Nasty people on Facebook – know that you can have your bank accounts frozen too, for a single bad comment on your Facebook page

One of the fascinating things about the current debate on precautionary warrants used against journalists – for which read me – is the fact that people, including journalists, think that only journalists are potential victims.

And that is the reason why a bunch of trolls, nutters and all-round nasty people are bitching on Facebook and the internet comments boards about how I got what I deserve and how journalists anyway shouldn’t be allowed to write what they want and not pay a price for it (because you know how this is a democratic island).

I read their comments and laugh at their ignorance. I could wake up tomorrow and sue a hundred of their ordinary-citizen, non-journalist backsides to kingdom come for slandering me with their vile comments on Facebook and elsewhere, and freeze their bank accounts with precautionary warrants while I’m about it.

All this talk about journalists, bloggers and non-journalists – and few people seem aware that the Press Act makes no mention of journalists at all. It doesn’t deal with journalists. It deals with PUBLICATION – in other words, anything that is printed, distributed, broadcast, or published on the internet, even if it is by an ordinary citizen from the gutter thinking she is being witty by sticking two horns on my head, plastering my face with Photoshopped green vomit, and lying about me beneath.

The press and politicians are not helping matters by talking about “precautionary warrants against journalists” and leading people to believe that the Press Act only applies to journalists rather than to anyone who writes anything in publication, including a two-line comment on his personal Facebook page.

We’re not talking about precautionary warrants for journalists here, but about precautionary warrants for cases filed under the Press Act, and cases filed under the Press Act can be filed against anyone, even a dockyard worker or a supermarket check-out girl.

I hope this is sufficiently clear, and that the people who slander me on Facebook and laugh because my bank account has been frozen have fully understood that I can sue them and freeze their bank accounts too. But I won’t, because unlike them, Minister Cardona and his policy aide, I’m civilised and democratic. Yet the point is, I can. And even if I’m not even remotely tempted to do it, others might well be.

They haven’t bothered to tell ordinary people that they can have their bank accounts frozen for making a nasty, lying comment on Facebook.