Internet

Jack of Kent on why the Twitter Joke Trial matters:

The Paul Chambers case – known as the “Twitter Joke Trial” – has three points of significance:

– how relentless administrative and judicial stupidity can end in a conviction;

– how the CPS are wrongly using criminal law in respect of electronic communications; and

– how a criminal record can change a person’s life for the worse.

Let us hope Doncaster Crown Court can reverse this injustice on Friday and allow Paul to rebuild his life.

He explains succinctly why and how these points matter for Paul Chambers, the poor guy whose life was ruined through this case, but it has of course broader considerations too, especially the first point. Chambers was originally convicted through a long chain of people and institutions unable or unwilling to apply common sense about what was essentially the kind of stupid joke you’d make to your mates or cow-orkers, but on twitter. You could’ve had the same sort of case thirty-forty years ago as well, if some passing police officer had taken offense to a similar joke by some local wit. But whereas then you had to have had spectacularly bad luck to say something stupid in front of a copper himself dumb enough to take an obvious joke seriously, if you do the same on the internet, your bad joke can land you in hot water long after you’ve made and forgotten it.

Twitter is meant for ephemeral conversation, but they don’t disappear when you stop talking. Once it’s on the internet it’s there forever, barring acts of god or Google. Which means that many more people can read and misinterpret your comments than just your mates and it only takes one blockhead to ruin your day. What’s more, because it’s so easy to gather data online, you have whole classes of professional blockheads, in government as well as working for private companies looking for “threats” and it’s not in their interest or power to treat anything like a joke. As with airport police, these people have no sense of humour and are obliged to treat any bomb joke like a real threat, no matter how stupid.

This is not to blame Paul Chambers for his misfortune, rather the fault lies with institutions like the police, like the Crown Prosecution Service and like the Robin Hood Airport security department for not using common sense or rather having institutionalised processes in which the right thing to do is to not think for yourself but follow procedures. That’s always been a bad thing, but it’s made worse when such a dumb organisation is fed the huge amounts of data gathered on us routinely every day and starts to datamine. No government and damn few private companies truly understand information technology and the simple fact that it’s not how much but what kind and which quality of data you gather and how you use it that’s important. So you get things like airport security officers googling for their airport to detect threats and then using inflexible, dumb procedures to process these “threats” because the only thing their organisations understands is “more data good”, “common sense bad”.

That’s the spectre we’re all living with, of huge unaccountable organisations fucking over our lives not out of malice, but out of wilful stupidity because of something we said online.