided that the right to privacy and the right to protect your reputation against untrue statements is more important that the right to free speech.
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Apparently, you've also decided that the right to protect your reputation against true statements is more important than the right to free speech - IIRC, in England truth is not an absolute defense against accusations of libel or slander.
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It is, but the burden of proof is on the person making the statement to prove that it is true.
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In the US there's a run around that as well: even if what you say is true you can be sued.
http://reason.com/blog/2011/03/16/this-week-in-free-speech [reason.com]
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The public interest defence is in addition to the defence of truth. That is the reason Simon Singh was acquitted of libel against the British Chiropractic Association for saying that Chiropractic doesn't cure asthma. It is in the public interest to have an open scientific debate, and scientific debate shouldn't be settled in the court room.
Truth is not a defence against a breach of privacy claim, but that is completely different to libel.
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So, try it out, Brits. Instead of posting, "John is a poof", try, "In my opinion, John is a poof."
The same goes for "allegedly" - allegedly.
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Or the humble question mark [thedailyshow.com].
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This is nonsense. In the US, calling a cop an asshole is protected speech regardless of whether you preface it with "in my opinion". However, the result either
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Twitter didn't censor the messages, just the "trend list." It wouldn't have hurt the revolutionaries at all.
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To be honest, that was never any business of the public at large. It's just that in the UK they can go to the courts and get an injunction. Whereas in the US there's little to nothing that can be done to keep the press out of the private lives of celebrities. To an extent that's natural, but if it didn't happen in public it's not public information.
Re:Where is this going to end (Score:5, Insightful)
> ...if it didn't happen in public it's not public information.
If it didn't happen in public the public would not know about it.
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Bingo! John wins the intertubez for today for what should be the most obvious and yet, most intelligent, statement of this thread.
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> If it didn't happen in public the public would not know about it. When you are a celebrity the lines between public and private shift. She might have been visiting him at home, and yet it could become public knowledge from a gossipy neighbor. Regardless, the press should be free to report it. It's not like celebrities don't get compensated for their loss of privacy.
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And if you threw something away in a rubbish bin without shredding it first, it's "public." If you use a email server that's not locked down tight, it's "public". If someone can hack into your mobile service, any messages stored there are "public."
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Uhhhh - not exactly a NASCAR "fan" - hell, I couldn't name more than three drivers. But, I do watch a race now and then. And, I don't watch to see a wreck. Watching someone drive at high speed is sometimes almost as exhilirating as driving at high speed yourself. I don't have any officially clocked speeds, but I've been over 180 mph on two wheels, over 150 on four wheels, and somewhere between 115 and 120 on 18 wheels.
I'm not crazy (I hope) but sometimes,
I FEEL THE NEED FOR SPEED!!!
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Hah... I'd agree if you'd mentioned F1 or rallying or touring. But nascar? When all they do is drive in a circle and turn left; the only things to look forward to, IMO, are the crashes and the commercials and changing the channel to just about anything else.
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But they are public figures. If they don't like it, they can go crawl back up into the womb...
Which is exactly where Ryan Giggs children would have to go to escape this current furore.
People like Imogen Thomas crave being in the public eye above all else, so will do anything she can to stay there. Who the hell else would actually apply to be a big brother contestant?
But if I sleep with her does it suddenly make it fair game for the gutter press to camp out on my lawn and harass me? Maybe it would make a great story to show me looking fat and ugly and use that as an example of how far she had fallen,
Not the first time they've blocked something from (Score:5, Informative)
trending.
They stopped wikileaks from trending a while back too [google.co.uk]
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Everyone, can we please move on from this conspiracy theory?
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How am I, Joe Public, meant to know which football player the story is about? I could list all 800 English Premier League players and be breaking the law. It's unbelievably illogical. If I, a minion of the almighty government, had access to the court injunction, I could refrain from guessing names and I would
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How am I, Joe Public, meant to know which football player the story is about? I could list all 800 English Premier League players and be breaking the law.
You're only breaking the law if you know at the time you publish it that the information is illegal to publish. Assuming you really don't know the identity of the footballers in question, you cannot break the law by speculating, because you also obviously would not know what the injunction prevents. You can't break a court order if you don't know of the order's existence...
Online newsagent scared by naming of footballer? (Score:2)
Similar to the trend list thing, here's another case of apparent censorship under fear. A newspaper identified one of the footballers, and that issue of the paper is missing from the online newsagent PressDisplay, even though PressDisplay is based in Canada, supposedly outside the reach of UK courts.
http://www.meejahor.com/2011/05/22/paper-identifies-injunction-footballer-scares-online-newsagent/ [meejahor.com]
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It also might be due to copyright. PressDisplay would need a license from the newspaper to distribute it online wouldn't they? And the newspaper presumably couldn't license and distribute something that's been barred by a court order, could they?
Still bad though.
Ryan Giggs is STILL trending (Score:2, Interesting)
The algorithm that twitter use favours novelty tweets over mass tweets. For my location Ryan Giggs is still trending whilst it has stopped elsewhere. There was an explanation of this after people accused twitter of censoring cablegate and wikileaks.
