May 10 2010
Twitter Shock : Accountant fined to send threatening tweet

Twitter: 140 characters of marvel. This is how twitter is defined by many of the technogeeks. It has changed lives of people and has changed the way how we think 2.0. Twitter changed the life of one more geek here indeed.

Paul Chambers, 26, claimed he sent the Tweet to his 600 ”followers” in a moment of frustration after Robin Hood Airport, in South Yorkshire, was closed by snow in January.

But a district judge at Doncaster Magistrates Court ruled that the Tweet was ”of a menacing nature in the context of the times in which we live”.

Chambers was ordered to pay a £385 fine, a £15 victims surcharge and £600 costs.

The Tweet he sent in the early hours of January 6 said: ”C—! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You’ve got a week and a bit to get your sh– together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!”

Airport staff were alerted to the message only when off-duty manager Shaun Duffield searched for “Robin Hood Airport” using the Twitter search facility a few days after it was posted, the judge heard.

Mr Duffield told the court he was looking for a new airport Twitter page.

He alerted airport security head Steven Armson who said he graded the threat level of the message as “non credible” but had no choice but to pass it on to police Special Branch.

The court heard the Tweet had no operational effect on the airport.

Chambers was arrested at his workplace at a car distribution firm in Sandtoft, near Doncaster, where he was a finance supervisor. But the court heard he had now lost his job because of the prosecution.

In the witness box at Doncaster Magistrates’ Court, Chambers said he had no idea anyone at Robin Hood Airport would see the Tweet and explained how it never crossed his mind anyone might take it seriously.

He said he had been planning to go to Belfast on January 15 to meet a woman he had met through Twitter, identified in court only by her Twitter alias, Crazy Colours.

But, the defendant said, in the early hours of the morning of January 6, he got a news alert on his phone which said various airports, including Robin Hood, had been closed due to the heavy snow.

Chambers said he sent his angry Tweet from his iPhone to his 600 “followers” and it did not occur to him this would also show up on the network’s Public Time Line – viewable by all Twitter users.

But the defendant said as Twitter features 600 messages a second it was unlikely anyone accessing the Public Time Line would have seen the message “live”.

Chambers told the court: “I was disappointed and frustrated that the airport had been closed. I just sent out a message to Twitter.

“My followers had been following how I was going to fly out to Northern Ireland and knew how much I was looking forward to it.”

He said he was just “venting his frustration”.

Chambers was asked if he understood the airport had to take threats seriously, whatever the context.

He replied: “I do now. 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.”

The court was told how police printed off a total of 460 Tweets which Chambers had posted between January 5 and January 13.

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