A cura di @francisco quintay.

Il Guardian spiega che nel Regno Unito le Corti hanno cominciato a confrontarsi con il particolare linguaggio dei social media nel contesto di processi per diffamazione.

“It was novel as regards the medium but it also provided an opportunity to explore the defamatory meaning question when looking at a very short and odd set of words,” says Garnier.

Oliver Cox, a senior associate at Carter-Ruck, the firm that represented Bercow, says the case illustrated that the courts are perfectly capable of finding a defamatory allegation in words published on social media, even if they do not directly make an allegation.

Adam Glass, a partner at Lewis Silkin, says it was the first major defamation case to really explore the way Twitter works – the complexities of the audience and the potential impact of a tweet. “A key factor was who the hypothetical reader of the tweet in question was, what characteristics they would have and how this would sit within their knowledge of the context of the tweet,” he says.