Wrong on the internet
Not me, you cheeky sods.
Laurence Fox is in the news for losing a defamation case. There's a lot of misinformation and scaremongering flying around about it. A lot of asking questions about things that are answered in the judgement, a lot of pretending things aren't there that are, a lot of 'confusion' about what it all means.
Of course there is, this is racism we're talking about. Can't have it ever to be fine to call people racist can we?
What happened?
Three people took Fox to court because he called them paedophiles on twitter. Fox made a counterclaim because they’d called him racist first.
The court had to decide:
- Whether the tweets had caused, or were likely to cause serious harm
- Whether the defences made that okay
The court only had to assess whether any defence held water if it found the tweets could cause serious harm.
The original claim
Laurence Fox called three people paedophiles
The defence
That this was a rhetorical flourish in response to being called racist. Anyone reading the tweets would know they weren’t serious accusations.
Did the tweets cause harm?
Two of the tweets had caused serious harm, or were likely to.
There wasn’t enough context in the tweets themselves for everyone who saw them to know they weren’t serious accusations, especially if they’d seen retweets or screenshots.
Accusations of paedophilia can create a ‘bad odour’ regardless of whether anyone involved in throwing the allegations about really mean it. That ‘bad odour’ can be harmful regardless of whether it’s true, especially as both claimants work with young people.
Both claimants could show they’d received abuse calling them paedophiles of a sort they hadn’t seen before Fox’s tweets. Both were gay men who sometimes worked with young people. There are actual convicted paedophiles with the same name as one, and a similar drag name to the other.
The third tweet wasn’t likely to cause serious harm as Fox had provided enough context in his tweet to signal he was making a rhetorical argument.
The verdict
An accusation of paedophilia is too serious to be a proportionate response to an accusation of racism, and people seeing the two tweets out of context could conceivably think the accusations were genuine or acted as if they did.
Two claims succeeded, the other didn’t.
The counter-claim
Three people called Laurence Fox racist.
The defence
The three claimants honestly believed it to be true, and still do.
Did the tweets cause harm?
No.
Laurence Fox had already made lots of high profile appearances in the media talking about his controversial views. He’d even said they’d ended his acting career before these tweets. Loads of people had called him racist, including in response to the same tweet the claimants responded to. He’d already had disagreements with his agent over his controversial statements.
It was impossible to say these three tweets in particular had caused him to be dropped by his agent or casused any other harm, partly because they’d only gained any prominence because Fox himself drew attention to them by calling the tweeters paedophiles.
The verdict
There was no need to consider the defences as the tweets couldn’t be singled out on their own as being harmful.
All Fox’s claims failed.
What's the problem?
I'll take Brendan O'Neill's response as a template because I saw it being called ‘a brilliant explanation’ on twitter and it’s bloody not. It's probably pretty similar to other big-spammed contrarians as well.
I won't be going through giving loads of block quotes though. Nobody has a stomach for that these days. What do you think this is, 2007?
Here are the links:
The judgement (PDF)
Brendan O’Neill’s ‘excellent’ explainer
Here are the problems O’Neill has with the judgement:
You can’t even make a rhetorical flourish now
Yes you can. One of the claimants lost. It was okay for Fox to call them a paedophile in the way he did. O’Neill never mentions this.
He actually uses the tweet from the unsuccessful claim to show how easy it was to see Fox wasn't being serious, without saying that this is the one the judge said was okay.
He repeats this point about not being allowed to make an exaggeration over and over in his article, but you can exaggerate for rhetorical effect without being punished. Fox did.
"Not one person of good faith or sound mind will have read Fox’s tweets and thought, ‘Wow, those people are paedos?’..."
It doesn’t matter whether people are acting in good faith and sound mind in interpreting the tweets as serious allegations without context. The danger of harm is still there.
The judge criticised Fox for not being able to show his allegations were true
No she didn’t. She just didn’t. The judgement lays out what Fox’s defence is and notes that it isn’t that he believed the allegations were true. That’s it.
O’Neill makes a big meal of this, but it’s just nonsense.
The court didn’t demonstrate that Fox is actually racist
It didn’t have to. The tweets weren’t harmful so the court didn’t have to look at the defences. One of the claimants would have had to present evidence of why he was racist if the court had to look at her defence, but it didn’t.
Fox’s lawyer tried to get the judge to do that anyway, but she didn’t. She gives a very detailed explanation of why, and this is a tiny bit of it:
His world view and his politics are not on trial in these proceedings, only the factual impact of what he said, and what was said about him, on this particular occasion.
“Why can the High Court decree that it is defamatory to refer to three non-paedophiles as paedophiles, but it cannot decide if it’s defamatory to refer to a non-racist as racist?"
I quoted this as it's a neat bit of rhetorical sleight of hand.
The high court did not decree it's defamatory to refer to three non-paedophiles as paedophiles. It was only defamatory to two of them. You can call a non-paedophile a paedophile in some contexts, just like Fox did here.
Only Brendan is implying Fox is non-racist, so that’s neat. The court didn’t have to decide whether it is defamatory to refer to a non-racist as racist, only whether it was harmful to refer to Laurence Fox as racist in this instance.
The actual answer is kind of the whole entire point of the judgement. It is defamatory to call a non-paedophile a paedophile or refer to a non-racist as racist if they can demonstrate that the accusations caused them harm and the defence isn’t sufficient. It’s not hard.
Literally everything O’Neill complains about here, and all the criticism I’ve seen flying about on twitter is covered in the judgement.
Why are they bloody moaning then?
It’s not worth wasting any energy deciding whether people moaning about this genuinely don’t understand the verdict or are deliberately lying. It’s enough that they’re wrong on the internet.
But right wingers would love for complexity and nuance to have been ignored and racism defined in this court for a bunch of reasons (O’Neill might just be genuinely confused of course):
- It would give them the opportunity to lobby for the definition to be changed to make it harder to call them racist
- They’d be able to clog up the airwaves with ‘but what if a black person wears white people trousers’ type bollocks for bloody ages
- A legal definition would make it easier to create dog whistles that skirt around it
Essentially, it’s like every other piece of culture war dogshit. A desire to curtail freedom of speech disguised an attempt to defend it. They want to make it hard to call people racist, but fine for them to say whatever they want whenever they want as a rhetorical flourish.
It’s not serious or sophisticated, but what do you expect, fucking Matlock?
