Twitter posts not private, rules press watchdog
The Press Complaints Commission has ruled that the Daily Mail and Independent on Sunday did not breach a civil servant's privacy when they printed her tweets.
Sarah Baskerville, a civil servant at the Department of Transport, complained after several of her Twitter updates from November last year were published in the two papers.
The articles reported on tweets by Baskerville in which she called a course leader "mental", said she was "struggling with a wine-induced hangover" at work and posted links to attacks on government "spin" and Whitehall waste.
Baskerville complained to the PCC, saying that her messages on Twitter were private and that she had a "reasonable expectation" that only her 700 followers would read them. But the papers countered that the messages could be read by anyone.
In its first ruling on quoting from Twitter, the PCC found in favour of the papers and dismissed any notion that tweets should be considered private information.
PCC director Stephen Abell said: "This is an important ruling by the commission. As more and more people make use of such social media to publish material related to their lives, the commission is increasingly being asked to make judgments about what can legitimately be described as private information.
"In this case, the commission decided that republication of material by national newspapers, even though it was originally intended for a smaller audience, did not constitute a privacy intrusion."
The commission said the publicly accessible nature of the information was a "key consideration".