So Ms. Baskerville freely issued updates describing the teacher
of a course she was taking as "shouty" and "mental," and tweeted
with abandon about "struggling with a wine-induced hangover" and
how, after lunch, she was "tired -- would much rather be going
home."
She also made some of her political views known, asking, "How
much more can we take from this Government?" regarding plans for
McDonald's Corp. and PepsiCo to help write health policy. And she
complained about cutbacks. Both her Twitter account and her blog
include clear disclaimers that the views expressed were personal
opinions and were not representative of her employer.
Nothing there to distinguish her from many British workers, but
because she is a government employee whose wages are paid by the
British taxpayer, the U.K.'s Daily Mail tabloid decided in November
2010 that it was justified in re-printing her tweets under the
headline "Oh please stop this twit from tweeting, someone."
The article prompted Ms. Baskerville to lodge the first
grievance of its kind with the Press Complaints Commission. She
claimed that her privacy had been violated and that the article was
misleading because it didn't print the full context of her quotes
-- for example, leaving out tweets that described the course she'd
attended as "good and worthwhile."
She took her case to the Press Complaints Commission -- an
independent body that administers the system of self-regulation for
the press -- but this week the commission refused to uphold her
complaints.
The commission said in a statement: "The civil service code
requires that public servants should not, by their personal
statements, call into doubt the impartiality of the civil service.
It was quite legitimate for the newspaper to highlight this
particular case."
This was the first time the commission had considered a
complaint about the re-publication of information originating from
Twitter. Ms. Baskerville insisted as part of her complaint that her
comments were strictly for her 700 followers, but the commission
ruled that "the potential audience for the information was actually
much larger than the 700 people who followed the complainant
directly, not least because any message could easily be
retweeted."
Since the press coverage, Ms. Baskerville -- who tweets as
@Baskers and describes herself as
a "Scottish & Sober-ish" civil servant next to a photo of
herself holding a glass of beer -- has added another 1,000
followers to her Twitter account, but has now deleted all her
tweets. She has not posted on her blog
since early December.