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"It is widely known that law enforcement agencies are turning to social networks to monitor citizens\u00A0but one UK Twitter user saw a joke tweet land him in hot water, as he was detained by\u00A0Homeland Security in Los Angeles, interrogated and barred from the US, The Sun reveals.\r\n\r\nBefore Leigh Van Bryan and his friend Emily Bunting embarked on a holiday to Los Angeles, Van Bryan tweeted that he was going to &amp;quot;destroy America,&amp;quot; boasting that he would try &amp;quot;digging up Marilyn Monroe&amp;quot; during his trip across the pond.\r\n\r\nIf someone tweets they would &amp;quot;destroy America,&amp;quot; you would expect it to alert law-enforcement agencies. However, in the UK, &amp;quot;destroying&amp;quot; can also be used as a term for partying or having a good time.\r\n\r\nWhen Van Bryan and Bunting arrived in the US, they were immediately detained by officials at\u00A0Los Angeles International Airport, held by armed guards and questioned for over five hours before they were &amp;quot;handcuffed, put in a van with illegal immigrants and locked up overnight.&amp;quot;\r\n\r\nTwelve hours later, after being held in separate cells (Van Bryan shared his cell with Mexican drug dealers), the pair were released and put on a plane home.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nBryan told The Sun:\r\n&amp;quot;The Homeland Security agents were treating me like some kind of terrorist. I kept saying they had got the wrong meaning from my tweet but they just told me 'You've really f***ed up with that tweet, boy'.&amp;quot;\r\nTaking the tweets literally, the second of which was a quote from Family Guy, Homeland Security officials searched the duo's cases for spades, just in case they had packed them to dig up Monroe's grave.\r\n\r\nTwitter users have increasingly been forced to accept the consequences of their tweets, with one high-profile case in the UK reaching newspaper frontpages. In 2010,\u00A0Paul Chambers, captured his frustration in a tweet after he learned that bad weather may halt his plan to fly.\r\n\r\nHe tweeted:\r\n\u201CCrap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You\u2019ve got a week to get your shit together, otherwise I\u2019m blowing the airport sky high!!\u201D\r\nSomeone took this \u201Cthreat\u201D seriously enough to inform the police and Chambers soon found himself\u00A0arrested\u00A0on terrorism charges, then\u00A0charged. Finally at his trial he was\u00A0found guilty\u00A0of \u201CSending by a public communications network a message that was grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character\u201D and fined \u00A31000. Since then he\u2019s\u00A0lost his job twice\u00A0as a result of the case.\r\n\r\nChambers appealed the case but the judge upheld the original decision, meaning Chambers\u2019 fine and criminal record remained in place. Following this, floods of Twitter users showed their support with #twitterjoketrial tweets,\u00A0including Stephen Fry\u00A0who offered to pay the fine.\r\n\r\nVan Bryan has since switched his profile to private, perhaps learning of what can happen when you threaten to do funny things inside a tweet that can be seen by Twitter's 200 million+ users (and law enforcement agencies).\r\n\r\nRead the latest Twitter news at TNW Twitter."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/twitter/2012/01/30/this-is-what-happens-when-you-joke-about-destroying-america-on-twitter/>