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Day: 26 February 2014

Facebook: the new King Maker

At the beginning of this month Facebook celebrated its 10th anniversary, but while celebrations where in order for Mark Zuckerberg and co, human rights activists and political journalists alike had other concerns regarding the social media behemoth. They attempted, in vain, to raise awareness of the site’s role and responsibilities as a modern day history maker. Rather than congratulations, the occasion was met instead with a resurgence of criticisms volleyed at the social media site for its deletion of pages and posts associated with human rights groups.

Such criticisms originally peaked in 2012, when Facebook was forced to apologise for the deletion of a post discussing human rights breaches in Syria. The deletion was justified as being in line with Facebook’s cyber-bullying policies, after their complaints centre was bombarded by objections labelling the post as offensive. In fact, the post was a link to the Human Rights Watch website which had just exposed the use of torture centres by Syrian Intelligence Services.

Despite the controversy, this year has seen the deletion of entire human rights pages, such as the Kafranbel Media Centre, the Daraa al-Mahata Local Coordination Committee and the London-based Syrian Network for Human Rights. Besides documenting the conflict in Syria, such pages are a crucial means for human rights activists to catalogue evidence for war crime trials in a theoretical post-Assad Syria. In a heavily censored country, they provide some of the most truthful depictions of the Syrian conflict.

Yet many such pages are deleted overnight without warning. Where warning is given, only a short time limit is provided to remove or edit the posts, which, in a country without reliable broadband connection, usually means information will be lost forever.

Of course this is no grand conspiracy by Facebook; the pro-Assad Syrian Electronic Army has claimed ‘credit’ for the latest in what is an on-going series of cyber-war tactics. Such tactics also include the hacking and destruction of human rights pages, typically through viral software and the flooding of comment sections of prominent media websites. The Guardian, CNN and the Atlantic, to name but a few, have all recently seen their comments pages flooded with pro-Assad support, preventing criticisms from being expressed or highlighted. Where the Internet was once the strongest tool of dissidence for activists, it too has become a point of territorial dispute.

Today then, Facebook is playing the same role as the printing press of bygone times. But despite the insistence that with the help of social media anyone’s voice can be heard, providing the potential for history to be written by the victims as opposed to the victors, the Facebook scandal has demonstrated that this is not as simple as we presume. Even when an individual or a group can create pages, it appears that thanks to the deletion of content we don’t always get the intended picture. In this respect it seems more accurate to describe Facebook as the unintended editors of history, deleting parts of the truth and in some instances preventing entire stories from ever being heard.

Facebook, therefore, finds itself in a surprising position of power, arguably one which is a far stretch for a company which started its humble origins as the appearance rating website, Facemash.

But perhaps this is not an entirely unpredictable outcome. Facebook creator and CEO Zuckerberg has always said the dream of Facebook was to be far more than just a company. In a personal letter to potential investors, Zuckerberg suggested that his ambition was to give people a voice through Facebook, in doing so transforming society and encouraging progress.

Through this liberal disposition, Facebook is now both a modern warzone and a modern history maker. Yet the cyber-bullying policies in place are proving woefully inadequate to deal with the responsibility of effectively policing a complex arena of debate.

Although most would argue that this is an unfair pressure to place on the shoulders of a social media site, even a goliath like Facebook, ultimately this is a self-inflicted responsibility. A better claim then perhaps is that it is unfair for Facebook not to make good on its promise to provide a voice to the oppressed. The quote from Spiderman’s uncle Ben springs to mind that “with great power comes great responsibility”.

Either way, the question of whether or not it is right or wrong for Facebook, or any social media site, to have such a responsibility is now irrelevant. The invitation of a haven for free speech has already been extended to and accepted by activists and individuals all over the world. And despite the warnings of charitable NGOs such as the Canadian SecDev Foundation as to the dangers of relying on Facebook, it is obvious to see why people still choose to do so. After all, few human rights websites have captivated a global audience estimated at over 600 million users.

