14 DAY TRIAL // Not long ago, a man from the United Kingdom was questioned by the police after having posted a tweet about blowing up an airport within a week unless his flight was restored. It appears that the man in question, named Paul Chambers, was in fact charged by the local authorities and is to appear in Doncaster Magistrates Court on February 19th.
The entire story started in January, when Chambers was about to go on vacation in Ireland and the Robin Hood airport, where he was about to board on his flight, got closed down due to heavy snow. Since it is a known fact that snow in the UK can be pretty devastating, it is no surprise the delay lasted for several days. By that time, the man was so frustrated, that he posted a tweet stating that he would give the airport authorities about a week to fix the problem, “otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”
He probably forgot about this post within a few hours, but the police did not, as they came looking for him a week later under the Criminal Law Act 1977 and they took him in for a six-hour interrogation. Chambers was then jailed for terrorism, and he was released within an hour on bail, but he still got his iPhone, laptop and home PC confiscated.
What started as a joke tweet apparently got Paul Chambers officially charged by the South Yorkshire Police and he is soon to appear in court. The authorities are probably being so zealous in an attempt to make an example out of Chambers' situation and scare off potential terrorists, and this is why he got charged with “sending by a public communications network a message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character contrary to Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003.”
The morale of all this can be easily summarized in a friendly piece of advice: try to keep your tweets neutral, for you never know when you might need to take responsibility for them.