Unless you're an arrogant blowhard like Slater.

Yeah, but it doesn't stay with the tens of thousands of twitterers. They then pass on the…

I think that's a case of laws not being able to stop someone being a dick. They're only able to try and deal with them afterwards.

They pretty much did. That’s basically what a suppression order is.

He just ignored it. As indeed others could have over the identity of the Darren Hughes complainant.

But "they" couldn't injunct Slater to stop revealing suppressed names?

Hashes to hashes, flunk to flunky
We know Major Jack's
a monkey
Strung out in heaven's thigh
Hitting an all-time, oh!

Brutal.

Thanks Steven.

Hardly. It's only about 75,000 people in NZ. Bookface on the other hand..

Some genius. If they called it YACR (Yet Another Chat Room), only nerds would be using it. I presume "Hard Yakka" would become the new word for what was "Cyber" in the 90s.

also I wondered if you meant to call this post
We are all a twitter
– ie: in a state of agitation…

Totally. agree.

Is there a sense in which it couldn’t happen here?

Not to teach anyone here how to suck eggs, but this is the nub of the issue. What "public" means has changed since the introduction of the Internet, and it's that bit that's rendered the law outdated.

Personally I don't…

You can, but many don't.

"Voted National today. Yum-cha for lunch"

or

"Voted National today. Yay for them!"

Both illegal and threatening democracy as we know it?

No, but there seems to be quite a big difference between taking out an ad and joining a discussion forum/joining a group of people at the pub. I'm talking about discussion forums, in particular Facebook, being rather like 'real' discussions.…

The problem with allowing exceptions is that people regard them as loopholes and drive trucks through them, then…

Well, quite — I don't think it was a coincidence that Jim Bolger waited until his last television interview of the campaign…

Why wouldn't they just move that rhetoric to the day before, then. There would still be no…

Not everywhere, but it does happen. The hard thing is to draw the line between advertising and coercion. So, the logic goes, if you disallow advertising you'll make coercion harder too. Also, as "Gandalf" noted in the Harold comments yesterday:

There should be no electioneering…

When voters go postal, we're really in trouble.

Again, regardless of how much I enjoyed your post in 2008, it seems the case invariably necessitates recourse to them….these…those… weak willed straw men and lasses. Considering our votes are confidential, if someone is campaigning for a particular candidate, how would it be in their…

+1

Does that actually happen everywhere else?

You’ve been living in China too long, sir.

That's beside the point Sacha ; ) There are countless democracies without this kind of law. When we take a macro view of our own, who's to say the system is any fairer with this anachronism. My main peeve with it is…

There's a special 8th Stage just for West Ham supporters

That sounds like a lot of work.

You've been living in China too long, sir.

Kind of difficult to figure out who would be harmed by twittering on election day.

The law itself seems to imply that last minute electioneering is unfair in some mysterious way, to whom?

Quite. The law is bordering on the superstitious and clearly lacks the spokes to roll in the…

You could report 10,000 people :-)

That's a civil matter. We're talking about the criminal jurisdiction here.

So 10,000 people could self-report? Not…

Rick’s comment above suggests that the Norwich Pharmacal rule means they could. Whether they would is another matter.

I don't want to be too definitive (not knowing US law as well as one might), but yes.

Even if Twitter was based in New Zealand they couldn't get the information, unless Twitter volunteered it.

The job of enforcing this…

I know extradition demands a similar offence in both jurisdictions, so (even if electoral offences were extraditable) they wouldn’t be able to because the US had no restrictions on polling day propaganda…

Dear God Russell – say you're not a Manure fan!

There is no good reason to be such a person, unless you have family connections to United fandom. Anyone but them.

I didn't say it was hard. I said it cost money, which the Electoral Commission is unlikely to have. They'll be funded for an expected level of electoral crime. But if there are thousands of cases, then they won't be able to enforce the…

Not quite.…

Boohoo. The Act-ing up party (ies) might make this solemnity of which you speak a case of wishful thinking, with or without the help of social media.

We are all Twitter!
I'm not.

and

They have to…

The law itself seems to imply that last minute electioneering is unfair in some mysterious way, to whom?

As for breaching suppression – well suppression does good sometimes (most times) but many of he most…

That's just cruel.

Finished bottom and relegated.

Oddly enough, that's what happened in the South Tyneside case — although, obviously, that was a libel action pursued by the…

Wouldn't work. That's for civil cases.

The ordinary course for criminal cases is a search warrant.

However, the charge here is a fine-only summary offence, so that won't work. They can charge twitter, maybe, and a…

It's not an infringement offence like speeding where they can just fine you.

They have to issue…

They could. But it costs money (money to pay lawyers to get user details out of twitter,…

I can't recall. It was all so long ago...

Politicians and their hacks are too thick to understand a "no circulars" sign on my letterbox; I doubt they're bright enough to…

I'm not so sure. They could just send fines to as many people as they can easily get, targeting people with the most followers, making the most posts, or the most obvious…

How did West Ham go this season?

I suspect it's the nature of Twitter that organising masses of identical tweets in support of your party flooding Twitter on election day might be... a tad counter-productive.