A Conservative Party Member of Parliament in the UK has said in an adjournment debate in the House of Commons that attacks on MPs via social media should be expected.
Speaking about a blog set up to troll politicians and others in public life, Guto Bebb, who is the MP for Aberconwy in North Wales, concurred with the views of Steve Rotheram MP that politicians as public figures should not expect to be immune from criticism online. “Despite being MP for Aberconwy since 2010 and knowing of this site since before then, I have attempted to ignore the blog as far as I could,” he said. “On occasion the authors have been complimentary about me, but more often than not I have been attacked.
“Such attacks, on the whole, need to be expected and accepted by a politician as part and parcel of the decision to become a public figure.
“Councillors are also, to an extent, in the same position—indeed, even the family home of the Deputy Speaker has been subject to online comments.”
The author of the blog called “Thoughts of Oscar” has been named as Nigel Roberts, who has since closed the website. It is alleged by Guto Bebb that Nigel Roberts, a local businessman, and Dylan Moore, a solicitor at David Jones solicitors, collaborated on the project.
In 2006, a judge at Pontypridd County Court told a then former Labour councillor, Dzon, known professionally as Jonathan Bishop, he does not have a legitimate expectation of privacy as a public figure, as by putting information about himself in the public domain he should expect to be open to scrutiny. In 2014 South Wales Police Constable Tim Davies was investigated following bringing a trolling case on behalf of a colleague, which was later dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service.
