DannyAlberta 
Wingman
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Hope for free speech in Canada! Elliott not guilty.
Apologies to the membership for my much delayed mega-post on freedom of speech in Canada.
One reason is that I have been so bloody busy with the business since the Summer (which I am humbly thankful for as so many of my fellow Albertans are out of work).
The second reason was that I was waiting for a decision in the trial of Gregory Elliott. An analysis of this decision was (and is) going to conclude my piece as a sign and portend of the future.
Looks like the future may be more bright than I had initially thought.
Elliott was charged with "criminal harassment" for hurling insults back and forth on Twitter with a couple feminists/social justice warriors (one of whom was connected with the police). Of course only he got charged despite the tactics and language used by the "victims" being in some cases more deplorable.
He was charged all the way back in 2012 and spent the very protracted and expensive period attempting to fight these charges.
Yesterday the Ontario Court of Justice acquitted him.
As the National Post writes:
http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada...dian-first
Quote:The nature of social media and freedom of expression were front and centre Friday when a judge found a Toronto man not guilty of criminal harassment on Twitter.
Gregory Alan Elliott was cleared of two charges of criminal harassment that stemmed from his Twitter interactions with two Toronto women’s rights activists. Judge Brent Knazan’s lengthy decision dwelled on both the nature of Twitter and freedom of expression in a ruling that is among the first in Canada.
Elliott was cleared, in part, because — though the judge noted his words were sometimes “insulting and homophobic” — his tweets were not considered overtly sexually or physically threatening.
Stephanie Guthrie and Heather Reilly accused Elliott of harassment partly based on his use of hashtags — a word, acronym or phrase after a number symbol used to create trackable conversations — they used. It was an assertion the judge found contrary to the open nature of Twitter. He said the pair may have felt harassed, but he couldn’t prove Elliott knew they felt that way, nor did the content of his tweets include explicitly threatening language.
Knazan also discussed the link between Twitter and freedom of expression. People must “tolerate the annoyance” of oppositional views as part of that Charter right,
“Freedom of expression represents society’s commitment to tolerate the annoyance of being confronted by unacceptable views…One man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric,” he said, quoting from Robert Sharpe and Kent Roach’s book the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The judge also noted a lack of “reasonableness” in Guthrie’s assertion she could expect to use Twitter to make negative comments about Elliott and not be exposed to his response or self defence.
The Post has a link up so you can read the entire judgment (which is unusual for Canadian print media).
It is 88 pages and will require more in-depth analysis for my forthcoming piece, but here are some highlights that I find very encouraging:
Quote:Twitter is a public forum; Ms. Guthrie compared it to a public square. You can communicate privately on it, and people do, but it is difficult. If you simply tweet, anyone who follows you can read it and anyone who doesn’t follow you can read it on the internet so long as they have a twitter account and yours is not private. If you address the tweet to someone by putting their handle first in the tweet, not only they will see it but those who follow their feed can see it as a tweet that they receive. If you mention someone’s handle in the text, then they will be notified even if the tweet is to someone else.
...
Twitter is a powerful medium and gives an individual the potential to communicate with many people as if that individual had access to the mass media. As such, the individual has certain responsibilities, and must act within the law, as Mr. Elliott is charged with failing to do. However, the individual also enjoys a constitutional right to freedom of expression.
...
Twitter not only expands access to readers to those who do not have access to the mass media, it is an alternative to the mass media. It has the potential to develop so that more and different points of view can be promoted, including those that are not reflected in traditional media. Since tweets can include links, I can conclude, just from the evidence, that Twitter can spread well-considered articles as well as the tweeter’s opinion. Any limitation on its use that is not necessary to prevent criminality will limit this potential. It will not be consistent with the freedom of expression that is essential to a free and democratic society.
...
The essence of Twitter and hashtags, as the limited evidence in this case demonstrates, is to facilitate communication between people with like interests who voluntarily choose to follow certain topics or people and see what is being said about and by them. If you can’t use hashtags – whatever hashtags you want and no matter who created them – then you can’t use the platform to its potential.
Even with respect to tweeting in general, using Twitter while being protected from seeing another person’s tweets or having them see and comment on yours is unworkable. You can limit seeing another person’s tweets by blocking them, by not opening another person’s feed and by asking your friends not to retweet tweets from people you have blocked. And you can avoid reading their replies by not writing to them. But if you tweet with hashtags and follow hashtags, you are going to see every tweet that contains those hashtags, and anyone who wants can follow them. A blocker can choose to avoid seeing tweets with hashtags they follow from someone they have blocked, but they lose the benefit of the hashtag discussion by that choice.
...
And I do not accept that blocking someone or telling them that you blocked them a month ago communicates that you are harassed. Ms. Guthrie was not harassed on July 7, yet she blocked him. There can be many reasons for not wanting to read someone’s tweets. In this case, as I will discuss, it was in part because Ms. Guthrie thought what Mr. Elliott had to say was worthless nonsense. This may be understandable, but is not equivalent to advising someone that you are harassed.
...
Ms. Guthrie asked in testimony, “What did it matter that he had a valid point? Who cares?” I interpret this evidence, with the help of her explanation, as meaning that even if he had a valid point it did not permit him to stalk and harass her. In that sense, she is correct: you are not permitted to repeatedly communicate a valid point to someone when you know that they are harassed if it would cause them to reasonably fear for their safety in all of the circumstances.
