CorpComms Magazine

A complaint by a civil servant that her 'private' tweets were republished by the Daily Mail and Independent on Sunday has been rejected by the Press Complaints Commission.

The civil servant, who worked at the Department of Transport, claimed that her tweets were private and were only to be shared with 700 or so followers. She also included a 'clear disclaimer' on her Twitter feed that the views expressed were personal.

The Press Complaints Commission ruled that, it was quite clear, that the potential audience for her tweets 'was actually much larger than the 700 people who followed the complainant directly, not least because any message could easily be retweeted to a wider audience'.

Both newspapers argued that the complainant's Twitter account was not private, and that she had made no steps to restrict access to her messages and was not publishing material anonymously.

They claimed it was 'reasonable' to highlight the messages and for their columnists to offer a view on whether it was acceptable for the complainant to talk about issues, such as being hungover at work.

The Commission ruled that the newspapers' actions did not constitute 'an unjustifiable intrusion' into the complainant's privacy.

Director Stephen Abell said the Commission was increasingly being asked to make judgments about what can be described as private information, adding: '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.'

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