
Toronto man found not guilty in Twitter harassment trial - eigenvector
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/verdict-expected-today-in-twitter-harassment-trial/article28334101/
======
parennoob
Some of the allegations made in this trial border on the comical; although it
is somewhat scary it took them so long to throw the case out.

"He continued to contact them, they said, in part through the use of hashtags
he knew them to be involved with." Let me get this straight – imagine two
people, Alex and Bob, who are both comics fans. Alex doesn't like Bob and has
blocked him on Twitter. Now Bob tweets something like "I like Marvel #comics".
Can you seriously say that he is "harassing" Alex because Alex is specifically
searching for Tweets with that hashtag and sees Bob's Tweet?

In my opinion, people wasting the court's time with such cases should be fined
a hefty amount.

~~~
ojbyrne
I wouldn't be surprised if the defendant files a civil suit against the
plaintiff.

~~~
ssijak
Can he get compensation for all the bad things that he endured because of this
trial (lost job, was not able to work because he was banned from the internet,
etc..)?

~~~
pakled_engineer
He crowdfunded some of the legal fees
[https://www.generosity.com/fundraising/gregory-alan-
elliott-...](https://www.generosity.com/fundraising/gregory-alan-elliott-
twitter-trial-support-fund)

Unsure if it's even worth incurring more lawyer fees pursuing the loss of
employment as the women will likely have no money to pay him, file endless
appeals and delays, ect.

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im2w1l
Is there a record of his and their tweets anywhere? (I would need both to see
to what extent he stalked their hashtags). Or is everything still up?

~~~
kelukelugames
Here is a link to a court doc.

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/296325188/2016oncj35](http://www.scribd.com/doc/296325188/2016oncj35)

Edit:

TL;DR

1) Mr. Elliot and Ms. Guthrie met in person to discuss design work. Elliot is
a graphic designer. Guthrie thought he was creepy and they don't agree on
stuff. But relationship is not yet hostile.

2) Guthrie publishes on Twitter the info of the person who made the Anita
Sarkiesian game. Elliot disagrees and gets blocked.

3) Elliot makes comments about AIDs and uses slurs. _" His language is vulgar
and sometimes obscene, and once inexplicably homophobic."_

After reading this I give up.

 _On the same day, Ms. Reilly tweeted with a period before Mr. Elliott’s
handle so that not only his followers but the“ whole world”would see it,
according to her evidence:“.@greg_a_elliott Just couldn’t ignore me, huh?
Leave me the fuck alone.” However, the space between the period and his
handle, perhaps a typographical error, may mean that it did not have this
effect._

Twitter scares me.

~~~
pervycreeper
>once inexplicably homophobic

The explanation is that the tweet in question is from a different account with
a similar looking handle. There are multiple news outlets which have been
informed of this inaccuracy, which have not yet issued corrections or
retractions for reporting this false info.

------
danso
What's interesting to me is that in America, which does have pretty strong
First Amendment protections, also has statutes for phone harassment:

[http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/telephone-harassment-
sta...](http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/telephone-harassment-statutes)

> _Telephone harassment is defined in many different ways. For example, while
> most states require some level of intent to harass or annoy, a few require
> only that the communication in fact harasses or that a reasonable person
> would expect it to harass...Telephone harassment often includes the
> following actions: calling repeatedly, anonymously or at inconvenient hours;
> causing the phone to ring continuously; using obscene language; or failing
> to hang up the phone. It can also include falsely stating that a family
> member of the recipient is injured or dead, or threatening to injure the
> recipient or a family member._

I support the non-guilty verdict here, but would someone be able to allege
harassment over Twitter on the basis that it is similar to the statues on
phone harassment (at least in America)? The argument is less about the content
of the message and more about the annoying nature of repeated "notifications".

~~~
parennoob
Phones are not a pub-sub system like Twitter is. Once you block someone, there
is no way they can contact you directly. _You_ have to go and read their
Tweets in some manner to see what they are saying.

Stephanie Guthrie was appears to have been literally trying to sue this guy
because he called her mean names (for which she blocked him), and was using a
hashtag that she liked to search on. Apparently, Tweets from people you have
blocked are still visible if they are using a hashtag that you search on. This
could possibly be a technical limitation – it's not like Google gives you an
option (apart from SafeSearch) to filter sites you may be offended by. Come to
think of it, _this is literally like trying to sue someone for putting up a
site indexed by Google that may come up for search terms you use_.

So I would say the case for being similar to repeated phone calls is invalid.

~~~
avita1
> Once you block someone, there is no way they can contact you directly.

Most carriers allow you to blacklist phone numbers (although that very well
may not have been the case when those laws were written).

~~~
iokanuon
And all of them allow you to set your number to private, so that the receiver
doesn't see it.

------
probdist
Previous (short) discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10954709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10954709)

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atjoslin
Ridiculous, Canada. The "Language Police" literally exist.

~~~
ojbyrne
Except the verdict was not guilty, thankfully.

~~~
pervycreeper
He was jailed, forbidden from using the internet, subjected to a multi-year
legal nightmare, left with a six-figure legal fee, and made a target of
aggression for rabid feminists worldwide.

~~~
pjc50
The article doesn't say any of that - cite please?

