Quote:
Originally Posted by TheDaddy
Great all those people that rob and attack people wandering the streets and we jail someone who calls a spade a spade (his words not mine  ). Still guess your every day Joe getting beaten up doesn't create many headlines and we've seen from the riots just how tough the law can be when headlines have been made. |
I think there are a number of issues here, the first of which is to be clear on what he actually did.
He did not just post a single racist message about Muamba. He then posted a series of racist and sexist messages directed specifically at other members of the site who found his initial post offensive. I won't repeat what he said but they were very offensive and meant to be read by the people he was abusing, he sent them those messages. There seems to be a desire to lessen the extent of his abuse to that single message about Muamba as make the sentence seem more egregious than it actually is.
That doesn't mean a jail sentence is warranted of course. However I think it's good to see action taken against these sick messages that are becoming increasingly common on the Internet and Twitter. It's worth taking a look at the messages Stan Collymore receives, it's often a unrelenting stream of explicit, sometimes violent, racial abuse whenever he comments on any topic. This is not a minor problem. It is not 'people being stupid on Twitter'. It's very nasty people hiding behind their perceived anonymity to constantly abuse people because of the colour of their skin or their gender. They have also taken to trolling the Facebook pages of the recently deceased to cause further grief to their families, again this will be tinged with racial and/or sexist abuse if they were not a white male.