Now that everyone’s a journalist, anyone can be sued

Trying to count posts on the web is like trying to number grains of sand on a beach. In June 2012, a data management company called Domo attempted the fool’s errand nevertheless. It calculated that, every minute, the then 2.1 billion users uploaded 48 hours of YouTube video, shared 684,478 pieces of content on Facebook, published 27,778 new posts on Tumblr and sent about 100,000 tweets.

Its figures were not exhaustive and they were out of date in an instant, but for a moment they captured the explosion of self-expression the net has brought. As the European Court’s demand that Google hide writing that breaks no law shows, technological change has made finding a way to defend freedom of speech, while protecting the rights of the unjustly maligned, one of the great democratic challenges of our time.

Nowhere more so than in Britain. If you deny yourself the pleasure of browsing the celeb press, you may not heard of James Stunt.