Perhaps then it is time for Facebook to step up and to start working more closely with human rights groups and official institutions, such as the UN, to ensure that such precious information and pieces of history cannot be lost. For although Facebook now has the power to make history, no institution or company should ever have the power to edit history, least of all at the click of a button.

I experienced Twitter abuse first hand

Last week I was subject to twitter abuse, or trolling as it is also known, for standing up against something that I believe is wrong – street harassment. I’m an avid supporter of the feminist campaign The Everyday Sexism Project, which started out as a blog and Twitter account where men and women could post their experiences of everyday sexism, from things such as people buying only pink or blue toys for new-born babies, to being sexually assaulted. What sparked the storm of twitter abuse I received was a tweet to the project discussing how I hate being beeped and whistled at when walking down the street.

Recently, trolling seems to be becoming a far too normal part of our society, particularly surrounding feminist campaigns. Two years ago, British diver Tom Daley was abused on Twitter after he lost out in a diving event. Last year saw Labour MP Stella Creasy and campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez become victims of rape and death threats due to their fight to keep inspirational women on bank notes.

The abuse I received wasn’t as horrific or violent as that received by others – but it still was an experience that made me feel uncomfortable and unhappy. When I received the first unpleasant tweet, my reaction was to just ignore it, thinking it will go away, and so that’s what I did. Unfortunately I was wrong, and the tweets got worse throughout the day. Each time my phone buzzed with a notification from Twitter I felt sick, and started to think about deleting my account even though I knew that wasn’t really the solution. I left my account as it was, and didn’t delete the tweet that had attracted the trolling, but by the end of the day I was emotionally exhausted.

I think Twitter is a brilliant platform for engaging in discussions in an intelligent way with others about issues. You may or may not agree with others’ perspectives, but I am often happy to engage in such things. If the trolls had sent tweets questioning how I feel about street harassment, I would have been keen to discuss – but I’m not willing to engage with abuse.
Social media, and Twitter, have become a crucial part of our everyday lives but, like everything, there are always going to be people who abuse them, and use them to abuse others, and this is something we can’t ignore. Ignoring the problem does not solve it, and so as I was being trolled on Twitter, I continued to retweet the many messages of support I got from others who agreed that street harassment isn’t acceptable, and that criticizing it is certainly not something worthy of abuse.

Ignoring sexism doesn’t solve the problem of it either, and this is why campaigns such as the Everyday Sexism Project and No More Page 3 are so important. If you haven’t already, have a read of the Everyday Sexism Project blog, and I dare you to tell me feminism isn’t important after that. Slowly but surely, feminism is being taken seriously again.
However, for many it still has negative connotations of bra burning and man hating, and what makes me particularly sad is that many women still see feminism in a negative light. Feminism is like any movement; the people who support it never have exactly the same ideas about it, but they’re fighting for the same united cause.

The blog scousebirdproblems.com doesn’t seem to think the same. The writer of this blog wrote a post last week entitled ‘Modern Feminism vs Everyday Sexism’, in which she decided to make an example of me by print screening and posting my tweet to the Everyday Sexism Project about street harassment – “this is another example of feminism gone wrong.”
One of the things my experience has taught me is that we need to focus on changing women’s attitudes towards other women in terms of feminism. The Scouse Bird Problems blog is a perfect example of how detrimental women’s attitudes can be for other women. Claiming to be a feminist and yet insulting other women based on their looks and the things that they do – or complain about – is itself anti-feminist.

As feminists, we should fight for women to be valued for more than just their appearance, and to be viewed as more than just objects, and I personally think that the writer devalues other women by focusing on these things too much. So next time you disagree with another feminist’s views, think about how to be critical in a constructive way, and understand that without solidarity, it will be even more difficult to reach the end goal we all aspire to: equality.

My Political Villain: Tony Blair

We might not remember it, beyond Mini Milks and the Teletubbies, but for the generation before ours the spring of ’97 heralded the end of a long, dark Tory winter that had lasted for almost two decades. Out of the shadows had sprung a bright-eyed Labour leader. The youngest Prime Minister since 1812 – his hair was still brown – and in touch with the people, Tony Blair promised a bright future for a population whose discomfort with the declining state had reached boiling point. Promising a minimum wage, human rights and a new, honest, people’s government, the possibilities seemed endless for Britain.