So: TD;DR Twitter are NOT censoring Giggs, its just their algorithm doing what it does.
A suggestion (Score:5, Insightful)
Their fame naturally reduces their ability to live a private life. But they don't have to live that life, they could get a regular job and disappear into the crowd.
A counter-suggestion (Score:2)
For gossip-mongers: Get a life of your own.
Re:A suggestion (Score:5, Interesting)
The flaw in your point is it's not proven he has been cheating and tabloid stories are nothing short of propaganda, it's a character assassination and the media is the weapon of choice.
In the UK, how it works is that the story is the story. Whether he has actually been cheating, eaten someone's hamster or whatever is barely relevant. It's a battle of PR clout.
These stories have very common themes: the male is some kind of famous, the girl is some desperate wannabe famous and is represented by Max Clifford [wikipedia.org]. If the male is at the peak of his celebrity, it's a fair bet that he did not pay his protection money, er I mean is not employing Max Clifford and a PR firm is trying to snag him with a grappling hook in order to drag up their "victim" into the spotlight for fame and/or interview fees.
On the other hand, if the male is in danger of dropping off the radar, it's a fair bet that both he and the "victim" are employed by the same publicist and the whole thing is a ruse to get back into the spotlight. Like when "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster" (see that wiki link [wikipedia.org]).
(There are of course stories about females but the story is more varied.)
It's all very well to throw up the "free speech" banners, but I'm not convinced it applies when your speech is all about attacking another person for cheap personal gain and the media operates no journalistic controls at all.
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That's why we have libel laws; and the UK libel laws are even more favourable toward the libeled party than US ones. Preventing people from speaking for fear that they may commit libel is prior restraint, and is generally considered to be bad.
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They more favourable in terms of winning, but not in terms of compensation.
Look at the Max Mosley case, his reward didn't even really cover his legal fees.
But it's a general problem in the UK, look at the phone hacking scandal similarly, whilst not libel £100,000 compensation is peanuts to the likes of News International. Look at Andrew Crossley and ACS:Law with his mere £1,000 fine.
In the UK yes we have laws to deal with these problems, but the damages are never high enough to be a
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Sorry, I don't buy it. I'm not an "everything must be free, man" extremi
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I think part the problem in this case is you have two issues being muddled together.
The first is of the right to privacy vs. the right of a free press.
The second is the right of a free press vs. false accusations by that press.
I think many people would agree with the free press idea in the former issue, but in the latter case the problem with have is a press making shit up and destroying people's lives just to sell papers.
In the Max Mossley case in the UK the Daily Mail printed a story about the F1 boss bei
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I'd agree that a good way to not get in trouble for bad behavior is to not engage in it, whether famous or not.
However, I don't think it's fair to destroy peoples' lives just because they're rich and/or famous. Don't treat them better because of their status, but don't treat them worse either.
Even if some people have a low opinion of their sport/music/acting/etc, a lot of them are famous for that. Why not leave it at that?
(the gossiping is probably more important to some celebrities' fame than others.)
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Wow, you sound like you're on a one man crusade against "infidelity." Bluenose!
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These athletes and other stars want to live in the limelight, they gotta deal with the costs of fame, and that means their life on display, every aspect analyzed and discussed by fans.
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But we are just as free to tweet about a neighbor who is having an affair as we are a famous person.
I'm not sure that this is true in the EU. Both the right to privacy and the right to free speech are enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Right, so the EU Court of Human Rights would balance those out against each other and decide which one trumps which in this particular situation. Even in case of famous people, there is a balance to be upheld. See e.g. Naomi Campbell v MGN [bllaw.co.uk]
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I'm not sure that this is true in the EU. Both the right to privacy and the right to free speech are enshrined in the EU Charter of Fundamental Right, so the EU Court of Human Rights would balance those out against each other and decide which one trumps which in this particular situation.
JFTR: There is no EU Court of Human Rights. The Court you mean is
the European Court of Human Rights, which is not an EU institution
but an institution of the Council of Europe.
Yes, it's complicated [wikipedia.org].
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JFTR: There is no EU Court of Human Rights. The Court you mean is
the European Court of Human Rights, which is not an EU institution
but an institution of the Council of Europe.
Yes, I know. Slip of the fingers because of the "EU Charter of Fundamental Rights" that came right before it in the sentence. Thanks for setting the record straight.
Re:A suggestion (Score:4, Insightful)
No one cares he's shitting on his wife and family. People are talking about this because he's abusing the law to hush it up. Had he ignored it, he'd only have to deal with his wife's divorce firm, and no one would be remotely interested in yet another Premier League player getting caught sleeping around.
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That is all.
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Do you think you should be able to take out a court order on your neighbors if some of them spot you "stepping out" on your spouse?
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But this isn't about a right to privacy. If this was about a right to privacy, then whoever uncovered the information in the first place would be the target of legal action, not everybody talking about it. This is the age of the internet and vast, multinational communication. Trying to stop information that's already out there is just a lot of flailing about that's going to hurt a few people and have no real effect.
