Friends and fellow citizens, have you heard the good news? Yes, I can’t believe it either; another would-be terrorist has been ousted and prosecuted, another budding bin Laden’s diabolical scheming has been stamped out by the might of Her Majesty’s constabulary and brought to justice! Justice, good citizens, has been done to those who dare to threaten the lives of innocents as a joke. A joke? Well, yes, admittedly it was just a joke, but, I might hasten to add, this was not just any joke, this was a joke published on…the internet!

Ahem. Well, yes, despite all that incredibly biting satire, the prosecution of Paul Chambers is a sad reality. The 27-year-old accountant has just lost his appeal against a conviction that has now found him guilty of sending a "menacing electronic communication" over Twitter. The offending message reads in full: "Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You’ve got a week to get your shit together, otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!"

That this is a joke seems to be too obvious to need pointing out. Even if you don’t happen to be a comedy scholar able to dissect the subtle interplay of self-deprecation, hyperbole and mock self-importance in the tweet, then at least the exclamation marks should be a dead giveaway. Not so for Judge Jacqueline Davis who ruled that the tweet was "menacing in its content and obviously so," claiming that "any ordinary person reading this would see it in that way, and be alarmed." Seeing as the ordinary people that the message was sent to consisted of Chambers’s friends and family one would hope that their first thought was a sit down and a quiet chat with Paul, rather than calling in the anti-terror squads. It is obvious that this trial is as much of a joke as the original tweet; not so funny is Paul’s loss of a job, a permanent criminal record and a £3,000 bill in fines and legal fees.

However, the issue here is larger than just a single misguided judge. A blind and inattentive application of the law will always result in these aberrations. They are rightly decried by the public, but will remain as mostly harmless one-offs. The lurking evil that prompted such a judgement is far more subtle: it is the widening gap between how those in power understand the internet, and how those who use it do. Our generation instinctively understands that although someone’s presence on the internet is partly an extension of their public life, there remains a key difference between what people say online, and who they are in real life: not everything needs to be taken so damned literally. You don’t leap to the phone to confront a friend every time their Facebook status declares that they "Just throttled a baby, woo", or send off heartfelt consolations when they update with "Now I can’t marry Prince William, FML", because you know the conventions – you know it’s a joke. The judge in Paul Chambers’s case seems to exemplify a generation that thinks that sending a tweet such as Paul’s is done with the same seriousness as a threatening and huskily-voiced phone call. These are the same people who wonder how long it will take for their ‘Electronic-Mail’ to get to you through all those pipes. These are the people in power.

The problem extends to the media as well, with po-faced literalism providing good headline fodder for perennially scandalised shit-stirrers such as the Daily Mail. Stephen Fry seems to be a lightning rod for these sorts of thing and was being targeted again on Tuesday because of an outburst against being labelled "opportunistic". And why did he get called this? Because he offered to pay Paul Chambers’s legal fees. The generation gap between those who understand and those who don’t is slowly closing, but until it does, at least we can show solidarity.