Joke Twitter Terrorist Found Guilty

With so many ways of doing things online that will come back to bite you, it’s a surprise that this kind of stuff doesn’t happen more often. A few months ago, one man from Doncaster, UK vented out his frustration over an airport closure on Twitter. With all flights grounded, he tweeted that he’d blow the airport "sky high" if something wasn’t done in a week. Were it him talking to his friends, that would have been that. But because it was on Twitter, and public, it didn’t take long before authorities stumbled upon the tweet and they didn’t like it.

The end-result was that he was found guilty of sending threatening electronic messages. The court believed that the message, even though made in jest, was inappropriate and, indeed, criminal for "the times in which we live." The judge ordered him to pay £600 in court costs and fined him £385.

"Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week... otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!," is the tweet that got Paul Chambers into so much trouble. Obviously, no one would actually take it as a serious threat to national security. And, in fact, no one did. The tweet was spotted by airport officials a few days after it was sent out. They didn’t believe it was of any threat and didn’t take any measures as a result of the message. They were required to pass it along to the police, though.

And the police didn’t find it so innocuous, going into a full-scale investigation and even printing out 460 tweets the man made between January 5 and January 13. Chambers is one dedicated Twitterer it seems. The man was later arrested at his workplace, which also led to him getting fired. Now that the judge has reached a decision, Chambers has said he is considering an appeal.