Racist tweets send UK university student to jail - Vancouver Sun (blog)

Liam Stacey only had a few hundred Twitter followers but that didn't stop his drunken, racist tweets about collapsed soccer player Fabrice Muamba from spreading around the globe and landing him in jail for 56 days.

The 21-year-old student has been suspended by  Swansea University and sent to jail for inciting racial hatred in a case that saw Twitter users reporting the offensive tweets to police.

Stacey's Twitter account, @liamstacey9 was taken down in the wake of the social media storm that erupted when he mocked the stricken Muamba, a player for the Bolton Wanderers, who suffered cardiac arrest during a March 17 game and collapsed on the soccer pitch.

Muamba is in intensive care in a London hospital,  where his condition is now described as serious but stable.

And Stacey was led off in handcuffs after a judge told him he had no alternative but to impose an immediate jail term.

Stacey's tweets were reported to the police by other Twitter users, including Stan Collymore, a British football commentator and former player.

"Your sick tweets have been passed on to the Police," Collymore told Stacey in a tweet.

In the wake of Muamba's collapse, when some thought he had died, Stacey mocked the player with a tweet that read,  "LOL, [expletive deleted] Muamba he's dead !!! #haha

He then responded to online critics with a serious of tweets, mostly unprintable and racial and sexual in nature.

The case has prompted controversy and resulted in an online debate over the severity of the sentencing for Stacey.  It isn't the first time someone in the UK has been jailed for intemperate social media posts. Last fall  a  Glasgow soccer fan's comments on Facebook about Catholics and fans of a rival team  earned him eight months in jail.

More recently a 21-year-old law Newcastle University law student wasn't sent to jail but was ordered to do two years of community service for posting racist tweets aimed at Collymore.

What do you think? Was the punishment too severe?

Or do you agree with Collymore, who wrote of the criticism over Stacey's sentence:  "Seems to be a few who think that calling someone a W*g,ni***r or c**n and being arrested for it is an infringement of FoS. Idiots."