Police have charged a mother with making malicious communications over social media after she called a transgender woman a man.
Kate Scottow of Hitchin, Hertfordshire in Britain was arrested in December. Three officers took her into custody as her then 10-year-old daughter and 20-month-old son looked on, The Daily Mail reported.
Now, she’s been charged by the Crown Prosecution Service, which says she made “persistent” social media posted designed to cause “annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety” to another person between September 2018 and May 2019.
“Last night, a CPS spokesman said the charge against Mrs Scottow had been authorised on August 21 ‘after reviewing a file of evidence from Hertfordshire Police relating to social media posts,'” The Mail wrote. Scottow is due to appear in court on Sept. 18.
When Scottow was arrested last year, Boris Johnson, who is now Prime Minister, criticized the move as an “abuse of manpower and police facilities.”
“Is this really the right way to fight crime? Is this what our brave police officers signed up to do?” Johnson wrote in a newspaper column. “Are you really telling me that it is a sensible ordering of priorities, when violence on the streets would seem to be getting out of control?”
The new case comes six months after Britain’s first transgender hate crime prosecution was tossed out of court, with the judge declaring: “There is no case and never was a case.”
That case involved Miranda Yardley, 51, who was accused of harassing a transgender activist on Twitter.
Britain has become downright Orwellian, enacting strict laws governing speech. In May 2018, a teenager was found guilty of charges that she disseminated a “grossly offensive message by means of a public electronic communications network” — by posting rap lyrics on a social media site.
Chelsea Russell, 19, of Liverpool, posted some lyrics on Instagram from Snap Dogg’s “I’m Trippin'” to pay tribute to a 13-year-old boy who died after he was hit by a car last summer, the BBC reported. The lyrics said “kill a snitch n****, rob a rich n****.”
The conviction came under Section 127 of the 2003 Communications Act, which states:
127 Improper use of public electronic communications network
(1) A person is guilty of an offence if he—(a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or
(b) causes any such message or matter to be so sent.(2) A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he—
(a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false,
(b) causes such a message to be sent; or
(c) persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.
In March 2018, a Glasgow Sheriff Court found Scottish YouTube personality Count Dankula — real name Mark Meechan — guilty of being “grossly offensive.” Meechan was arrested in April 2016 for allegedly committing a hate crime by sharing a short video on YouTube. The video showed him teaching his girlfriend’s dog to give a Nazi “Sieg Heil salute,” and showed the pug named Buddha responding excitedly to the phrase “gas the Jews.”
He says the video was intended to be seen by just seven of his friends who follow his YouTube channel, Count Dankula, the Daily Mail reported. He taught the dog to act like a Nazi as “a joke intended to upset his girlfriend,” Newsweek wrote. “But he says the video was shared, by someone on the social media platform, Reddit, which led to the surge in its popularity,” said the Mail. The video was viewed some 3 million times.
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