A Twitter user was sentenced in a UK court for posting a tweet considered extremely offensive, which was about a war veteran. The user was sentenced to 150 hours of community service.
Joseph Kelly, of 36 years old, originally from Glasgow, posted a tweet last year about Captain Sir Thomas Moore, a British war veteran who became a national icon for raising money for healthcare workers in 2020.
“The only good British soldier, burn, old friend, burn,” Kelly wrote on Twitter in February 2021 the day after Moore’s death.
Kelly was drunk when he posted this, he almost immediately regretted sending the tweet and then deleted it after a few 20 minutes, said his lawyer Tony Callahan, according to The New York Post.
“His level of criminality was a publication in a drunken state, at a time when he was struggling emotionally, from which he regretted and deleted almost instantly,” Callahan said, adding or that Kelly only had a handful of followers at the time.
“He accepts that he was wrong. He did not anticipate what would happen. He took action almost immediately to delete the tweet, but by then the genie was out of the bottle,” Callahan added.
However, British prosecutors were seeking prison sentences, citing a controversial UK law that punishes online posts that are grossly offensive, indecent, obscene or threatening in nature with up to six months in prison.
Sheriff Adrian Cottam, responsible for Kelly’s sentence, said in court that her punishment was important to deter others.
“It is important that other people realize how quickly things can get out of hand. You’re a good example of that, not having a lot of followers,” Cottam said.
Kelly was found guilty under Section 127 of the UK Communications Act, to be replaced by The country’s broad Online Safety Law.
Critics of this legislation, however, fear that the new legislation will also result in prosecutions similar to those of Kelly, applying sanctions to citizens for messages considered based on vague notions of public morality.
Other Britons who have been sentenced under the same law as Kelly include a law student who was sentenced to community service for sending racist messages to a football player football and a woman who posted songs about Holocaust denial on YouTube.
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