Allowing the authorities to decide what may or may not be said online is a bad idea, full stop, even if the comments made are widely deemed to be offensive.
Moreover, as the reaction to Jan Moir’s comments in the Daily Mail about the late Boyzone singer Stephen Gateley showed, Twitter users can just as easily be censorious in one context and upholders of free expression in another.
Moir’s article was widely regarded as anti-gay [Me: even though she merely pointed out that gay men have a proclivity for casual anonymous (and potentially fatal) sex in public places — something Stephen Fry himself admitted and promoted in a separate incident shortly thereafter], provoking a storm of angry commentary from Stephen Fry and Charlie Brooker, particularly on Twitter. With a thousand appeals to the Press Complaints Commission to take action against Moir, there seem to be some things which, in the eyes of the Twitterati, you are not allowed to say…