It all started off so well. In his first term, Tony signed the Good Friday agreement, ending decades of violence in Northern Ireland, equalised the age of consent for homosexual sex, introduced the Human Rights Act as promised and, thankfully, steered us away from the Euro. Tony seemed to be the purveyor of liberal sense that he had promised in his campaign.
It wasn’t all peachy, though. It was in this term that Blair granted independence for the Bank of England, to much praise from the financial leadership in London, who the party had courted much support from during the 1990s. While accompanied by the maintenance of Conservative expenditure estimates for two years, this seemed to be an indicator of fiscal prudence. However, it was the first in a long line of fiscal policies and deregulation that culminated in one of the deepest recessions the country has ever faced. Conveniently, this occurred after Tony left office.

It was in his second term that things rapidly started spiralling downwards for this particular right hon. True, we should have seen what was coming. While in opposition, Labour had heavily criticised the Conservatives’ slow movement over Bosnia. In his first term, Blair had given the speech that established the now-infamous ‘Blair doctrine’ for international intervention, which explained his rapid and award-winning movement into the civil wars of both Kosovo and Sierra Leone.

However, it was his involvement in the ‘War on Terror’ that has come to define Blair as a Prime Minister and a political villain. Despite being faced with one of the largest protests in British history, attended by up to 400,000 people, Blair decided to join the US in invading Iraq in 2003 on the basis of questionable evidence of WMDs. This, coupled with his earlier entry into Afghanistan, led to Blair becoming known as George W. Bush’s ‘poodle’, which is a deep insult to poodles the world over. The relationship was so appreciated in the US that Blair one several national awards.

This unpopular action, alongside the somewhat shadowy behaviour that accompanied it, came to define Blair’s governmental tactics over his remaining years in office. Since resigning, Blair has raked in funds from speaking engagements and has become an apparent expert on the Middle East.

Just this week, however, the legacies of his time in office have hit the headlines again. It was Blair’s government that instigated the kind of cosy relationship between government and press that Leveson blew apart. In light of this, his offer to provide advice to Rebekah Brooks over phone hacking in 2011 seems unsurprising. His suggestion that she launch a ‘Hutton style’ inquiry into it is more worrying, given that it again raises questions about the veracity of the inquiry that cleared his government of wrongdoing over the Iraq evidence, with tragic consequences.

It is because Tony Blair could be the blueprint for good intentions corrupted by power that he is my political villain. It’s not all doom and gloom though; the Americans still absolutely adore our Mr Blair and given his new found love of a good tan, I’m sure the feelings are mutual.

Our prison system is corrupt and that should worry us all

The UK prison system is ludicrous. There are more drugs in Pentonville than the gnarliest TEED concert and a higher level of corruption than a Somalian diamond mine.  Thanks to an archaic focus on retribution, rather than rehabilitation, we have constructed a system which has reached record levels of re-offence, with 90 per cent of those sentenced in England and Wales having offended before and almost a third linked to 15 or more crimes, up from one in five a decade ago. The system is defective.

A recent example of just how farcical the implementation of rules in many UK prisons can be, is the story of Curtis Warren, sentenced for a £1 million cannabis plot and Teresa Rodrigues, a senior manager at his prison’s drug and alcohol unit, whose star-crossed love transcended the steel bars and was consummated twice a day in his bed. Warren – nicknamed Cocky – because of a bizarre disdain for the same authority which has bestowed on him a more than, was once Interpol’s Target One, the most wanted international criminal, sought for violence, armed robbery, drugs importation and smuggling hand guns and grenades.

However, Warren did not only enjoy the company of Rodrigues while supposedly under the close watch of guards but, as a court heard, also managed to find time to mastermind a £300 million drug empire built on heroin importation using seven mobile phones smuggled into La Moye, a purportedly ‘medium security’ prison – presumably a ‘low security’ prison is something akin to a scene out of a Michael Bay movie.

