Telegram Channel Admin Jailed For Three Years

The District Court on Tuesday sentenced a 26-year-old woman who helped run a Telegram channel during anti-government protests in 2019 to three years in jail, for conspiring to destroy property and inciting people to injure others.

Hui Pui-yee had pleaded guilty to the two offences, and her sentences will run concurrently. Her jail term had been reduced to three years because of her guilty pleas, and after the court heard that Hui had suffered from severe depression and had no criminal record.

Hui’s lawyer had argued that she had taken a passive role in the channel, by helping to filter out personal information and had only asked people to “bomb” others’ phones with messages.

But Judge Frankie Yiu said the offences were serious, and messages posted in the channel were spread to tens of thousands of channel members in a short period of time.

Yiu said even though there was no evidence showing Hui had publicised messages instructing others how to create grenades and bombs, others had. This could have created consequences that are “difficult to imagine”.

He added that Hui, as one of the channel’s administrators, could have deleted or amended those messages, but she did not and instead allowed hate speech towards the government and police to spread.