[Mrluvaluva]

Unfortunately the minority generally spoil things for the majority.

[Mrluvaluva]

A different view from The Telegraph:

"Top banter: Liam Stacey is an idiot. That's punishment enough for his Fabrice Muamba tweets.

Top banter eh? Liam Stacey. Top drunken banter of which any red-blooded Lad would be proud. Let's look at some of that japesome badinage in full, because by crikey, we've all got a lot to learn from your razor-edged wit.

As Fabrice Muamba, the Bolton Wanderers midfielder who suffered a heart attack during an FA Cup quarter final against Tottenham Hotspur, lay apparently dying on the field, Mr Stacey tweeted: “LOL, ******* Muamba. He’s dead.”

In response to some of the people on Twitter who suggested that this might not be quite the time for it, he proceeded to add:
• you are a silly ******… Your mothers a w*g and your dad is a rapist! Bonjour you scruffy northen *******!
• owwww go suck a n****r d*** you *********g aids ridden ******
• go suck muamba's dead black d**k then you aids ridden t**t! #muambasdead
• go rape your dog! #******!
• I aint your friend you w*g ****** ….go pick some cotton!

There are a few more examples of his Wildean mind in action here.

And then, to remind the sensitive among us that it was only some top, top banter – no doubt he would describe himself as the Archbishop of Banterbury – he said:
• only taking the p**s, obviously people can't take a joke

Obviously. And it turns out that the courts can't really take a joke either. Stacey has been charged with inciting racial hatred, pleaded guilty, and been sentenced to 56 days in jail.

Mr Stacey is, I hope you'd agree, an idiot. Or at the very least, when he is catastrophically drunk (as he apparently was, after Wales won the grand slam in the rugby Six Nations), he behaves like a prize idiot; perhaps in sober day-to-day life he's perfectly intelligent. But does he deserve to be jailed? My colleague Ed West says no; that "whenever race becomes a factor in anything, people lose their ability to reason", and that his tweets, while horrible and vicious, were significantly less unpleasant than a lot of actual violent assaults which get let off with suspended sentences or community service. (I know from previous comments that many of you remember this one – another racist attack, but by Muslim girls on a white girl, in which the attackers were given suspended sentences.)

I think Ed's wrong, on one count. I think this isn't, so much, about race as about the strange three-way relationship between Twitter, public outrage and the law.

Last week, the country was united, as it rarely is, in sympathy and shock for Muamba. Opinion is divided about these fits of public emotion – the national tearfulness after Diana's death, and so on. A friend of mine notes that in football especially they are spasmodic, and bring fleeting bouts of concern – for a few weeks British football was consumed with worry about depression, after Gary Speed's suicide in November; now it's heart screening, after Muamba – before being largely forgotten. But for the most part the emotion is genuine, even if it might be a brief madness of crowds.

So when Stacey tweeted his nasty little tweets about Muamba, even though he was probably only being followed by a couple of hundred people at most, it shot around the internet, because people who were genuinely concerned about the life of a young man read them with shock. They were spotted by Stan Collymore, the football commentator who has recently worked to highlight racist abuse on Twitter, and gained more publicity still.

This is the problem, as far as the law is concerned, with Twitter. Today, for the first time, libel damages have been won over a tweet: Chris Cairns, a former New Zealand cricketer, won Ł90,000 from Lalit Modi, the deposed Indian Premier League commissioner, over unfounded match-fixing allegations. Modi's tweet was seen by an estimated 65 people, but one of them was the CricInfo website, which spread it further. In 2010, Paul Chambers was convicted of sending a "menacing message" over a public telecommunications system after he joked on Twitter about blowing Robin Hood Airport "sky high" because its flights were snowed off and was spotted by the police. In each case, people think of Twitter as a sort of extended pub conversation, or private chatroom, but in theory it could be seen by millions of people: it is a publishing tool which can reach as many people as any newspaper or television channel, if the author's luck is good or bad enough.

In Stacey's case, it was his bad luck/thundering stupidity that he made his horrible comments at a time when Twitter was particularly on the lookout for unpleasantness about Muamba, so it spread like a cold in a playground. And, of course, once the police is made aware of someone apparently breaking the law (and whatever you think of the hate-crime laws, the phrase "I aint your friend you w*g ****** ….go pick some cotton!" is surely at least a contender for the title of "incitement to racial hatred"), they have to do something about it. It didn't matter, so much, that it was race; it mattered that his sort-of-private conversation became incredibly public due to widespread public disgust.

For what it's worth, which is not very much, while I despise Stacey's "banter" and think it is a prime example of why the word needs to be rejected by all right-thinking people and left to rot with simpletons like him, I agree with Ed that it's wrong to jail him, when perpetrators of other, by any measure far more terrible, crimes walk from the court. For Mr Stacey, a lifetime of being an idiot is probably punishment enough.


