₦airaland Forum

Jowanonline:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/punchng.com/rights-abuses-were-not-answerable-to-us-uk-says-presidency/amp/

Temptee101:

Why not, when they have their own personal person at the helm

God punish Maj. Gen. Bubu

executive12:
Yeah right. "Nigeria remains independent". Yet your President and his family are always dashing to the UK for medical treatment.

StaffofOrayan:
Can't you see you are the fool here?
There is a reason Buhari sent his kids to the UK to study, the only place he trusts his health and that of his children,
What protest can you hold in Nigeria and won't be faced with live bullets,
Does that happen in the UK?
I hope you don't have brothers and sisters in Nigerian universities? You know how youths like to protest 'aluta tinz' hopefully their rights to demand change would be respected.

The joke is on you

jaxxy:
Presently or when? U need to state the worst they have done. Who did they illegally detain people for 140day and more or when they disregard court orders.

Is it right to jail someone for being offensive on Facebook or Twitter?

Jake Newsome was jailed last week for posting offensive comments online. His is the latest in a string of cases that have led to prison terms, raising concern that free speech may be under threat from over-zealous prosecutors

What follows is offensive. The facts are unattractive and there is no hero in this story. On 30 April, two days after teacher Ann Maguire was stabbed to death by a pupil in Leeds, Jake Newsome, a 21-year-old man who had himself attended a secondary school on the other side of the city, posted on his Facebook page: "Personally im glad that teacher got stabbed up, feel sorry for the kid… he shoulda pissed on her too".

"Thats not very nice" reads the first of 37 comments on his post. Others soon chipped in, addressing him by his nickname: "Greeny come on! You're better than that" wrote one. "Greeny seriously that's harsh" wrote another. "Greeny, not sure you should be saying this stuff on facebook man – people get in trouble for this kind of stuff".

A few days later, after his post had been shared more than 2,000 times, West Yorkshire police arrested and charged Newsome under the 2003 Communications Act with having sent "by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing nature". Last week Newsome was jailed for six weeks, after pleading guilty, with the judge quoting his post back to him and saying: "I can think of little that could be more upsetting or offensive."

Newsome was the second person jailed for social media offences related to Maguire's death. Last month Robert Riley, a 42-year-old former bus driver from Port Talbot in Wales, was sent to prison for eight weeks after his tweets about Maguire, in which he said he would have killed her colleagues as well, led to complaints and the unearthing of other offensive material on his Twitter feed, including racist insults. A teenager from Cardiff was also arrested and bailed.

Such events now follow a familiar pattern, with the torrent of online reaction to the highest-profile and most shocking crimes reliably including offensive elements. In October 2012 Matthew Woods, 19, was jailed for three months for posting sexually explicit comments about the abducted child April Jones, after being arrested for his own safety when an angry crowd gathered outside his house. Also in 2012 Azhar Ahmed was prosecuted for a post made two days after six British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, in which he wrote that "all soldiers should die and go to hell", and biology student Liam Stacey was jailed for two months for racist tweets sent after footballer Fabrice Muamba suffered a heart attack – a sentence criticised by European human rights commissioner Thomas Hammarberg.

Last year more than 10 arrests were made in the aftermath of the murder in south-east London of soldier Lee Rigby, and one man, Benjamin Flatters, was jailed for posting anti-Muslim material.

Caroline Criado-Perez
Writer and campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez faced a campaign of harassment and violent threats on Twitter, for which two people were jailed
That the levels of insult and quantity of hate speech found on social media offends many people is well known. There has been widespread outrage about the abuse by online trolls of a handful of public figures, the swimmer Rebecca Adlington and diver Tom Daley among them. In January Isabella Sorley was jailed for 12 weeks, and John Nimmo for eight, for their part in a Twitter campaign of harassment against the feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez, who led efforts to get a female historical figure on a British banknote. Criado-Perez described the experience of receiving repeated violent threats as "terrifying".


The cases of Newsome and Riley are different. They did not target or menace individuals, and lawyers and human rights campaigners have this week raised concerns about their being jailed for causing offence.