Corruption statistics in prisons are startling to say the least; Transparency International – the leading non-governmental anti-corruption agency – estimates that in the UK there are around 1000 prison officers involved in corruption, a further 600 involved in an inappropriate relationship with a prisoner and that the drug trade inside prisons is worth approximately £100 million a year.

Furthermore, the suggestion that an anti-corruption authority could check on staff and ensure that prisons themselves don’t become a hotbed of crime has largely been ignored by policy makers. Despite a recent report that suggest the budget of the CPU (Corruption Prevention Unit) be increased by £5 million to tackle such things, the CPU has had its budget and employees cut and its Chief Executive has retired, without being replaced.

Corruption runs rampant and unchallenged because prisons are too focused on punishment and too broad in their mandate. Punishing a heroin addict like a murderer and vice versa is downright daft. We should be rehabilitating those who can be and punishing those who must be. There is no need for a benevolent drug councillor in Warren Curtis’ deservedly long stay in prison and no heroin addict has ever put the needle down after being reminded that what he’s doing is against the law.

Now, you’re probably thinking, “hang on a minute, how does any of this affect me?” Why does it matter if they’re snorting cocaine in Wandsworth or banging their guard in a room full of Che Guevara posters? As long as they’re not doing it on Oxford Road, I’m happy.  But prisons should not be a place where petty criminals turn into hardline gangsters; their vices shouldn’t be perpetuated – they should be alleviated.

The reason for this is the cost, both social and economic, which at the moment is extraordinarily high – and rising. The initial cost of having your freedom taken away is about £65,000 and £40,000 a year from then on. We are already housing 80,000 inmates in a system designed for 50,000 which means more prisons will need to be built, costing more money still. In a democracy, spending such large amounts on restricting peoples’ freedom seems counter-intuitive, even more so when you accept that the majority of prisoners are released skill-less, contact-less and hopeless into an economic climate that is notoriously difficult. It is no wonder that re-offence is so common. We are spending vast amounts of money on a system that only perpetuates its own failings.

One change would be to implement a wide-ranging residential drug treatment program for appropriate offenses, which have shown to actually offer a £200,000 net benefit to society over the lifetime of someone who would have been a prisoner in other circumstances. This approach delivers a much lower re-offense rate and is much cheaper to run; at the moment less than three per cent of prisoners identified with a drug problem have access to appropriate rehabilitation programs in prison.

Prisons are not deterrents for serious criminals who know how to use them to their own advantage and do no good for petty criminals who only leave with a renewed sense of animosity towards a society they have no place in. What we need is a prison system inclined towards compassion not incarceration; we need a clear divide between petty offenders who deserve empathy and serious offenders who deserve punishment. This current inbalance means that those who should be punished get excessively catered to and those who should be rehabilitated get excessively punished.

We need to recognise that the system is flawed and acknowledge that change is necessary. It is crucial for our long-term success as a society, both economically and socially, that we learn to differentiate between those for whom crime was a product of misfortune, who should be dealt with compassionately, and those for whom crime was a choice, who we should deal with voraciously.

Live: Cage The Elephant

7th February

Apollo

6/10

Playing a support slot isn’t always easy, unreceptive crowds waiting only for the headline act of the night are a common occurrence. Yet thanks largely to lead singer Matt Shultz, Cage The Elephant excellently excite the packed Apollo with a rip-roaring show.

Throughout much of the set Shultz leaps, writhes and dances around the stage with a ferocious energy. Tracks like ‘It’s Just Forever’ flash past in a blur as flailing limbs and growled vocals emerge across the stage amidst frantic strobe lighting.  The rest of the members remain rooted to their positions whilst Schultz flails around, it is clear he is the vibrant heart of the band.

Yet Shultz’s charisma extends beyond this wild stage manner. When things slow down with ‘Cigarette Daydreams’ he also takes a stationary position, bathed in a purple light, and still keeps the crowd interested in his performance, with eyes fixed on the centre stage rather than wandering to the bar.

As the band launch into ‘Teeth’ Shultz descends into the now riving pit of a crowd, and lifted on their hands manages to walk a good few metres deep into the stalls area, shouting “Promise that you’ll never leave me”. It’s fitting that with the band’s Christian upbringing he cuts an almost Christlike figure walking on the waves of arms provided by the audience.