A link with a lot of comments

[MTVN]

Originally Posted by Mrluvaluva

A different view from The Telegraph:

"...people think of Twitter as a sort of extended pub conversation, or private chatroom, but in theory it could be seen by millions of people

I definitely think this is the case, people are saying he wouldn't be able to go out and start ranting racist crap on the street with the intention of inciting hatred, but surely we are able to see the difference between that and drunken tweets on his own twitter page. It is exactly the sort of thing he'd probably say down the pub and there people would likely just tell him to shut up, but when posing this sort of things on twitter people forget how easily seen and accessible they are

[Mystic Mock]

I still can't get over them Muslim girls getting away with beating the girl up because they was drunk,more like it was because they didn't want to be seen as racist and being drunk doesn't mean you are posessed or something lol.

That's why these racist jokes on Twitter don't bother me as much as cases like the one that's just been mentioned.

[Kizzy]

Originally Posted by jedward fever

I still can't get over them Muslim girls getting away with beating the girl up because they was drunk,more like it was because they didn't want to be seen as racist and being drunk doesn't mean you are posessed or something lol.

That's why these racist jokes on Twitter don't bother me as much as cases like the one that's just been mentioned.

Actually you just jogged my memory of that...but muslims don't drink do they... and lots of women without a chaperone?....Hmmmm ...yes odd!

[Kizzy]

Agreed there mr luvaluva....perfect sense.

[Mrluvaluva]

It's set a precedent here hopefully.

And then the freaks come out - tweet to Stan Collymore:

Badluck Schleprock ‏ @dirtyvodkaman
@StanCollymore lol you ****** ******, good thing it's not a hate crime over here (yet) to call you the mongrel that you are. cry about it!

For every one prosecuted, there will be many more.

take this guy

[Kizzy]

Originally Posted by Mrluvaluva

It's set a precedent here hopefully.

And then the freaks come out - tweet to Stan Collymore:

Badluck Schleprock ‏ @dirtyvodkaman
@StanCollymore lol you ****** ******, good thing it's not a hate crime over here (yet) to call you the mongrel that you are. cry about it!

For every one prosecuted, there will be many more.

take this guy

Im assuming this person thinks that Collymore is a hypocrite due to his abuse...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/110009.stm

[Mystic Mock]

just bullied a few homo kids... feels good man

heil hitler

Wtf?

[Mrluvaluva]

It's not just Stan. He is targetting many just for the sake of it if you look at his page, because of the story. It's like a red rag to a bull for some.

[Kizzy]

Ah well, he is just another fool talking rubbish though... what can you do?...they can say what they like there apparently.

[Mrluvaluva]

That's my point. He can get away for it for the moment, sitting in front of his screen in his warm and safe environment. Tomorrow could be another day though, and his whole world could change. Just like it did for Liam Stacey...

[Mrluvaluva]

Liam Stacey could be freed tomorrow...

A student jailed for mocking footballer Fabrice Muamba on Twitter after he suffered a cardiac arrest could be released in the next 24 hours.

Liam Stacey, 21, was jailed for 56 days on Tuesday after he admitting inciting racial hatred.

He is to appeal against his sentence tomorrow (Friday), and if successful could be freed straight away.


More on the story

[Kizzy]

He is going to get some right stick, I actually feel a bit sorry for him tbh

[Shaun]

The thing is trolls and shock-jocks use this kind of language all the time and I find it really difficult (and basically the joke's old now, so tedious, too) to tell the difference between someone trying to provoke a reaction and someone genuinely racist.

Either way I don't particularly mind them getting punished. The internet is full of too many morons. Twitter in particular. But then I've seen few wise statements made in under 140 characters.

[Mrluvaluva]

A student has lost his appeal after being sent to jail for posting racially offensive comments on Twitter about footballer Fabrice Muamba.

Swansea University student Liam Stacey, 21, from Pontypridd, was sentenced to 56 days on Tuesday.

A High Court judge in Swansea has now dismissed the appeal against sentence.

On Friday, Mr Justice Wyn Williams told Stacey he rejected an argument that he had already been punished enough.

He said the Swansea University biology student had admitted an offence of racist intent.

"He was intending to say what he said and was intending to produce the effect that he did," said the judge.

Stacey was sentenced at Swansea Magistrates' Court on Tuesday after admitting inciting racial hatred over remarks about the Bolton Wanderers player, who collapsed during a cup tie against Tottenham Hotspur.

Mr Justice Wyn Williams told Stacey: "There can be no avoiding the conclusion that your offence was committed in the context of a grave illness that had afflicted Fabrice Muamba.