Thomas Hughes, executive director of free speech organisation Article 19, said the charity is "extremely concerned by the number of arrests and prosecutions for comments made online in the UK. Nobody should go to prison simply for causing offence. This is not only our view but a violation of international legal standards that protect speech that shocks, offends or disturbs." Jo Glanville, director of the writers' network English Pen, said of Riley: "He hasn't incited violence, there's nothing around public order, so it's purely for being tasteless. I think we're seeing something new here. It's a chill on freedom of expression. Causing some distress to members of the public shouldn't be enough to get you a custodial sentence."


Lawyer and legal blogger Lyndon Harris described Newsome's case as "a knee jerk reaction by the CPS" and told the Guardian the law is "failing miserably. At what point does unpleasant become criminal? You're just locking people up for saying nasty things. If someone said that to you in the pub and you went to the police, they'd tell you to go away."

Former director of public prosecutions Keir Starmer
Keir Starmer, the UK's former director of public prosecutions, believes that 'too many prosecutions for these kinds of offences can have the effect of chilling free speech'.
Former director of public prosecutions Keir Starmer, who issued new guidelines for social media cases exactly one year ago that stressed the high threshold for prosecutions, said "there needs to be a debate, the debate needs to take place in parliament and it needs to take place sooner rather than later".

He believes his guidelines have done "a good job in difficult circumstances", but politicians now need to step in.

"There always used to be a protected space, so you could say things in private you could not say in public. With social media there is no protected space, and that's what there needs to be a debate about. The notions around place and reaction just don't work with social media. You could have a situation where two people in their living room make remarks to each other for which they would never be arrested, but if they make these remarks by email, they could be, as the legislation covers any public electronic communication system."

The law most often used in such cases, he points out, is an updated version of one from the 1930s that was designed to protect people working in telephone exchanges from obscene phone calls: "Eighty years on, it just doesn't work. This hasn't been seen as a priority in a time of austerity, but change is overdue. I've always thought that too many prosecutions for these kinds of offences can have the effect of chilling free speech."

But if free speech is threatened, where are its defenders? When asked to comment on last week's sentence, Index on Censorship chief executive Jodie Ginsberg said the CPS had ignored its own guidelines, which was "highly damaging for free expression in this country". But beyond a tight circle of specialists, reaction to the jailing of two men for posts made after Maguire's murder has been muted, which is perhaps more surprising in light of Facebook's decision to reject complaints about Newsome's post and leave it online, on grounds that it doesn't violate the company's community standards. In other words, a post regarded by the British state as so far beyond the pale that its author has gone to prison is still allowed on Facebook. Facebook's director of public policy in Europe, Richard Allan, who is also a Lib Dem member of the House of Lords, declined to comment, though a spokesperson stressed that Facebook is making efforts to educate users about the possible consequences of social media use.

Until the trial of Peter Nunn, accused in relation to tweets sent to the Labour MP Stella Creasy, the most celebrated social media case in this country is likely to remain that of accountant Paul Chambers. In 2012 Chambers was cleared on appeal on the grounds that a tweet in which he said he would blow up an airport, after being stranded en route to a date, was a joke and not a menace.

Paul Chambers Twitter joke trial, High Court, London, Britain - 27 Jun 2012
Paul Chambers (middle) found support from comedians Al Murray (left), Stephen Fry and others after he was convicted over a joke he made on Twitter. He was later cleared on appeal.
Chambers' supporters included comedians Al Murray, Stephen Fry and Graham Linehan, and a benefit gig was held to fund his expenses. But the notion of free speech as a right to be defended online has been overshadowed by cases of misogynist threats and abuse.

"Why hasn't there been more of an outcry about recent cases?" says David Allen Green of Preiskel & Co, who was Chambers' solicitor. "The novelty of Twitter has worn off. Would you really want to argue in favour of someone making unpleasant comments about someone who has just died? These cases are less attractive, though some would say that's when you need free-expression protections even more."


Glanville agrees. "It's often cases that don't seem to have particular merit in terms of artistic value, or promoting the public good, that are the landmarks. I'm thinking of the obscenity trials in the 1970s – the Oz trial, the Linda Lovelace memoirs. Nobody would say these works had literary merit, but those cases were very important for the greater protection of freedom of speech and our culture as a whole. It's very important these cases are challenged. I do think we are seeing a chill on freedom of expression that ranges right across from the press to the foul-mouthed blogger."

None of those who have served prison sentences for offences committed on social media wanted to talk to the Guardian. They are nobody's heroes and know as much, though Jake Newsome's defiant Facebook post a week after he was told that he could face jail – "I will always say what the Bleep I want" – does show in its ragged way that he believed constraints on speech were at issue.

