Lord to sue Twitter users who falsely accused him of abuse

Will probably not succeed if it goes to court

IANAL, but I'm pretty sure you can't be found guilty of naming him if what you said was "Someone has accused X of doing Y" as long as that statement is true. Neither can you be found guilty if you said "The person not named by Newsnight was X", if this was true. You would be in trouble if you said "X as done Y" or "X is a pedo"

Maybe if the torries had investigated the allegation at the time during the 80's this sort of mistaken identity thing wouldn't of happened.

This is an interesting area, that's going to be an absolute bugger to deal with.

I would argue that one of the reasons we got super-injunctions is that the press started taking the piss. They don't like people getting injunctions against them, and with the modern era of t'internet, all you need to do is report that so-and-so has taken out an injunction, stoke the rumour mill online, until said rumour is so far into the public domain that the injunction is defeated. Then you can tell the court that everyone already knows this - so can we now report it please. I believe that's one of the reasons that courts then banned journos from even mentioning the injunction. Although the courts apparently aren't granting them any more.

There's debate on having a privacy law, which I don't see as viable in a world with an only slightly-regulated internet.

I guess we'll end up with more the American model of freedom of speech, where anyone can say anything - and you can't get a court injunction to stop them. You can of course sue after the event. Just on the grounds that it's so hard to keep things from being globally known now. Particularly as the media know they can pursue this route. So if you can't make a story stand up, all you need do is stoke the rumour mill, then watch the internet light up.

I know someone who's worked for the Torygraph and the Times, and it's interesting how much is just known in the small world of the Westminster/Media Village. It doesn't always leak out, but it's easy enough to find out. Now you don't even need to be in that world, or know someone, just know the right blogs/forums.

Interesting times ahead. [end ramble]

Well, as a Twitter User

I'm glad I mostly ignored that one (and more importantly, didn't re-tweet anything that might harm me while drunk). However, as right as the good lord might be in taking his online accusers to court, this does beg a question: How does the law deal with what amounts to acts of mass disobedience on social media?

It was all terribly funny when it came to the lurid details of a certain footballer and a super injunction, but accusing someone of being a paedophile is a deadly serious business.

Whilst Lord McAlpine can afford to take ordinary meatbags to court for defamation/slander whatever; the rest of us mere mortals would simply have to ignore such attacks against us. Courts are playgrounds for the rich not the poor.

So, a million Twatter users promptly defame him and Lord McAlpine has to work out if he can afford to file a million suits with the added annoyance that many of these users may not be in the UK.

Added annoyance

... and that they are linked to a "generic" email address e.g. hotmail, yahoo mail, etc

How does he propose to track these down ?