So Cage The Elephant have the performance side down, yet the quality of their songs doesn’t quite match up to this. The musicianship of headline act Foals later in the night further emphasises how plain Cage The Elephant’s songs were. They’re certainly a good live band to see, but only if you’re prepared to be caught up in the sweaty mess of euphoria they instigate.

Should we allow a return to standing in English football stadia?

YES- Thomas Turner

I’m going to start this with a little game of Andrew Georgeson bingo. Get the full house, and the Mancunion Sport  will pay for you to have a pint with the man himself. Here are the words: ‘Hillsborough’, ‘crush’, ‘unsafe’, ‘hooligan’ and ‘German football hispters’. Each will – as they have been relentlessly – be used to argue against the proposal for safe standing in UK stadia. And crucially, not a single one of them provides a decisive point.

Let me start with Hillsborough; a watershed moment for English football, and an atrocity of the type which we should never allow to occur in this country again. 96 people lost their lives – but did any of them die directly as a result of being able to stand at a football match? Hindsight says not.

The paddock in the Leppings Lane end was overcrowded due to the incompetence of the police. The crush was caused, ultimately, by a steel fence at the front of the paddock, and a lack of crush barriers to separate supporters. The number of fatalities was largely a result of the negligent manner in which clubs for years had treated safety standards and procedures – indeed there had been incidents in the Leppings Lane end in the years before the disaster which had indicated the danger.

Yet none of these factors are integral to standing at football matches – which leads me on to the prospect of ‘safe-standing’, based on the German ‘rail seating’ model. Just as with current seated stands, there is no requirement for large fences to be erected at the front. Each single row has a crush barrier in front of it. Seats (and therefore seat numbers) are still provided, meaning that clubs can prevent capacity being exceeded by monitoring the number of tickets sold. In short, as the large German stadia prove, there need not be anything inherently unsafe about standing.

In spite of this, many still associate the potential return of standing with a similar return to the ‘bad old days’, where outbreaks of violence amongst the crowds became commonplace. The advocates of this argument seem to be clutching at straws.

Huge progress has been made in recent decades with regards to the problem of football hooliganism, and the proof of this is no more evident than in the family friendly environment which typifies most modern day stadia.

Are we really suggesting that by allowing people to stand (which many still do, unsafely, in seated areas), we will flick a switch which transports us back to the heyday of the 1970s, where mobs of fans running amok along the terraces are a perpetual distraction from the ongoings on the pitch? This is nothing more than scaremongering.

But why, you may ask, do we want a return to standing at football matches anyway? There are two reasons which I can think of.

First of all, the change to all seated stadia has undoubtedly coincided with a drop in the atmosphere within stadiums. Anybody who has ever been to a football match will tell you that the atmosphere is greater in areas where people predominantly stand. I think the link between atmosphere and on-pitch performance is too often overstated, but to some, the ability to stand and sing at a football match is a valuable part of English football culture, which for nearly  twenty years now has been prohibited.

This coincides with the fact that if people can safely stand, and do stand in seated areas currently, we are also hindering the enjoyment of those who actively choose to sit. Some away fixtures in particular must be torrid experiences for those physically prevented from standing for long periods. If we can safely harness the preferences of both the sitters and the standers, why aren’t we?

Secondly, a switch to safe standing areas may also enable us to cure another ill of modern football – that of high ticket prices. Due to increased capacity, prices for standing tickets will undoubtedly be lower, enabling clubs to again attract the young and less wealthy supporters they have lost in recent years.

While the Taylor report specified that seated tickets ought not to be more expensive after the switch to all seated stadia, what we have seen is the direct opposite. The Bundesliga is renowned for its affordable tickets, so call me a ‘hispter’ if you wish – if it means cheaper tickets, you can call me what you like.

The aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster changed football in many ways – and many were for the better. But along with the behemoth that is the Premier League, it has also to an extent allowed football to be taken away from those who were for so long the life-blood of the game. Safe-standing would be a valuable embodiment of a return to the ‘people’s game’.