Guilty pleas have meant there have been almost no attempts to defend such behaviour in court, and very little legal argument about just what "grossly offensive" means. Instead, lawyers have spoken at sentencing hearings in mitigation, and focused on defendants' immaturity, weak grasp of social media, or the influence of alcohol.

"There is a fear of social media and of how dangerous it might or might not be," says Glanville. "It is something I think the police and courts haven't yet worked out how to deal with in a common-sense way, and in their attempt to deal with what is still a very new area, I think they're over-reacting."

Whether those convicted of these offences or the other people most closely affected by them agree with her, it's hard to say.

jaxxy:
U are still looking for a reason to do bad things. Did the uk disobey court orders or hold people in detention for 140 days without going to court.

This is criminal anywhere in democracy.

jaxxy:
It’s very sad how u look for acts of irresponsibility and even mistakes to justify ur intentional acts of gross irresponsiblity.

The difference btwn u and the uk is when they are called out to objectively face their sins not looking for other people’s sins to justify their sins. Have sm sense of personal responsibility. Stop copying every bad example from Pdp and mistake or evil doers u see out there and justifying it.

WelcomeToBiafra:
[s]You are skipping to including Ruga for Fulani terrorist[/s]

LabDNA:
[s]Another unintelligible gobbledygook from the airheaded ninnyhammer.

A densed and debased cacafuego who thinks himself a normo-homo sapiens.

Zilch in his skull but always blowing hot air, littering and bemuting the cyberspace with his dopefied conjectures! A mental asylum should be your eternal domicillium if there will ever be a modicum of chance to extricate you from your trisomy-powered tomfoolery.

Clown![/s]

hahaha i will give it to you oh egregiously malignant rapscallion. You never do know when you are beaten do you?

Such a tasteless amalgam of feculent dross yet this loathsome ignoramus who is a genetic polisson thinks himself worthy. You are such a
debauched sybaritic dullard to say the least. You have used the word gobbledygook thrice already. Try some fresh material you this blabbering reprobate obfuscation with a contraceptive personality.

You are such a lascivious onanist with the mindset of a hippophilic necrophile.

You are so lame

jaxxy:
Ure desperately searching for excuses and reasons to continue to disregard the rule of law. Pls continue. Make sure u don’t obey the laws.

jaxxy:
They won’t they obey the laws and take people to court and follow court orders. They are not a banana republic.

LabDNA:
You are a bumbling buffoon, with an I.q less than Seargent Buhari's excreta. Total imp with a cranium impermeable to common rationale.

You only exist to parasitize on vital oxygen meant for normal humans. Nothing more.


Hopeless crumb-picking dunce!

Naff off!

Just listen to this incalculably salacious delinquent with his villainous thick-headed amalgamation of loathsome repulsiveness telling me to naff off

tsk tsk You are craving attention i see but alas i do not give such to an unutterably cretinous perverted irredeemably boring mass of existential impotence such as you.

Now you fvck off

LabDNA:
Shut your rotten mouth and spare us your gobbledygook!

Cantankerous sycophant!

Angelfrost:
Stop, please just STOP!!!

Even a dull child can easily pick out the clear derogatory intent of Punch. What you and the obsequious Mr. Adesina choose to do in terms of over-simplification or damage control is your loaf of bread.

I sense you enjoy embarrassing yourself, but this has gone a bit too far... Have the decency to quit while you still appear sensible. Tackle me any further, and I just might take the gloves off, and grammatically eviscerate you.

Angelfrost:
This right here is why I despise sycophants...

No matter how learned and well read you are or might claim to be, sycophancy, however noble, will end up reducing you to the level of idiocy and tomfoolery.

Just look at what a supposed learned youth and graduate put up there... It's as sad as it is amusing. I choose to laugh!!!

CSTR2:
You are so dumb and you don't even realise it.
Read that huge pile of nonsense you wrote again.

CSTR2:
Illiterate.
So much nonsense in one post.

DMerciful:
Why is UK and US focusing more on the social media companies like FB, Google, etc rather than their citizens?

QueenAddyRealty:
A ban from nairaland is hardly life-altering, and certainly not physically inconvenient. Imagine, someone like NwaAmaikpe getting locked up for his eccentric comments. This is what you are supporting. Nairaland could well ban him but asking that he be shipped off to detention somewhere is a bit extreme.

