Nine people have each been told to pay £624 to a woman raped by footballer Ched Evans after they admitted naming her on Twitter.
Further to our post yesterday: New social media warning from hiring professionals another example of the dangers of engaging social media before brain emerges.
Seven men and three women, aged between 18 and 27 from north Wales and Sheffield, have admitted in a court of law that they revealled a rape victim’s identity.
The law grants victims and alleged victims of rape lifelong anonymity.
The former Sheffield United and Wales striker Ched Evans was jailed for five years in April for rape.
When the internet arrived it seemed like a new vast, unregulated frontier, where people could blog and post with impunity was developing without consequences.
And as social networking took off, it felt as though conversations once had down the pub, could be had in writing online because somehow, it wasn’t the same as publication in print.
Through a series of prosecutions, the public is slowly waking up to a simple truth- publication, is publication, is publication.
When you blog, post and tweet on criminal cases you are bound by all of the laws the mainstream media has always known about and has had to observe.
And ignorance of the law is no defence. All nine of those who pleaded guilty today claimed they didn’t know that naming a rape victim was itself a crime.
Dyenamic Solutions has been waiting for this case to come to court as we thought that the social media users might even be jailed. One thing is for sure- in criminal cases, you hit the keys of your phone or pc at your peril. Ignorance has never been an excuse to the eyes of the law.
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