We are not amused......................

.....interesting story today in the Metro Paper on page 3 !!

The Queen’s Facebook page was unveiled yesterday and more than 100,000 signed in for updates to the new “British Monarchy” page meaning they will receive updates on the Queen’s activities.
Buckingham Palace says it is not a personal profile page, but users can "like" the service and receive updates on their news feed. Over 40,000 people rushed to “like” the new Facebook page in the first hour.

It was intended as an understated means of plugging the Royal Family into Facebook with updates but it promptly became a forum for slanging matches between anti-royalists and supporters.

So even the Queen now has a Facebook account, although we cannot add her as a friend ……………interestingly it was the third most popular story accessed on the BBC News website today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11704599

It actually made me think would the Queen actually ever look at the site or read any of the postings. It would certainly give her an insight into how the public are thinking about the monarchy and some of the issues that interest and engage them, although I suppose she has plenty of advisors already around her to inform her of that.

The new Facebook page has been described as "the final frontier" of the Queen's foray into digital technology. Does the fact that the Queen has a social network page on Facebook mean she embraces the web and has become a trendsetter serving a new generation of web users  and this could then be considered clever marketing of a modern and up to date monarchy who keep in touch with changing times?.

Researching a little further I found she actually already has a Twitter account with 70,148 followers launched in July 2009 to spread news about the Royal Family and she has her own You Tube channel launched in 2007 which hosts videos of key events such as the Christmas message which has 32,418 subscribers and whose films have been watched over 8.3 million times over the last 3 years.

However it saddened me and shocked me a little that even the Queen was subject to slanderous and insulting comments on her official page. It seems some people will take any opportunity to post vile comments regardless and this makes me reflect on some of the down sides of social network sites I’ve discussed previously in some of my blogs.
Moderators were forced to remove dozens of comments by anti-monarchist saboteurs who clicked the “like” button in order to join discussions on the page only to post abusive messages. A Buckingham Palace spokesman confirmed that moderators had been forced to remove “a number” of abusive postings. “There are an awful lot of comments on there and, while we’re certainly not stifling debate, our colleagues in the web office are moderating the page and removing any offensive comments with sexual content or bad language,” he said.
I think this is one of the unintended consequences of Facebook. Although it started out  to create a “facebook” for Harvard University - a book of pictures used to find cute girls and guys to date  it became very big , very fast and now serves half a billion users, many of it’s users, especially young people, not even concerned with the controversies.
Facebook has provided an opportunity for a wide variety of groups to attempt to build support for a cause. At one end of the spectrum it has been used to get Rage Against the Machine to the top of the pop charts in the UK and at the other, it is vital for serious political campaigns, from the disputed Iranian elections to action against BP over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the Facebook group is the first port of call for many to give their views. Even though it might not have been intended, fairly early on Facebook was a political platform.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-10705923

It seems however good intentions are they can always be abused.

I then started to think about what some of the Queens descendants would make of our modern world and the fact that slanderous comments could be made against the Queen herself on her own official page. And by the same token what some of our most famous traitors in history would think if they could come back for a day and observe that they only have to log on and they can  say what they like about who and what they like publically even to the monarchy and government? Interesting thought ??!!

The most serious of all crimes in the Elizabethan Age was high treason, ie: plotting to overthrow the queen. In law treason is the crime that covers some of the more serious acts of betrayal of one's sovereign or nation. A person who commits treason is known in law as a traitor.
In English law, high treason was punishable by being hanged, drawn and quatered (men) or burnt at the stake (women), or beheading (royalty and nobility). Treason was the only crime which attracted those penalties. The penalty was used by later monarchs against people who could reasonably be called traitors. Many of them would now just be considered dissidents.

In Shakespeare’s play King Lear, when the King learns that his daughter has publicly dishonoured him, he says “They could not, would not do 't; 'tis worse than murder” a conventional attitude at that time (1600). In Dantes’Inferno, the ninth and lowest circle of hell is reserved for traitors; and Juds Iscariot who betrayed Jesus in the bible, suffers the worst torments of all: being constantly gnawed at by one of Lucifer's own three mouths. His treachery is considered so notorious that his name has long been synonymous with traitor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treason
There have been plans afoot for many years to change the laws on treason in the UK but apparently there is an awful lot of statute law in the UK that deals with treason and all acts are still in force. Interesting thought????

TREASON ACTS

1351: Defines offence

1495: Allows defence

1695: Regulates trials

1702: Bans hindering succession

1708: English/Scottish law harmonised

1814: Ends disembowelling etc

1842: Deals with firearms, attempts to alarm monarch

1848: Deals with radical agitation

1998: Crime act ends death penalty

All acts still in force

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7288516.stm
So are these Facebook perpetraitors, traitors, dissidents or just members of a modern culture who have the benefit of free speech and social networking sites?
I think all I can perhaps safely say is the Queen’s ancestors would definitely not be amused !!!!