Earlier this month the BBC alleged on a news program that a former Tory politician was a child molester. The report, which didn’t actually name the man, was untrue.

But a frenzy of speculation began on Twitter, with thousands of people either tweeting or retweeting the name of Alistair McAlpine — a.k.a. Lord McAlpine, an adviser to Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister. The BBC has since apologized for sloppy reporting and coughed up £185,000 ($294,000) in damages. But some of those who tweeted about it are facing a probable lawsuit.

Those who repeated the claim include everyone from ordinary tweeters with few followers to high-profile celebrities like British actor Alan Davies with hundreds of thousands of followers. The media is reporting that some 10,000 people could be sued, leading to the largest number of defendants in a case in British legal history.

Of course many of those people were merely doing what most people do on Twitter: passing along gossip, the way they would on Facebook, by text message or by email. But unlike those, Twitter is completely public.

“Twitter is not just a closed coffee shop among friends,” says Andrew Reid, McAlpine’s lawyer. “It goes out to hundreds of thousands of people and you must take responsibility for it. It is not a place where you can gossip and say things with impunity, and we are about to demonstrate that.” Read more…

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