A unique August?
In my Twitter feed yesterday, I kept encountering a rather interesting stat. @JJ_Lin (me neither…) had this to say: “INTERESTING FACT ABOUT AUGUST 2010. This August has 5 Sundays, 5 Mondays, 5 Tuesdays, all in one month. It happens once in 823 years.”
I don’t follow this chap, but I picked up on his Tweet because a few people who I do follow – and greatly respect – retweeted it. The ‘interesting fact’ seemed instantly dubious to me, so I checked it out. Of course, I was right – August has five Sundays, five Mondays and five Tuesdays every time August 1st falls on a Sunday. It last happened in 2004, and due to leap years, it will next happen in 2021.
Retweeting without fact checking
What is interesting is the number of people who chose to retweet this without even checking that it was true. As @DailyInfoOxford said when this was brought to their attention: “Thanks for the correction! Shows the perils of retweeting without fact checking.”
Defamation law
On this occasion it was trivia. But what if the snippet being retweeted was blatantly defamatory? What if it said, for example, that Keith Chegwin boils rats alive and eats one for breakfast every day? (Which, I should add, he doesn’t).
I last studied media law at least ten years ago, but as far as I can tell, anyone who retweeted that would have libelled Keith Chegwin. Cheggers could rightfully sue every single one of them.
Everyone’s a publisher
It is commonly said that everyone is writer these days. But it’s not true – with blogs, Twitter, Facebook and the like, everyone is a publisher. The world has fragmented into millions – if not billions – of tiny one-man media outlets. But the old media laws still apply, and that makes things very interesting.
Everyone has the ability to publish, but very few have the media law knowledge to keep them on the right side of our surprisingly stringent defamation laws. More to the point, they don’t have editors above them with superior media law knowledge and expensively-assembled legal teams that would put the kybosh on anything defamatory before it goes to print (or online).
A publisher’s responsibility
With the right to publish comes the responsibility of publishing. A lot of people don’t understand this until it’s too late. I know, for example, one blogger who had to settle out of court for comments published beneath a post on his site – he hadn’t himself libelled, but he published the libel of another person. And then we can go closer to home. My last post – about Flybe’s website – was a bit of a departure for this blog. Usually I just moan; this time I was outright accusing a company of sharp practice.
Before allowing that to go online, I really had to check my facts and the relevant laws. I had to carefully word every sentence and err on the side of caution where necessary. I’m as sure as I can be without hiring a team of lawyers that what I have written is fair comment, truthful and watertight. But, while I’m extremely grateful to all of those who RTed my tweet that drew attention to the blog post, it does worry me. How many of them had actually checked things out before hitting send? Few, I suspect.
Strings attached
One day, someone will take umbrage at a libellous statement being spread across Twitter like wildfire and decide to sue every single person who published it. It’ll either lead to a change in the law, or a much-needed realisation that the freedom to say whatever you like in the public domain has important strings attached.
UPDATE
Yesterday evening, I was reminded of an example of someone facing legal trouble over a Tweet. It wasn’t libel – but a Doncaster man was convicted of threatening to blow up a plane. Story here. It also appears as though someone has been taken to court for alleged Twitter libel as well – after a seemingly innocuous comment about her apartment.
Ha, the same thing happened with ‘future day’ where people thought that the day in question was the one mentioned by Doc in Back to the Future and it went wild! Think it even ended up a trending topic too!
I called bullsh1t on it at the time: http://brown727.co.uk/back-to-the-future-day-fail/ yet it went on for about 3/4 days.
A great post David raising some really strong, considered points. You’re right it’s all too easy to retweet and potentially spread all manner of rumours or inaccuracies (the example here does sound ridiculous from the outset though). The worrying thing however is that whereas those of us with training in media law will have this in the back of our minds when writing posts etc, not everyone has this experience, so millions of people who are completely new to publishing could be walking blindly into problems.
And you’re right – blogging and microblogging are publishing, but so few people are aware of the significance of this or the responsibilities it brings with it.
Thank you for making this very good point! As one who actually did RT the stupid thing about “happens every 823 years” without checking, it’s salutary to be reminded that publishing untruths is at best bad for your reputation, and, as you say, in worst cases has legal consequences. Tweet with care.
People who wouldn’t gossip continually send rumors, gossip or inaccurate information via email, blog, Twitter or any other internet communication method. What is there about webspread (did I just coin a new word? It works!) that makes people feel that everything they read on the web is fact? It is quite amazing that many people haven’t been sued for libel for propagating lies. Great topic. There will be much more on this as internet law becomes feasible – yes, feasible. It may have to be tackled on an international basis to have the needed effect.
We tweet on a daily basis @Comfy_Living and had not thought about this kind of situation, although we tweet about our products, we interact with our followers on a personal level with little facts (like August above) to even what was eaten for lunch.
This article has highlighted exactly what everyone should do when receiving ’round robin’ emails in their personal or work accounts, a lot of hoaxes are out there and there are many forums on the internet that can dispel these myths.