CHORLEY, England - Everyone agrees that his "jokes" making fun of two kidnapped girls crossed the line. Matthew Woods swiftly became an object of contempt after he posted the crude and offensive comments on his Facebook page.
But did he deserve to be locked up for them?
A judge thought so and ordered the 19-year-old to spend 12 weeks in jail, essentially for overstepping the bounds of good taste. Woods now sits behind bars - and also in the middle of a growing clash in Britain between freedom of expression, societal mores and the digital revolution.
Woods is one of several people whose use of social media has landed them on the wrong side of the law. They've been arrested, tried in court or otherwise subjected to public censure for posting distasteful opinions or malicious statements online, remarks that would've earned them little more than disapproving looks if they'd said the same thing over a pint in their corner pub.
One man angry about the war in Afghanistan was ordered to perform 240 hours of community service for declaring on Facebook that "all soldiers should die and go to hell." Police also went knocking on the door of a 17-year-old boy who tweeted an insulting message to Olympic diver Tom Daley, saying that he had let down his dead father by failing to win a gold medal. He was arrested, but released and given a warning.
While deploring such sentiments, civil liberties groups and prosecutors alike have registered alarm over the rash of arrests and investigations, concerned about an erosion of free expression here in one of the world's oldest - and most raucous - democracies.
"We are seeing a criminalization of speech that wasn't there before," said Kirsty Hughes, chief executive of the London-based nonprofit group Index on Censorship. "It's seriously worrying."
The source of the controversy is a 2003 communications law that, among other things, makes it a crime to send messages deemed "grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character" through a public electronic network.
Critics note that provision actually comes from an older version of the law from the 1930s and was aimed at protecting telephone operators from abuse.
The 2003 act kept that passage, but it was in a world before Facebook, Twitter or other online social networking sites, at a time when the phrase "going viral" hadn't yet gone, well, viral.
Yet the law continues to govern a completely new media landscape encompassing the Internet and its offshoots, an anachronistic situation that critics say should be urgently addressed but probably won't be, given the current government's focus on reviving the British economy.
"The recent spate of arrests shows us that the law is having unintended consequences," said Damian Tambini, an expert on media policy at the London School of Economics. The communications act needs revision, he said, "but legislative reform will not happen for at least two years."
Such punishments can seem shocking to Americans, for whom freedom of speech - even (or especially) odious and hurtful speech - is enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
Britain has no written constitution, though it boasts its own long, proud tradition of free expression as embodied in the popular tourist attraction Speakers' Corner in London's Hyde Park, where anyone can get on a soapbox and release his or her inner orator.
The Digital Age has complicated matters.
