MR JUSTICE WARBY Approved Judgment Monroe v Hopkins [2017] EWHC 433 (QB) Mr Justice Warby: Introduction 1. This is the trial of a libel claim arising from two tweets sent by the defendant, Katie Hopkins, about the claimant, Jack Monroe, on 18 May 2015. The defendant is a journalist who writes for the MailOnline. The claimant is a food blogger and writer. The claimant, assigned female gender at birth, now identifies as “non-binary transgender”. But by agreement, I shall call her Ms Monroe and use feminine pronouns. 2. Ms Monroe’s complaint is that the tweets accused her of vandalising a war memorial and desecrating the memory of those who fought for her freedom, or of approving or condoning such behaviour. Ms Hopkins does not suggest that Ms Monroe did behave in either of these ways. Her answer to the claim is that her tweets do not bear the meanings complained of; are not defamatory of Ms Monroe according to common law principles; and, or in any event, are not defamatory because it has not been shown that they caused serious harm to Ms Monroe’s reputation, as required by s 1 of the Defamation Act 2013. 3. The issues as to liability are, therefore, (1) what meanings were borne by the tweets, (2) whether those meanings had a defamatory tendency, and if so (3) whether it has been proved that the serious harm requirement is met. 4. The trial has been short. The only oral evidence has been that of Ms Monroe, who has been cross-examined for the best part of a day. Mrs Hopkins has not given evidence. She relies on two witness statements made by her solicitor, Ms Harris, analysing a body of twitter records. Those statements have been admitted into evidence by agreement, without cross-examination, though without accepting the accuracy of the analysis. Ms Hopkins also relies on facts and documents that have been put before the Court by agreement. The facts Twitter 5. Twitter is an online news and social networking service, which is widely used and very well known. It allows people using the Twitter website or a mobile device app to post and interact with messages of not more than 140 characters, called “tweets”. This much is common knowledge. But Twitter is still a relatively new medium, and not everyone knows all the details of how it works. Where something is not a matter of common knowledge a Judge is not entitled to bring his or her own knowledge to bear. The facts normally have to be proved. In this case, however, many of the relevant facts about Twitter have been agreed, and set out in a Schedule called “How Twitter Works”, which is attached to this judgment as an Appendix. I shall employ the abbreviations used in the Appendix. 6. Estimates for the number of followers of the claimant and defendant at the relevant times are agreed. Figures for the number of impressions, or the number of times various tweets first posted in 2015 were re-tweeted, liked, or replied to, are available from more recent data sources. These are unlikely to represent the exact position at