Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 is a notorious blot
on the statute book, epitomised by the ultimately unsuccessful prosecution of
Paul Chambers (the Twitter Joke Trial) under the first limb of the section. That concerns messages of a grossly offensive,
indecent, obscene or menacing character sent by means of a public communications
network.
The section is such a mess that the Director of Public Prosecutions
had to devise a set of social media prosecution guidelines in attempt to avoid
criminalising a substantial proportion of the population.
The less well known second limb of Section 127 is also extraordinarily
broad. It catches anyone who sends –
again by means of a public communications network - a message that he knows to be
false for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety
to another.
The second limb was originally designed in the 1930s to catch
a particularly unpleasant type of hoaxer who would send telegrams to people
informing them that a relative was seriously ill (see Hansard). Now, like the first limb, it can catch tweets. (Tweets qualify because they are sent across
public telecommunications networks.)
Putting aside the potential for the second limb to catch all
sorts of harmless pranks, we can have some fun with it.
Consider the tweet that forms the title of this post: “This tweet
is a Section 127 offence.” Could that tweet fall (however theoretically) within
the second limb of Section 127?
The first requirement is that the message be false. If the tweet is not an offence under Section 127,
its message is false. But if it is false,
then Section 127 can bite. But if that
means the tweet is an offence, then the message is true and the tweet cannot be
an offence. (For self-referential paradoxes, see here)
Is the tweet sent for the purpose of annoying another? Hardly (and indeed ‘another’ may suggest
something targeted at a particular person). However a substantial section of
the population detests logical puzzles and paradoxes and may conceivably be annoyed
to discover that they have been lured into such a maddening game by following
the link to this post in the tweet.
Finally, S.127 requires that the sender knows the message to
be false. The tweet’s assertion that it is an offence under Section 127 is both
preposterous and, by virtue of that falsity, potentially caught by S.127; and so
(putting annoyance on one side) in turn possibly true. I’ll leave to the philosophers whether I know
to be false a message that I believe to be false, yet which endlessly loops through truth
and falsity.
