As the activity on Twitter of so-called ‘trolls’ plumbed new depths over the weekend, senior management at the micro-blogging site announced that they have updated the rules to make it clear that abuse of users will not be tolerated.
The announcement came as police revealed that they are investigating allegations by eight people of abuse on the site, after three female tweeters said that they had been the subjects of bomb and rape threats.
As the Guardian reported last week, the written harassment of prominent women is nothing new; a hundred years ago, an opponent of votes for women wrote: “we would give you and old Mother Pankhurst (the fossil-worm) Five Years Penal Servitude and then burn you both together”.
The sentiment is similar to the tweets sent to female journalists, MPs and campaigners in the last week or so, which are currently being investigated by the Specialist Organised & Economic Crime Command.
However, some commentators argue that Twitter is merely a platform, not a publisher and so should not be held accountable for what individual tweeters say. In fact, when tweets about Lord McAlpine were aired earlier this year, the peer sued the individuals who had made them, not Twitter itself.
It is such a grey area that the Crown Prosecution Service has issued guidelines on prosecuting cases involving social media and says that prosecutors may only start a case if it passes two stages of a test; the first is requirement of evidential sufficiency and the second involves consideration of the public interest.
The CPS goes on to say that cases involving the sending of communications via social media are likely to benefit from early consultation between police and prosecutors, which is no doubt happening in the current cases being investigated.