Twitter community angry about joke tweet prosecution

Today has seen Twitter taken over by the joke that earlier this week, after losing his appeal, Paul Chambers who was fined £1000 made earlier this year during the snow.

Dara O’Briain was among many who posted the following:

Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!! #IAmSpartacus

As you can see from the screenshot, another 95 people have retweeted Dara’s tweet. Dara was not along and probably thousands if not tens of thousands people tweeted the same thing…

Actually if you think about it, if a million people on Twitter sent that Tweet, all were fined, that’s £1bn that could be used to offset the spending cuts… A little bit of politics there!

There has been much written about the #IAmSpartacus meme today.

BBC News reports – Twitter anger over bomb tweeter

Guardian says – #IAmSpartacus campaign explodes on Twitter in support of airport joker

Channel 4 News writes – #Iamspartacus Twitter campaign takes off

It has also reached America, well you would expect that with Twitter.

LA Times – Twitter joke goes bad, users protest by evoking Spartacus

CNN – Mass Twitter campaign supports airport threat tweeter

The original tweet was a stupid joke, not a threat, a joke. The fact that two judges could not see that says a lot about how little the establishment understands social media. The protest may show, if Paul appeals again, that this was a joke between friends and in no way was any kind of serious threat.

That nice Stephen Fry has already said he will pay Paul’s fine.

Paul though lost his job because of the prosecution. The sad thing is that I doubt Paul will be the last person to be prosecuted for making a joke on Twitter.

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