But in another sense, important to the determination of this charge, Ms. Guthrie is not correct. If he had a valid point, he was entitled to use the hashtags that she had created and mention her, as he would not know that she was harassed by his expressing views in opposition to hers or her friends’. This is particularly the case regarding any issue about which Ms. Guthrie had herself engaged.
It goes further. He did not have to have a valid opinion in her view or even an opinion that was not spurious in her view. He could, in the tradition of Canadian freedom of expression that I discussed above, have a controversial or even offensive opinion. He could use extreme, hyperbolic, provocative language such as “fascist feminists.” He could be, and unfortunately was, homophobic and insulting.
Mr. Elliott’s view, as emerges from the content of his proven tweets, is that he could write what he wanted. His view conforms to the Twitter rules and the Canadian value of freedom of expression. If that was his state of mind, then he would not know that Ms. Guthrie was harassed by his doing what was lawful and what the platform they were both using permitted. What was lawful remained lawful; it does not amount to a crime unless the person communicating knows that the other person is harassed.
...
The proper use of Twitter is complicated, as it is developing. One view is Mr. Elliott’s as expressed in tweets such as, “You don’t know the value of twitter. If you want a private conversation use email,” and tweets expressing the importance of allowing others to tweet even if you think their opinions have no validity and are garbage. Ms. Guthrie’s view is the opposite. Though she testified that Mr. Elliott had a right to give his opinion, she took the position that she could demand that she be excluded from receiving it, which is her right – but also that he had to comply and cooperate, which is not her right.
...
Each aspect of his tweeting is legitimate. To repeat, tweeting on a topic and exercising freedom of expression, arguing facts about his history with Ms. Guthrie (possibly falsely regarding his having no sexual interest), exercising and expressing his opinion on the proper use of the medium that everyone was using, is permitted.
...
To argue this tweet as a sample of criminal harassment does not advance the proposition that Mr. Elliott knew Ms. Guthrie was harassed; it raises doubt as to whether he knew or not. It comes back to the two understandably different ways that Mr. Elliott and Ms. Guthrie viewed the whole affair.
His volume of tweets harassed her because of her view that she could control people’s non-threatening, non-sexual use of her handle and hashtags that she used beyond not reading their tweets and taking the ineffectual step of blocking. He cannot be imputed with knowledge that Ms. Guthrie was harassed by his tweeting. Mr. Elliott was not responsible for that view, which is at least arguably incompatible with Twitter.
...
It is reasonable that fear can arise just from the fact of someone continuing to contact someone after being asked to stop. That behaviour could reasonably signify that the person who continued the contact was capable of anything since they ignored the request. Findings of reasonable fear are made on just that basis; I have done so myself in criminal harassment trials.
But in this case, Ms. Guthrie’s unreasonable premise that Mr. Elliott was irrational and had nothing valid to say meant that she never put his tweets into any context. The very fact of his tweeting any hashtag she followed or any tweet about her or with her handle harassed her.
She would not even allow for the possibility that he had any reason apart from the obsession with her that he perceived to tweet about her. Given that she had a leadership role in the campaign to denounce him, that is not reasonable.
I do not restrict this consideration to physical safety, as s. 264 can include psychological safety. Though Crown counsel argued that as a basis of Ms. Guthrie’s fear, I did not interpret her fear of danger to mean that. She particularly cited his knowing the neighbourhood in which she lived, and there is no evidence that she feared for her psychological safety. But that fear must also be reasonable.
I admit I was expecting Elliott to be convicted. From the Battle of Toronto to the election of increasingly politically correct leftist governments here in Canada, every indication was that freedom of speech was dying a slow but inevitable death here.
This ruling gives me some genuine hope.
There are still some issues here. The Judge found that "recklessness" as to whether a SJW feels harassed by a tweet or series of them will be sufficient to make out that element of the offence. There is also some clear white-knighting language in the judgment and insufficient denunciation of the bad behaviour of the "victims" (although some recognition that Elliott could take actions in Twitter to defend himself from their character assaults on him).
The most important thing to me is that the Judge found that given the nature of Twitter as an open platform and the fundamental importance of freedom of expression as a Canadian constitutional right, it was totally unreasonable of the "victims" to feel harassed. Whether they felt subjectively harassed is insufficient. A reasonable person in the context of an open platform for speech has no objective basis to feel harassed by someone expressing an opposing viewpoint, even if it is expressed offensively. This is the crux of the ruling and the victory for free speech.
I will of course analyze further and in more detail the implications of this ruling for my mega-piece, but for once I see reason to be optimistic that the tyranny of the politically correct may not be total and that the counterfeit "human right" not to have one's feelings hurt or beliefs challenged could be on the decline.
TL;DR: a Canadian male Twitter troll was actually acquitted of "harassing" internet feminists because he has the right to disagree with them and disagree offensively. There may be hope for freedom of speech in Canada after all.
Just a human enjoying his "Apex-Predator Privilege" atop the food chain.
(This post was last modified: 01-23-2016 01:10 PM by DannyAlberta.)
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Man charged with criminal harassment after pissing off & "creepin" Twitter Feminists
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