eta: I didn't really give my opinion of the situation. I think it's a dangerous precedent to jail someone for that amount of time over a tweet. I'm a big. big supporter of what we in the US have as protected speech. I do wish we could have a few more exceptions to our laws, but not for any tweets, no. For the idiot pastor burning Korans? That would have been a great time to have a well-thought-out law about inciting racial/religious hatred!
Not to derail, but there are definitely certain instances I think it should be possible to punish a person for tweets.
I heard a few cases over the summer of people tweeting false information that led to mass panics. The equivalent of screaming "fire" in a crowded theater. An example would be someone who in Mexico who tweeted that a gunman had gone to an elementary school and opened fire. Parents panicked and rushed to the school, trying to make sure their students were okay. There were accidents as a result. The problem? There was no shooter. Someone had falsely sent out tweets about it and then it spread so quickly that it created a mass panic.
I can't recall every scenario, but there were three or four, and each of them made me think that there should be consequences for certain things. Knowingly "joking" about something that can cause a panic or a riot is wrong. Knowingly doing it in all seriousness is even worse.
Weren't the riots in London not too long ago caused by someone tweeting false information about a shooting? Saying that the police had killed an unarmed minority kid? When the actual situation, if I'm recalling correctly, was that the kid had pulled a weapon and then been shot?
That started
riots. People were hurt, buildings destroyed, and so on. All because someone falsely tweeted information. Twitter is dangerous because it moves so fast. Yes, the people who act as a result are also partly at fault, but in the case of the Mexico situation, if you had a message saying
your kid's school was being attacked by gunmen, what would you have done?