Whether we should care or not doesn't enter into it, because the laws he wants to use to sile
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Since you are arguably making significant financial gains from giving up that privacy, it might be debatable as to how much privacy you can retain, I mean ultimately facts are facts and the truth will out.
Trend list, bah! (Score:2)
First, of course, removing something from the trend list is not censorship. It's a top ten type list, not the content itself.
Second, there have been complaints about the twitter trend list [wordpress.com] for a long time. The trend list has never seemed to be just a numerical ranking of tweets - I don't regard it as any more reliable than a Slashdot poll. Whatever they are doing here is probably not new.
I have also heard rumors that the trend list is particularized for the viewer (i.e., we don't all see the same trend list
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Ah, yes, our friends the spammers. As someone who has an active enough twitter account to attract "backscatter spam" (i.e., spam tweeted to my account but intended for others to pick up), I don't think you are going to be able to make that totally automatic.
You could make the trending list into a "honeypot" - make it a pure popularity contest, and hire 5-10 employees to watch it and banish trending spam. (5 to 10 for 24x7 surveillance). That way, you could whack lots of spam accounts at once. And, providing
Barbara Streisand effect all over again (Score:4, Insightful)
Predictions (Score:2)
Someone /. doesn't care about: Free speech trumps privacy /. does care about: Privacy trumps free speech [slashdot.org]
Someone
Under Control??? (Score:3)
FTA: However, he (Lord Neuberger) warned that modern technology was "totally out of control" and society should consider other ways to bring Twitter and other websites under control.
Personally, I think Lord Neuberger and those like him are the ones that need to be brought under control.
Dirty Little Secrets (Score:2)
Usually people who get their panties in such a knot over personal scandals being revealed to the general public have a few skeletons in the closet.
Who wants to put money on the thought that maybe Lord Neuberger has more than a few "kinks" of his own. I wonder if he likes to dress up like a schoolgirl and get his ass paddled by a dominatrix.
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FTA: However, he (Lord Neuberger) warned that modern technology was "totally out of control" and society should consider other ways to bring Twitter and other websites under control.
Firstly, he didn't say that. So, it's already pretty clear that you haven't looked at the context [judiciary.gov.uk]. Lord Judge (the Lord Chief Justice) did say those words, but in the following context:
...everybody knows about defamation; some people even know about the Press Complaints Commission; and some people even know that most newspaper editors do not like to go foul of the Press Complaints Commission, notwithstanding some of the articles to the contrary. But they know about defamation; everybody knows that if you get it wrong, the damages will be very substantial. They also know that modern technology is totally out of control. Anybody can put anything on it. I suspect that they
would pay much more attention to an article in a newspaper or on the media than they would to anything that anybody can put out on modern technology. I think there is a significant difference.
Basically, what he's saying is that modern technology is out of the control of the law (which, if anything, this mess over injunctions - they're not super-injunctions - has demonstrated). But he's saying that it doesn't really matter! This was at the end of a speech where he was talking about how it was necessary to start us
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Actually it's not a bunch of Brits: it's one single judge. What I recall from what I've seen of the Prime Minister's comments on the situation seem to indicate that he views it as legislating from the bench and that work is under way to get some proper, sane, legislation through Parliament.
Suppressions of Freedom (Score:2)
Under what great mystical process can any government claim that an adulterer can not be publicly pointed to as an adulterer? Freedom involves a willingness to allow exposure of the worst parts of all of us. The basic notion of promoting the best of us while limiting the success of the worst of us needs to run its natural course. In the old days a man could challenge another man and the rightness was established by the strongest in lethal combat. The realization that great people and strong muscle
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Ryan Giggs ? (Score:3)
Ans Slashdot?? (Score:2)
Since when is Slashdot UK based?
then tell me: WHO ARE THESE FOOTBALLERS????
(and who did they frell?)
It's not just Twitter running scared (Score:2)
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lol
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AFAIK, it's not active censorship (i.e. silencing certain content), but rather the way the trending topics algorithm works, in that it will ditch topics after a sharp spike, to limit itself to 'breaking news' [pcmag.com]. You still find loads of tweets if you search for Ryan Giggs.
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Wait, do you mean the footballers is Ryan Giggs, or the tweeter is Ryan Giggs, or is it somehow both?
Perhaps Giggs created the twitter account himself in a fit of terrible remorse for his exploitation of the legal system.
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The first one is. The second one is someone else.
Pssh, only in Linux.
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Yep, that's slashdot... ... manage to make a linux joke. A funny one too. Gotta love it :)
We take an article about sports celebrities and legal issues surrounding rights of privacy and
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He also, apparently, thinks that I could be held criminally and civilly liable for revealing this information. So, this entire post is just my way of saying, "Hey, go fuck yourself" to that judge.
So why did you post anonymously ?
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That's fairly obvious. Censoring trending topics is impossible to prove - they can just claim the algorithm did it. If they were censoring tweets they'd have inevitably been caught red handed before they managed to censor even a handful of twitter users.
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