03/02/2020 Stocker v Stocker [2019] UKSC 17 (3 April 2019) or indeed at trial that the words complained of are not defamatory of the claimant, that the tribunal adjudicating on the question must then select the nondefamatory meaning for which the defendant contends. Instead, those words are ‘part of the description of the hypothetical reasonable reader, rather than (as) a prescription of how such a reader should attribute meanings to words complained of as defamatory’: see McAlpine v Bercow [2013] EWHC 1342 (QB), paras 63 to 66.” 37. Clearly, therefore, where a range of meanings is available and where it is possible to light on one meaning which is not defamatory among a series of meanings which are, the court is not obliged to select the non-defamatory meaning. The touchstone remains what would the ordinary reasonable reader consider the words to mean. Simply because it is theoretically possible to come up with a meaning which is not defamatory, the court is not impelled to select that meaning. 38. All of this, of course, emphasises that the primary role of the court is to focus on how the ordinary reasonable reader would construe the words. And this highlights the court’s duty to step aside from a lawyerly analysis and to inhabit the world of the typical reader of a Facebook post. To fulfil that obligation, the court should be particularly conscious of the context in which the statement was made, and it is to that subject that I now turn. Context 39. The starting point is the sixth proposition in Jeynes - that the hypothetical reader should be considered to be a person who would read the publication - and, I would add, react to it in a way that reflected the circumstances in which it was made. It has been suggested that the judgment in Jeynes failed to acknowledge the importance of context - see Bukovsky v Crown Prosecution Service [2017] EWCA Civ 1529; [2018] 4 WLR 13 where at para 13 Simon LJ said that the propositions which were made in that case omitted “an important principle [namely] … the context and circumstances of the publication …”. 40. It may be that the significance of context could have been made more explicitly clear in Jeynes, but it is beyond question that this is a factor of considerable importance. And that the way in which the words are presented is relevant to the interpretation of their meaning - Waterson v Lloyd [2013] EWCA Civ 136; [2013] EMLR 17, para 39. 41. The fact that this was a Facebook post is critical. The advent of the 21st century has brought with it a new class of reader: the social media user. The judge tasked with deciding how a Facebook post or a tweet on Twitter would be interpreted by a social media user must keep in mind the way in which such postings and tweets are made and read. 42. In Monroe v Hopkins [2017] EWHC 433 (QB); [2017] 4 WLR 68, Warby J at para 35 said this about tweets posted on Twitter: “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 https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2019/17.html 10/16