Senior MPs have said that Lord Justice Leveson must find a way to stop people from wrongly identifying people using social media channels, after Lord McAlpine was falsely accused of being a paedophile.
MPs suggested that restricting the Leveson report to only newspapers would only address ‘yesterday’s problems’.
Conor Burns MP, a Conservative member of Parliament’s Culture, Media and Sport select committee, said: “At the moment you have got this situation where newspapers are rightly constrained by libel and defamation laws but people are linking to the stories through the internet and spreading vile and heinous lies about people, who have no right of redress.
“Lord McAlpine’s reputation was in tatters last week because people were able to post things with complete impunity on the internet. We are going to have to bring Facebook and Twitter under the same laws as libels committed by newspapers or television channels.”