Twitter judgments

Yet this week's tale of the bizarre comes from one of our European neighbours, after a Spanish judge in Seville ordered a businessman found guilty of defamation to tweet his court sentence every day for 30 days.

Rubén Sánchez, of consumer rights group Facua, launched a legal challenge against Luis Pineda, the owner of a rival organisation, in 2013 over hundreds of defamatory tweets.

The court eventually found in favour of the claimant. Writing in his ruling, the judge said Pineda had used Twitter to post 'humiliating and insulting expressions and remarks' about his rival.

But in a classic example of an innovative judicial punishment, the judge ruled that, because the offending tweets were available to be read by all of Twitter, the sentence should also be published openly on the social network.

Pineda was also ordered to erase 57 defamatory tweets and pay €4,000 in damages to his victim. The full sentence - which runs to four paragraphs - was to be tweeted using a 'tool created to increase the number of permitted characters' as 140 would just not be up to the task.

The defendant, however, has so far refused to comply with the order.

While judges in England and Wales are becoming more au fait with the powers of social media, it seems unlikely that such a ruling will be tweeted down from the High Court any time soon. Our loss.

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