~~~
ssijak
"He had more problems than a charge of criminal harassment. According to
Gregory Elliott’s son, Clayton, the Canadian courts initially sought to detain
him for the duration of his trial. This would have seen him jailed for more
than three years. Eventually, the Crown was persuaded to grant bail, although,
as part of his bail conditions, Elliott was prohibited from using “the
internet and any device with access to the internet.” A graphics designer by
trade, this was crippling to his career. Before he even had a chance to figure
out how to continue doing his job of 17 years with these restrictive bail
conditions, he was fired without cause. Forced to withdraw his pension early,
the 55-year old father of four has spent more than $50,000 in legal fees, and
still owes a further $40,000."

Also they falsely accused him as pedophile (while they knew he was not guilty
for what they were accusing him).

One of many sources : [http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/19/a-life-ruined-
by-fe...](http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/11/19/a-life-ruined-by-feminists-
and-the-state-only-the-internet-can-save-gregory-alan-elliott/)

------
smegel
Feminist persecution.

------
stevebmark
Reminder that this has nothing to do with "free speech," and that celebrating
the outcome of the trial for that is flawed reasoning.

~~~
13thLetter
Only if you have a narrow, pinched, legalistic definition of "free speech"
which would be unrecognizable to any of the philosophers and statesmen who
created our modern understanding of the concept.

If, for getting into an argument with certain people, you can be punished with
being ostracized, fired, prevented from earning a living, demonized by the
news media, and put through a years-long wringer in the courts, your freedom
of speech is harmed even if at the end of it a judge says not guilty.

~~~
kaonashi
> ostracized, fired, prevented from earning a living

…and if you force people to be in your company regardless of what you say does
to those people, you've taken away their freedom of assembly.

~~~
13thLetter
Then it's a good thing that's not what I said, isn't it?

Not everything that's legal is right. A company that fires someone because
they got in a Twitter argument on their own time is behaving _legally_ , and
an attempt to make such an action illegal would probably cause more problems
than it solves. But a company that does such a thing would not be _right_.

~~~
kaonashi
That would depend on how what that person said affects their relationships
with co-workers (e.g. someone went on a racist Twitter tirade that all their
co-workers read, some of whom belong to groups they were disparaging)

~~~
13thLetter
Are you comfortable with your employer having the power to control what you
say, in your free time, and not about said employer? Because that's what this
boils down to. I would expect people who are skeptical about the great power
that large corporations hold to oppose that kind of behavior.

~~~
kaonashi
I'm comfortable that my employer can terminate my employment should I alienate
the people I work with to the point I can no longer carry out my job.

~~~
13thLetter
I hope for your sake that the political winds never blow a little differently,
then.

~~~
stevebmark
An employer can already fire you for saying something in your free time. An
employer can fire you for ANY reason, ANY, that doesn't violate civil rights.
This is well known and no one is fighting for any laws to change this. This
lawsuit is about harassment, not free speech, and celebrating (legal)
"harassment" on the grounds of "free speech" is again, flawed reasoning.

~~~
13thLetter
"An employer can already fire you for saying something in your free time. An
employer can fire you for ANY reason, ANY, that doesn't violate civil rights.
This is well known and no one is fighting for any laws to change this."

Literally five replies ago in this very same comment chain, I stated that it
was indeed completely legal for employers to behave in this fashion, and
should continue to be so; I merely pointed out that it was not _right_.

"This lawsuit is about harassment, not free speech, and celebrating (legal)
"harassment" on the grounds of "free speech" is again, flawed reasoning."

But this comment chain very definitely is about employers firing people for
exercising their free speech, on their own time, not related to their
employer. I don't think they should do that. What do you think?

~~~
stevebmark
I think you need to keep going with that train of thought. Is it morally right
that an employer can fire someone they don't like? If it doesn't violate civil
rights, it's 100% fine to me. What's the alternative? Should an employer NOT
be allowed to fire someone they don't like? That sounds like very bad
constraints on the employer. Should there be some protection system against
specific reasons for terminating employees? It's not possible from a legal
perspective, because you'd have to implement a law to protect every possible
reason an employer would want to fire someone, all of which would trample the
rights of the employer. Any employer is as free to fire someone for hate
speech as the person is for supplying hate speech. It doesn't mean that either
are free of consequences.

The employer controls the company. If keeping someone on board who has
opposing views will lead to a worse company and more suffering, it would make
moral sense to fire them.

~~~
13thLetter
Hopefully we've moved past the strawman of trying to make such political
discrimination illegal. That being said...

You need to consider the long-term consequences of being comfortable with such
behavior on the part of employers. If it's considered admirable to fire people
with political views the employer does not approve of, as it is now, that
simply makes the country's political divisions ever more extreme. If you work
for Google you have to be a Democrat, if you work for McDonnell Douglas you
have to be a Republican. Soon enough you won't be able to live in certain
places if you have certain political opinions, because you won't be able to
find anything more than menial employment. At best, we have two angry and
completely distinct political sides, with absolutely no understanding of the
other or willingness to compromise, staring at each other over state borders
and fighting dirty for every nationwide policy. At worst... well, there's no
limit to the "worst" part.

Now, consider the alternative philosophy: employers explicitly do not care
about their employees' behavior on their private time as long as it doesn't
involve the employer. Not only do we avoid political segregation, but under
this scenario, you can hold whatever opinions you want, and you can get into
endless meaningless flamewars with the other side on social media without
worrying about retribution. I really have trouble understanding why anyone
wouldn't prefer this to constantly having to look over your shoulder,
wondering what your employer might think of your opinions.

