The power of Twitter

16th October 2009 by Jason C. Filed under: Blogging

The other day, the Guardian reported that it had been gagged from reporting on a parliamentary question, to be asked in the commons. It couldn’t say who had issued the “gagging order” (a.k.a. a “super injunction”), why it had been issued, and could only sneak out the fact that it existed because it was about parliamentary business.

This went out on a few high profile blogs, and spread from there. Eventually, after a few hours, the reason for the gag came out – I read about it first on Twitter. It was about a company that had dumped toxic waste off the Ivory Coast. Within hours, the name of the company and their solicitors (Trafigura and Carter-Ruck, respectively) were some of the most used words on Twitter. The culmination of all this attention was that Carter-Ruck withdrew their injunction, because of the huge publicity it was bringing to the story.

And that is the story of how Twitter broke a super-injunction. You can read a more full story here with a very nice visualisation of the story as it developed. Not bad considering most of the stuff on Twitter is about what some stranger’s cat’s had for dinner.