MR JUSTICE WARBY Approved Judgment Monroe v Hopkins [2017] EWHC 433 (QB) 31. Some of the Jeynes principles can have special resonance in particular contexts. The warning at (3) against over-elaborate analysis is especially relevant when it comes to political speech: Waterson v Lloyd [2013] EWCA Civ 136 [2013] EMLR 17 [66] (Laws LJ). But the fact that speech is political does not of itself require any special approach to deciding its meaning: Thompson v James [2014] EWCA Civ 600 [26]­ [27] (Longmore LJ). The Court is able to give appropriate protection to political speech without distorting well-established principles about the meaning of words: see, for instance, Barron v Vines [2015] EWHC 1161 (QB) [46] and [2016] EWHC 1226 (QB) [86] (summary judgment, evaluation of defences, and assessment of damages). 32. The references to “the article” and to “bane and antidote” in principle (5) are probably best seen as particular expressions of the rather wider rule, that a determination of meaning must always take into account the whole of the statement that contains the particular words complained of, and of the context in which that statement appears, and of the mode of publication: Charleston v News Group Newspapers Ltd [1995] 2 AC 65, esp at 70 (Lord Bridge). The context will always include facts which were general knowledge at the time the statement was made; the meaning of words includes implications or inferences that a reader would draw from the words, in the light of those facts: Jones v Skelton 1370. Context will also include any surrounding material in the same “publication” as the words complained of, that has some bearing on how the statement complained of would be read and understood. The mode of publication can affect the way in which the ordinary reader absorbs information, including the amount of time they devote to reading or viewing it. 33. Jeynes principle (6) means that the nature of the publication or medium can also affect the characteristics which the court attributes to the ordinary reader. But it is necessary to be a little cautious about this aspect of the matter, because it can involve an invitation to act on preconceptions that are unsupported by evidence. Special characteristics should only be taken into account if they are matters of common knowledge, agreed, or proved: McAlpine [58], Simpson v MGN Ltd [2015] EWHC 77 (QB) [10]. Principles applied to Twitter 34. These well-established rules are perhaps easier to apply in the case of print publications of long standing such as books, newspapers, or magazines, or static online publications, than in the more dynamic and interactive world of Twitter, where short bursts of pithily expressed information are the norm, and a single tweet rarely exists in isolation from others. A tweet that is said to be libellous may include a hyperlink. It may well need to be read as part of a series of tweets which the ordinary reader will have seen at the same time as the tweet that is complained of, or beforehand, and which form part of what Mr Price has called a “multi-dimensional conversation”. 35. The most significant lessons to be drawn from the authorities as applied to a case of this kind seem to be the rather obvious ones, that this is a conversational medium; so it would be wrong to engage in elaborate analysis of a 140 character tweet; that an impressionistic approach is much more fitting and appropriate to the medium; but that this impressionistic approach must take account of the whole tweet and the context in which the ordinary reasonable reader would read that tweet. That context includes (a)