facebook rss twitter

Super injunctions are Twitter gold

by Scott Bicheno on 11 May 2011, 16:08

Tags: Twitter

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qa5vb

Add to My Vault: x

Super-tweets

Hitwise has announced that Monday was the biggest week on record for Twitter traffic in the UK, with the previous spike having presumably been Bin Laden's killing.

The reason for this spike was the supposed tweeting of six celebrity scandals, the details of which were being kept out of the public domain by a supposed ‘super injunction'.

Since UK privacy law is apparently being made up on the hoof, we don't dare publish a link to the Twitter account in question, but it has spawned the Hashtag #superinjunction, and we're sure you can find all you need from that, as well as a flood of spoofs and opportunistic commercial/malicious tweets. As ever, beware of clicking on links.

Now at least one of the six tweets, which have not since been added to, have been refuted, and none of them have been substantiated. So they need to be taken with a massive pinch of salt and are mostly trivial anyway.

 

 

The sole significance of these tweets is that they appear to test ability of our legal system to enforce super injunctions, which not only prevent anyone from reporting on the matter in question, they also make it illegal to report that you've been banned from reporting.

There is some sound reasoning behind the concept of the super injunction. If a judge has ruled that a given matter shouldn't be in the public domain, the reporting of that ruling will itself make the matter public and thus defeat the object of it. However, it has long been felt that super injunctions are being used predominantly to prevent embarrassing gossip from getting into the papers, and that is a flimsy reason for restricting freedom of speech.

It's so easy to set up an anonymous Twitter account that it's hard to see how such an apparent breach of a super injunction can possibly be prosecuted. So while major publishers have rightly to be wary of the such judgements, as long as the details can find their way onto Twitter the efficacy and credibility of the super injunction seems fatally undermined.

And the papers have, of course, jumped all over it. The Sun wasted little time in publishing as much detail as it thought it could get away with, while the Independent opined that, in the Twitter era, privacy is finished.

Meanwhile we were reminded that this is hardly a new phenomenon; with Trafigura having secured a super-injunction back in 2009 that even prevented an MP raising the matter in the House of Commons. The block was dropped when details of the case spread so rapidly on Twitter as to effectively make it public knowledge.

There have been some other cases this week that show how the Internet is leading to frequent revisions of privacy law and the constant resetting of precedent. Max Mosely lost his case to force media to pre-warn (presumably to allow them time to apply for a super-injunction) individuals before publishing details on their private lives, while the PCC told off the Telegraph for entrapping some Lib Dem MPs, but only over the semantics of ‘public interest' and the punishment seems to have been minimal.

The news media is under more pressure than ever to deliver scoops and details of the private lives of public figures will always be fertile ground. For this reason there should be boundaries, and wrecking people's lives in order to sell a few more papers can't always be defended by the label of public interest. But the Internet, and Twitter in particular, make it increasingly unlikely that individuals can successfully manipulate the legal system to prevent their own indiscretions becoming public.

 



HEXUS Forums :: 10 Comments

Login with Forum Account

Don't have an account? Register today!
The issue here is not the allegations themselves but that these so-called super injunctions even exist. There are things that the public should know, necessity or not. For every ten stories of a famous person being found naked wandering around Kempton Park wearing a sheepskin rug and nothing else that gets buried, there's one story about oil traders dumping toxic waste that's covered up too.

For every positive aspect of “anonymous” publishing there's going to be a huge number of negative ones:-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/7626547/Man-who-lied-about-James-Bulger-killer-on-Facebook-sentenced.html
amdavies
The issue here is not the allegations themselves but that these so-called super injunctions even exist. There are things that the public should know, necessity or not. For every ten stories of a famous person being found naked wandering around Kempton Park wearing a sheepskin rug and nothing else that gets buried, there's one story about oil traders dumping toxic waste that's covered up too.
What ever happened with that story, there was a big ho ha ha, but nothing came of it?

Was there actually any evidence of wrong doing? I saw lots of supposition in very disreputable sources thou, so I'm guessing no smoke without fire and all that…. Oh wait, its because of retards who think that way we need super injunctions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_C%C3%B4te_d%27Ivoire_toxic_waste_dump

Short version seems to be: It happened, the company involved agreed that it happened but they don't accept that they did it on purpose.
Always the way, isn't it? Settling without admitting liability… part of wishes it was banned, it's such a pathetic back-road out of everything.

I know in many ways it's a legal quirk, but I dislike most of the legal quirks relating to large sums of money moving from one group to another to make a problem go away.
However, it has long been felt that super injunctions are being used predominantly to prevent embarrassing gossip from getting into the papers, and that is a flimsy reason for restricting freedom of speech.

How would you like it if every person you met had a rundown on all your indiscretions, every little sordid thing you had ever done and some extra lies/embellishments on top? People, including celebrities are entitled to a private life, the papers have no place printing about who shagged who. Affairs happen, all the time, all over the place, most of these “journalists” have probably had one themselves, yet think it's perfectly OK to tear down some celeb in order to create some fake moral outrage and sell a few papers.

"But we need to know what our role models are doing, think of the kids" - NO! If the paper's didn't print that semi-accurate tittle-tattle then the kids wouldn't be corrupted thinking footballer X was doing it so they can as well, they'd carry on thinking he was a heroic sportsman and just wish to play like him. Sometimes not knowing something about someone is better.

Super-injunctions have a place - controlling the newspapers and their runaway violations of privacy. So long as when it is in the public interest - i.e. corrupt politicians and taking bribes etc they are not granted then democracy survives. To be honest I also fail to see how knowledge of a politician having an affair is important - does the fact he boned his secretary affect his ability to do his job? Doubt it, unless he's the “Minister for Morality and No Boning At Work”.