Tweet
An exasperated tweet by an air traveller grounded in January's snow cost him £1,000 today when a court failed to see the joke in his spoof threat to "blow an airport sky high".
Trainee accountant Paul Chambers is the first Briton to be convicted of a criminal offence on the microblogging site Twitter, whose bursts of 140-character tweets suit such brief moments of passion all too perfectly.
News of his conviction at Doncaster magistrates court was, appropriately, broken by disappointed and angry tweets from friends and supporters. He was told by a district judge that his message was "of a menacing nature in the context of the times in which we live".
Chambers, 26, tapped out on his mobile: "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your **** together, otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!" The tweet was sent in the early hours of 6 January to his 600 followers.
The court heard that Chambers, like thousands of other travellers frustrated by the foul weather at the time, had simply suffered "a moment of frustration" because his plans to fly to Ireland – for a blind date with one of his Twitter contacts – looked ruined. He was arrested by anti-terror police at his office a week later, after an off-duty manager at Robin Hood airport, near Doncaster, found the message while doing an unrelated computer search.
The airport categorised the message as "not credible" in threat terms but was obliged to tell South Yorkshire police, who took action. Chambers said detectives repeatedly asked him if he realised how the joke might misfire in "the world we are living in".
Officers later deleted the tweet and impounded his iPhone and two computers. Chambers claimed after his arrest that he had to guide them through the details of what Twitter was and how it worked.
He was fined £385 by district judge Jonathan Bennett and ordered to pay £600 costs and a £15 victims' surcharge. He also suffered the embarrassment of sitting in court listening to a string of other foul-mouthed tweets he had sent, which convulsed the public gallery.
His solicitor, Richard Haigh, described the episode as a Basil Fawlty outburst, which was immature, tasteless and unacceptable but not criminal.
Chambers's supporters and some civil liberties campaigners have attacked the charge of sending a public electronic message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character contrary to the Communications Act 2003. The case is the first in Britain to follow a small number of similar convictions in the United States.
Chambers lost his job as a financial supervisor at a car distribution firm in Doncaster after his arrest. He said before today's hearing that when the police called at his office, he initially feared that a relative must have had an accident.
"I would never have thought, in a thousand years, that any of this would have happened because of a Twitter post. I'm the most mild-mannered guy you could imagine," he said.
The court heard that Robin Hood's operations had not been disrupted, but Chambers told the judge: "I apologise for whatever consequences have happened, but at the time that was not my intention at all. It did not cross my mind that Robin Hood would ever look at Twitter or take it seriously, because it was innocuous hyperbole."
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