This is just my opinion, though

QueenAddyRealty:
Sir/Ma, with due respect, there are legal remedies for all you have cited as lapses of libel/slander laws.

First of all, Dr. Obadiah could well be sued and I believe of the government has a case, they should win easily. I mean, a government that can go and end ongoing proceedings in a court with gunshots and a stampede should have no problems securing a mere libel/slander conviction. Upon which Dr. Obadiah will be made to pay damages and public apologies, etc.

Also, there is such a thing as “incitement to violence” in law and it is a crime. This means anybody found guilty of inciting violence already has their punishment prescribed in the law books.

I truly believe that adding more bite to libel/slander laws is nothing short of a dictatorial attempt at policing speech. By the way, why now as the world gets more democratic and the fights for human freedom get more holistic does the Nigerian government want to restrict the boundaries of acceptable speech?



PS: I sell and lease land and properties with stress-free titles; C of O, Governor’s Consent, etc. Call me today, let me hook you up.

QueenAddyRealty:
Sir/Ma, with due respect, there are legal remedies for all you have cited as lapses of libel/slander laws.

First of all, Dr. Obadiah could well be sued and I believe of the government has a case, they should win easily. I mean, a government that can go and end ongoing proceedings in a court with gunshots and a stampede should have no problems securing a mere libel/slander conviction. Upon which Dr. Obadiah will be made to pay damages and public apologies, etc.

Also, there is such a thing as “incitement to violence” in law and it is a crime. This means anybody found guilty of inciting violence already has their punishment prescribed in the law books.

I truly believe that adding more bite to libel/slander laws is nothing short of a dictatorial attempt at policing speech. By the way, why now as the world gets more democratic and the fights for human freedom get more holistic does the Nigerian government want to restrict the boundaries of acceptable speech?



PS: I sell and lease land and properties with stress-free titles; C of O, Governor’s Consent, etc. Call me today, let me hook you up.

madone:
[s]hahahahahaha my guy like that u see how stupid u are u leave matter enter another thing. U be goat and u no go ever get sense .I won't be surprised if na one small under aged small school boy dey behind this stupid captain moniker . It's been ur normal routine to form relevant in thread repostingand quoting people .very important advice for u my guy . Keep off my post next time you hear me cos u no reach .....coward . The thunder that will fire u the next time u quote me will be created by ur brain dead ancestors cos I am sure u inherited this stupidity and dullness from Dem iseokpukpu like u. May u never be paid for all ur post again. Eeeediot.son of a frustrated Father. God forsaken fool. >: see his face he wan cry[/s]

stonemasonn:
stop talking rubbish, how do you want social media to be regulated? Be careful what you wish for.

Xisnin:
No.
This is why you should learn to read and do independent research.

QueenAddyRealty:
With due respect to my friends above advocating for regulating the media, I’d like to say that there are already laws that guide the publication and dissemination of wrong and false information and there are also stipulated penalties where a party is found to have breached said laws. Any amendment of these led would only make the punishments more draconian and more weighty than the offense committed.

Thanks.

However, if you are interested in buying lands and property that have no conflict and no stress involved, I can help you with that. Our properties are super safe and either half a C or O or Consent.

Please check my contact details on my signature and call today. Thanks

gtown:
Since they thrive on spreading fake news and hate speeches, regulating social Media will unsecure the secured futures of their born and unborn children.
They are even everywhere saying why can't the dead penalty punishment for corruption as being practice by the Chinese be copied instead. But the truth is the day such law is proposed, it is these same Media Defenders of the Corrupts crew that will attack it. They have condemned themselves to wailing over any policy, action or inaction (meritorious or not) coming from the government in power today, as marked protest against the 2015 defeat suffered by their hero and darling party.

Eteka1:
You won't see them here now.

Beosten:
This is why you need speech regulation in this lawless nation. Dish out misleading facts and face the music. Awon eeyan PDP...

Danzakidakura:
you are a paid member of Buhari media. Why wont our leaders learn other good things from those countries you want to copy social media regulation from. Cant they their electricity,good roads,water supply,good hospitals and other things that will help the economy grow like this countries economy. Is it only social media regulations that Buhari want to copy from developed countries ? Social media regulation bill kee you dia