Soccer star going after Twitter users

by Matt Brann | 25th May 2011

Photo from Flickr

Across the pond, there’s a big fuss over something called “super injunctions,” which as an American, I had never heard of until stumbling across a story on the International Journal of Sport Finance blog.

In short, a super injunction is a legal tactic in England that is, to quote Tech Crunch Europe,

“when someone rich (these things are very expensive) takes out an injunction on the press that not only stops them [from] reporting something but also stops them [from] reporting that the injunction even exists.”

You think Tiger Woods would have paid any price to have a super injunction imposed in November 2009? That’s exactly what Manchester United soccer star Ryan Giggs allegedly did, obtaining a super injunction in order to prevent the English press from revealing information about an affair.

But the super injunction didn’t stop Twitter users from discussing Giggs’ personal affairs, which led to Giggs suing Twitter and attempting to obtain information on approximately 75,000 of its users for violating the super injunction. It’s a story that has consumed England.

There’s a litany of issues I have with this story but I’ll just focus on three questions:

• Why does England think it’s a legally sound principle to allow people to pay a large fee in order to prevent the press from reporting information? As a journalist for more than a decade, I’m absolutely baffled why the UK press hasn’t fought this legal practice until the law was changed. Now, though, it appears some are starting to put up that fight.

• Since Twitter is based in San Francisco, why would anyone expect the social network site to follow UK laws? It appears, however, as though Twitter may release information on UK users who “violated” the super injunction. And I put violated in quotes because that leads me to my third question.

• Since super injunctions are directed toward the press, why is Twitter even being sued? Twitter is certainly not a media organization and its users are not members of the media, and super injunctions are directed toward the UK media, not the public. It could be argued that since journalists often use Twitter to report quick news hitters on their accounts that Twitter is a news outlet, but that’s a far stretch.

Several in the UK media are actually siding with the English courts. In fact, a columnist for The Guardian went just a wee bit overboard when he wrote the following:

“Unless we decide to become an anarchistic society, Facebook and Twitter must be reeled in.”

Fortunately, most in the media and public find this story totally absurd.

One Response to “Soccer star going after Twitter users”

  1. Barney Willis

    Jun 5th, 2011 :

    Look the issue with super injunctions is actually more to do with a person’s right to privacy as protected under the European Convention on Human Rights. The UK tabloid press is incredibly intrusive into people’s lives. Newspapers and websites try to claim that reporting someone’s alleged infidelity is in the public interest in the knowledge that the general public at large is ever increasingly voyeuristic and will buy the publication. Nowadays journalists have very little sense of responsibility or proportion and think just because they found some titillating gossip that it should be published immediately no matter what the consequences. The Internet has made this worse with every tom, dick and harry calling themselves journalists debasing what was once a profession where people were mindful of their responsibilities. So instead of stories of national and international importance being discussed and probed the media is dominating with gossip about celebrities. The terms freedom of the press and public interest have been bastardised by the media just so they can go around and publish what the hell they want without consequence.

    By the way twitter is most definitely a form of media.