My poor, sweet, ugly, shocking, beautiful interwebs

[BDG]

(18 November 2012, 14:05)HunterNurturer Wrote: People will go to prison for saying or doing things on the internet that would actually be LEGAL in real life. Anonymity will simply be a distant, ideological dream.
How do we know this to be the case? Because it’s already happening. People are regularly being arrested for things they say on twitter or facebook – even things that would barely classify as a crime in the real world like insults, jokes and symbols of protest. A man has just been arrested for showing a video of a burning poppy on facebook, and while clearly offensive and in bad taste, anybody who believes this deserves an arrest is an enemy of free speech – but things are about to get a lot worse. The director of public prosecutions is about to issue guidelines on when criminal charges should be brought due to actions on twitter or facebook , and it’s barely even making the news.

You know that the guidance from the DPP is so that freedom of speech is promoted and they will be taking into account the context of material you put online - for instance, the guy that was arrested for posting a maddaline mccann joke - should not have been arrested - but if he had emailed it to her family, he should have been.

We have had laws around this kind of thing since public electronic communication networks began in the 1930's.

Before you put anything online, you should ask yourself, if I put this on a poster in my front window, could I expect a knock from the police, a brick through the window or my head kicked in.

I do agree that the internet is not the place it once was and it is the worse for it. I have been using it since the early 1990's and I put it down to back in the day, you had to have a certain geekishness about you to get online, it was not an easy thing to do and so you did not really come across thickos online, and so it was very self regulating.

Now the idiots are online, they need someone to protect them. Its like the fools who climb Ben Nevis in mid winter in a pair of old trainer.