Tweets take on legal significance

Lalit Modi, the previous Indian Premier League commissioner, is an incredibly controversial and central person in international cricket. He also tweets frequently, and recently claimed that New Zealand cricketer Chris Cairns fixes matches on his twitter.

Granted, Cairns was going be frustrated; few thought he would sue Modi over a tweet, however, because Twitter is not considered that seriously legally. The extremely well-respected libel judge who handled the case made the decision (after contacting two authorities on what exactly Twitter is) that the libel case could proceed.

At present, the chances of being held legally liable for a tweet are getting higher by the day. Gareth Compton, a Birmingham councillor, tweeted a "glib comment" about an independent columnist in which he stated in response to criticism from the said journalist "can someone please stone Yasmin Alibhai-Brown to death? I shan't tell Amnesty if you don't. It would be a blessing, really."

Afua Hirsch, in her legal blog for the Guardian, writes that police put him in jail on charges of incitement to murder. Taking into consideration it was only a tweet, the police reponse was pretty intense, and it is tough to think that Mr Compton, a councillor, attempted to provoke the population to kill a journalist over criticism; even if only because he is aware how easy the prosecution's job would be in such a case.

Problems inherent in internet and text communication are very genuine reasons why holding people legally accountable for post on social networking sites needs to be thought through. The lack of situational context, tonality, facial expressions, and hand gestures, eye contact, etc signifies that determining what someone is trying to say in a tweet can be challenging.

Or at the very least, it can be hard to establish unbiased, legal standards for determining what is meant by text found on the internet. It will, of course, have to happen simply out of necessity as channels like Twitter become more common. Until then, be mindful not to tweet anything that could get you thrown in jail.