The potential for a semi-private message, intended for friends or nobody in particular, to be massively amplified via social media (often through retweeting by self-appointed celebrity thought police) could complicate the analogy, but shouldn’t. The Lord Chief Justice found recently in the widely-reported “Twitter joke trial” that the Communications Act should not be used to clamp down on “satirical, or iconoclastic, or rude comment, the expression of unpopular or unfashionable opinion about serious or trivial matters, banter or humour, even if distasteful to some or painful to those subjected to it”. Even the Twitterati.