Twitter trials and Facebook juries: An analysis of the Australian sub judice rule and the regulation of prejudicial publicity on social media during high-profile criminal trials

This thesis investigates how the sub judice rule operates in practice in the age of social media. While the law was well established in terms of how it regulated the behaviour of publishers before the internet, there are concerns it is less effective in the digital age. By analysing data from Twitter and Facebook during two high-profile murder trials, I investigate the prevalence of prejudicial publicity on social media, and examine how professional journalists and non-journalists talk about criminal trials. This analysis identifies the types of information empanelled jurors might see about trials and what this means for the law