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Surprisingly for such an outspoken MP, the case went unreported. So when a Toronto court last week acquitted a man of harassing two women on Twitter, the ruling was hailed as a Canadian first. The judge’s foray into the Twitterverse to draw the line between boorish behaviour and what constitutes criminal harassment was widely misreported as a precedent.

Activists swiftly denounced the ruling as tantamount to declaring “open season on women.”

But as Rempel’s case and a review of others reveal, the anonymity of a Twitter handle is no shield from the law.

“I think anybody who thinks it’s open season on women online is taking (an) overly simplistic view of things,” said Boris Bytensky, a criminal lawyer with Adler Bytensky Prutschi Shikhman. “If you engage in direct threats through Twitter on women or anybody, you’re going to get charged with uttering threats.”

Skeene’s conviction serves as an example of tweets that cross into criminality, while Gregory Alan Elliott’s acquittal demonstrates the high bar for proving criminal harassment in the courts. Not only does the complainant need to feel threatened, but their fear must be deemed objectively reasonable.

“What the judge (in Elliott’s case) basically was saying is if the two of you want to use Twitter to engage in a consensual exchange of insults, it’s not going to be a crime,” he said, referring to part of the reason why Elliott was found not guilty. The judge in that case ruled that the women in question, Stephanie Guthrie and Heather Reilly, did not have a reasonable fear of Elliott because they continued to engage with him online.