And there we have it: the first person to be charged with intending to stir up racial hatred online has now been jailed for 20 months. 28-year-old Jordan Parlour pleaded guilty to charges put to him at Leeds magistrates’ court on Tuesday, confessing in court to having taken to Facebook during the recent unrest to rile up rioters. His own city Leeds saw approximately 400 people turn out last weekend and cause chaos on the streets – with a local hotel manager having to put his business into lockdown after rioters pelted it with stones and smashed windows. Good heavens…
But while the court heard Parlour was at home at the time with a broken heel, he was still engaging with what was going on. Taking to the social media platform between 1-5 August, the Leeds man told people online that ‘every man and his dog should smash [the] f*** out of Britannia hotel’ – amongst other rather unsavoury posts. Indeed, the first conviction for posting online in relation to the riots comes after Home Secretary Yvette Coooper’s warnings to ‘armchair thugs’ who stoked tensions from the comfort of their own homes – with Parlour himself told by the judge that ‘this offence is so serious that an immediate custodial sentence is unavoidable’. Crikey.
As Mr S wrote this week, Parlour’s case caught the attention of many of the online community – including Twitter CEO Elon Musk himself. The US tech billionaire took to his own platform in a rage when he heard there had been an arrest in the UK over online posts. ‘Arrested for making comments on Facebook!’ he fumed, adding: ‘Is this Britain or the Soviet Union?’ Not stopping there, the businessman went on to post an image of a Family Guy character in a torture chair, writing: ‘In 2030 for making a Facebook comment the UK government didn’t like.’ The period of rioting might have quietened down but Elon’s war on Labour continues…
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