Ruling – Permission to Appeal – The defendant sought leave to appeal against the award of 24,000 pounds in damages for two teweets found to have been defamatory of the claimant.
Warby J said this about tweets posted on Twitter: ‘The most significant lessons to be drawn from the authorities as applied to a case of this kind seem to be the rather obvious ones, that this is a conversational medium; so it would be wrong to engage in elaborate analysis of a 140 character tweet; that an impressionistic approach is much more fitting and appropriate to the medium; but that this impressionistic approach must take account of the whole tweet and the context in which the ordinary reasonable reader would read that tweet. That context includes (a) matters of ordinary general knowledge; and (b) matters that were put before that reader via Twitter.’
Judges:
Warby J
Citations:
[2017] EWHC 645 (QB), [2017] WLR(D) 234, [2017] 1 WLR 3587
Links:
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Stocker v Stocker SC 3-Apr-2019
The parties had been married and divorced. Mrs S told M S’s new partner on Facebook that he had tried to strangle her and made other allegations. Mrs S now appealed from a finding that she had defamed him. Lord Kerr restated the approach to meaning . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Defamation, Damages
Updated: 29 January 2022; Ref: scu.581415