"It was immediately apparent that he was gravely ill and while he was lying prostrate on the pitch you posted comments that were extremely racist couched in terms that can only be described as extremely offensive.

"What was written was capable of being read by any user of Twitter and these messages provoked a very strong response.

"You received responses which were extremely critical but you did not desist - instead you posted eight messages which were extremely abusive and insulting.

"You later realised the enormity of your behaviour and tried to apologise.

"But you deserve to be punished for your actions. It can't be argued that a term of 56 days is too long for this offence.

"By pleading guilty you admitted a racist intent to your comments."

Paul Hobson, defending Stacey, told the appeal hearing: "This should not define him, but it will leave a blot upon him forever.

"He has already had a short, sharp, shock, his life has changed very swiftly in just a fortnight.

"He has been made an example of and surely this will do enough to prevent others from acting in a similar way.

"Rarely will the court deal with an individual who has attracted as much stigma as this defendant - this has devastated him and his family and his friends."


Full Story

[Mrluvaluva]

Has this become a trend?

https://twitter.com/#!/ninjathunder/...054464/photo/1

Stan Collymore ‏ @StanCollymore Reply Retweet Favorite · Open
Staffordshire Police have contacted me to see if I want to report the racist tweets from earlier.

I just don't understand the need?

[Kizzy]

Originally Posted by Mrluvaluva

Has this become a trend?

https://twitter.com/#!/ninjathunder/...054464/photo/1

Stan Collymore ‏ @StanCollymore Reply Retweet Favorite · Open
Staffordshire Police have contacted me to see if I want to report the racist tweets from earlier.

I just don't understand the need?

I don't 'get' twitter.....who do you twit twoo?....lol
Seriously though it just seems so impersonal...Moreso than forums and FB....

[Mrluvaluva]

A student jailed after making racist remarks on Twitter about footballer Fabrice Muamba has apologised and says he has paid a huge price.

Liam Stacey told BBC Wales' Week in Week Out programme how the comments - "just drunken stupidity" - turned him into a national hate figure.

Stacey, from Pontypridd, was given a 56-day prison term for a racially aggravated public order offence.

Muamba, 24, suffered a cardiac arrest on the pitch in March.

He recovered in time to attend the return fixture at the Reebok Stadium on 3 May.

Stacey told the programme, which is broadcast on Tuesday on BBC One Wales, he did not know why he made the remarks on Twitter, adding that it was a "stupid, massive, massive mistake and I've paid a big price for it".

"What I struggle to get my head around was the week or two before I was just a normal kid getting on with my work in university, getting on with life, playing rugby with all my mates, then a week or two later I was just going to prison, everything had been turned upside down," he said.

The programme also went undercover to expose how so-called internet trolls - people who carry out anonymous online hate campaigns - target the most vulnerable.

It heard from the mothers of murder victims Rebecca Aylward from Bridgend, and Kirsty Wilkinson from Swansea,whose online memorial sites were attacked by trolls.

Kirsty's mother Catherine Broomfield said: "It's just beyond belief, it just hurts. I've already got a big hole in my heart as it is and these people just make the hole deeper."

One troll told the programme attacking others made him feel better.

Week In Week Out also enlisted the help of an unnamed internet expert to set a trap for the trolls who went out of their way to shock, offend and upset vulnerable people.

Nobody has been prosecuted for making comments about Rebecca Aylward or Kirsty Wilkinson.

However, the head of the Crown Prosecution Service for Wales said reported online crimes are treated exactly the same as offences committed "in the real world".

Jim Brisbane, chief prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service in Wales, said the vast majority of the population enjoyed social media and used it responsibly.

He added: "But there's now an opportunity to make it clear for those who overstep the mark and abuse the privilege of being able to communicate in such a wide way, that the law that applies to other settings and other forms of communication can apply equally to what they're doing, and if that is not recognised then there may be consequences."

Superintendent Joe Ruddy from South Wales Police led the investigation into Stacey's case.

He said: "We in South Wales Police have seen over 100% increase in the number of social networking type occurrences in the last two years and that's probably just tip of the iceberg in what's going on out there."

While Fabrice Muamba continues to recover, Stacey's future remains uncertain.

Swansea University suspended him pending the conclusion of disciplinary proceedings.

On Tuesday, it said Stacey would remain suspended for the remainder of this academic year and is not allowed to return to campus.

But he will be given the opportunity to sit his final exams as an external candidate next year at another venue and, if successful, to graduate in absentia.

He will remain excluded from the campus, the university said.

"We take the actions of this student very seriously, which is why he is no longer part of our campus community," it said in a statement.

"We are mindful that he has been given a prison sentence, and therefore has already paid a price for his actions.

"He has expressed genuine remorse and we are satisfied that he understands that his behaviour was unacceptable, and damaging to the university."


BBC