So to the powers that be, please, stand and deliver.

NO– Andrew Georgeson

‘Safe’ Standing in football in the top two tiers of English football should, quite simply, never be allowed.

I am stunned that it is even being considered in a country which had its footballing tradition changed from a stadium disaster. Hillsborough and Valley Parade should be enough evidence for this, but let me dismantle any other nonsensical ideas all the Against Modern Football and German Football hipsters have.

My overwhelming problem is how police would control a standing section. Despite the argument that every stadium will have allocated standing sections defined by tickets, Hillsborough was supposed to only have an allocated number of people inside. The fact is, police couldn’t control what was happening at Hillsborough. The Taylor report concluded that ‘the main reason for the disaster was the failure of police control.’ The introduction of standing sections could lead to people sneaking in, the overcrowding occurring, then who knows what could happen.

The other contentious issue is the German Football Hipster conundrum. Borussia Dortmund has an amazing atmosphere with their 25,000 strong walls of Yellow and Black flags. But this won’t transfer to England for several reasons. Firstly, the standing section in England will become a section for the die-hards, the ones who give themselves a name like the ‘ultras’ or the ‘unit’, the guys who are at Weatherspoons ahead of opening time every Saturday, have 3 team-based tattoos and watch Green Street religiously. These stands will harbour hostility, not in a Fenebarche way, but in an aggressive pissed-up bloke from Leeds way which kills the atmosphere. One has to remember that the hostile atmosphere in Borussia Dortmund’s stadium nearly got all away fans banned from the match against Shalke due to police fears over atmosphere, so it’s not as rosy as everyone makes it out to be. You could never take your 10-year-old to the section as if your team scores and the crowd celebrate by pushing/shoving/crushing each other. The removal of standing sections from many grounds has clearly reduced football hooliganism. That is a fact. Some teams still harbour tinges of hooliganism, just look at Millwall last year at Wembley in the FA Cup final. Are we really going to let these people stand?

Unlike most of the Against Modern Football crew who have probably never been to a match outside of the Premier League, let’s turn our attention to lower league football. I followed my village team, Dunston UTS, from their 500 capacity all standing stadium in the North-East, all over the country as far as Norwich for a match in all standing stadiums, to the FA Vase final in Wembley Stadium. At Wembley Stadium, despite nearly 85,000 empty red seats, there was an incredible atmosphere because everyone was enjoying themselves; everyone was living up to the occasion, and actually enjoying football instead of the politics surrounding it.

Atmospheres in some stadiums are poor because of inflated ticket prices, manic owners, over-paid footballers, you name it. That’s fine, be disgruntled about that, but protesting for cheaper ticket prices won’t ever cost anyone their lives. If people actually stepped back and enjoyed the match instead of becoming pundits or getting so pissed up beforehand that they don’t know what day it is, the atmosphere would be fine.

I honestly can’t see how it could be cheaper either. Borussia Dortmund’s season ticket cost 190 Euros for their giant terraced stand. But at the same time, the owner of the club refused a beer increase from 3.70 to 3.80 saying ‘’that extra 10 cents doesn’t make the difference, why should we increase it? It doesn’t satisfy our people.” The ‘50 plus 1’ rule also ensures no foreign owner can take majority control so the club remains in German hands. The differences don’t translate to England, so the idea that tickets will be cheaper is based on nothing. If we want to return to tradition, I suggest a return to gentleman wearing bowler hats, suits with ribbons on and carrying clackers. Return to the days when the FA Cup coverage wasn’t one of the trials of Hercules to get through, and instead was just a nice occasion where we interviewed fans beforehand wearing half and half scarves.

Sadly tragedy will strike again, but let Bristol City trial it – a team with an average attendance of 11,500 this season – not even the largest in League 1 and who will not return to the Championship anytime soon. Let Aston Villa lobby for the campaign to try and win back their heritage as one of the classic English grounds after losing all their reputation in the league and having their FA Cup semi-final rights stripped off them.

