Today there is a lot of fuss about the information on just who has obtained a super injunction to prevent the publication of details of their sordid private life being “published” via a Twitter post. It is probable that the relevant Twitter post is just wrong, but more interesting than that is the reaction of the old media. And an apparent misunderstanding of just what Twitter is.
The old media is complaining that there is effectively two rules – one for them and a quite different one for Twitter users. Well, no it isn’t quite like that. The relevant Twitter user – if he or she is within the jurisdiction of a UK court – is just as guilty of breaching the injunction as an old media company who published the story themselves. In practice, it is not possible to stop a Twitter user publishing before being prevented from doing so – there are just too many Twitter users out there from stopping them.
What will be the effect of this in the medium term? Basically it means that the old media will not be able to make any money at the old meaningless “three people in a bed” story – they will still be able to sell newspapers with real news, but meaningless exposés of someone’s private life with no real public interest will be a lot less likely. With any luck. And good. The news is not made any better by knowing that celebrity X slept with gold-digger Y unless that celebrity is genuinely in public life and making a moral stand on such issues.
The funny thing is that people somehow think that this is a new “problem”. I can remember the Spycatcher issue way back in the day where a publisher was prohibited from publishing the autobiography of a former MI5 agent in England, but the book was widely available elsewhere in the world (including unbelievably in Scotland!). Although the mechanisms were different, the basics are the same – one group of people are not allowed to tell the story, but another are.
Now onto the misunderstanding of Twitter itself. When someone “tweets” some item of news on Twitter, the company itself is not responsible – except to the extent that they are obligated to take it down given appropriate legal action. The person responsible for the content of the tweet is the tweeter themselves. The Twitter company themselves are no more responsible for the content than the newspaper delivery boy is responsible for what is in the newspaper.
Having said that, I believe that super injunctions are wrong. Injunctions to stop a story being published are all very fine, although they are relatively unobtainable for an ordinary person. And yes ordinary people do sometimes appear in news stories. But preventing the fact of an injunction stopping a story being published is wrong.