It is nothing more than the FA trying to make up for the real problems they can’t do anything about. Football has an absolutely shocking past. If we don’t learn from our history, we are bound to repeat it.

Trial by Twitter is harmful to justice

In recent months, the internet has become an arena of public shaming. Hundreds of thousands of social media users with no legal training and possessing no knowledge of the cases in question are in danger of becoming online vigilantes. Armed only with 140 characters and a hashtag, many are taking to the web to denounce those accused of unsubstantiated allegations. The internet has become a town’s square, only now large enough to put all the worlds accused sinners in the stocks.

Examples of speculative justice expressed on social media have clearly occurred in Manchester itself this year. The acquittal of William Roache on all charges as of the 6th February, has highlighted the damage that can be done to an individual’s integrity and reputation if assumptions are made regarding the charges against them on social media as well as in the courts.

Nowhere has this issue been more true than at our very own university, where last summer a student of the University was indicted in an accusation of rape. An image of the student released by the police appeared on several websites and news programmes, starting with the Manchester Student Safety page, rapidly spreading through Facebook and Twitter. Users were quick to vilify the student in question. By late afternoon the image was being circulated by the Manchester Evening News and ITV Granada and was trending on Twitter.

With users instantly lending a guilty verdict to the case in question, without knowledge of the evidence, the incident must beg the question of whether people should be more considerate in what they post. Eight months later, the student has been cleared of all charges. However, the incident has done perhaps permanent damage to the student’s reputation. The pain this student was forced to endure would have been confounded doubly by the hatred received online. By hopping on the trending bandwagon, we see users jumping to their own conclusions without seeing the full facts. This is not only unfair to the victims and the accused but it is certainly not in keeping with the principles of due process and fair justice.

We must also consider the longer-term consequences for those charged on public forums like Twitter and Facebook. It may attach a stigma to a potentially innocent individual, regardless of the eventual trial and outcome.

Of course it is of paramount importance that victims of abuse can come forward with confidence, fully in the knowledge that justice will be delivered but it is not for the glare of the public eye to determine the outcomes. It is counter productive to the cause of justice for victims if unproven allegations are allowed to circulate.
In the case of Bill Roache, the actor’s personal life was brought to the fore by social media and damning accusations made about his character, accusations from which it can be difficult to recover. A further example is the case of Lord McAlpine and the ‘witch hunt’ that ensued after false allegations were made regarding sexual abuse claims last year.

Of course the increasing prevalence of smartphones and Twitter is becoming an aid in some cases, notable the Steubenville rape case in 2012, where the use of social media accounts such as Twitter, Flickr and Instagram were paramount in building a successful case against two high school football players. Images uploaded to Twitter, depicting scenes of a gratuitous nature regarding the rape of a student at a party featured heavily as evidence brought against the two young men. But as the images were in the public domain it became very much a public trial, with threats being issued to the men prior to their eventual conviction.

Lord Leveson, speaking at a conference in 2012, claimed that new laws are needed to stop this ‘trial by Twitter’. He argued that the web has become a global megaphone for gossip and that governments will need to consider introducing laws to regulate it. Also at issue, is the perception that online actions do not have legal consequences, something many users can forget when spouting vile abuse from behind the safety of the keyboard.

Earlier this week the alleged molestation of Dylan Farrow by her actor/director former stepfather Woody Allen was once again brought to the fore, following Dylan’s open letter to the New York Times. Many people (in excess of 3000) were quick to take to the comments section in order to either condemn Woody Allen or direct abuse at Dylan, accusing her of lying. At the moment, the case looks unlikely to be brought before a court but far too many people are taking to the internet to voice an brash opinion based on ill-founded beliefs.

The trial by Twitter and other social media platforms is a worrying trend. We are seeing the presumption of innocence, the very cornerstone of our legal justice system, ignored, in order for ill-informed ‘trolls’ to wreak havoc on people’s names. I must assert once again that I believe all those who have been abused should come forward in all cases. But, until substantiated evidence has been brought forward in a court of all law, let’s for now try and keep our personal judgements off the Twitter-sphere to avoid doing more harm than good.