NEWS T
What Next for Tweets and Twits?
here’s nothing like a footballing scandal, a super-injunction and a law-suit against a popular social networking site to get the media in a tizz.
This week’s unprecedented events have proven the power of social media and raised the question as to whether such sites should be subject to the same privacy rules that govern traditional media.
There was little doubt that Twitter was the weeks big winner, receiving the kind of global publicity that money cannot buy. Following the revelations, UK traffic to Twitter hit record highs as traffic to the site increased 22% higher with a staggering 12% of all weekly visitors new to the site. But was this at the expense of the privacy of an allegedly philandering footballer, freedom of speech or UK law…or all of the above?
Twitter & Privacy – Cornering the market
In case you’ve been on holiday in some warm, sunny, wifi-less corner of the globe this week; the big news story has involved a post on Twitter naming several celebrities which it alleged had obtained super- injunctions to gag the press from publishing details of their personal lives.
Some, like Jemima Khan, quickly tweeted that the allegation was entirely untrue whilst others including a premier league footballer who the tweet alleged had an extra-marital affair with former Big Brother has- been Imogen Thomas returned to court, demanding that Twitter disclose the details of the 75,000 people who re-tweeted the post.
At that point the mainstream media were in a quandary, trapped between a super-injunction that prevented them naming the footballer and the knowledge that social media was stealing the scoop of the week.
Enter, a bitter, self confessed adultering Liberal- Democrat, John Hemmings who used parliamentary privilege to defy the rule of law by revealing that the footballer who had obtained the super-injunction was the individual named on Twitter- Man Utd veteran and all-round squeaky clean professional, Ryan Giggs.
This in essence leveled the playing field with the
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mainstream media now able to report on the weeks worst kept secret. Hemming it seems made the personal judgment that the footballer had crossed a boundary when seeking for the courts to force Twitter to reveal the details of users who had tweeted and re- tweeted his identity.
The final twist in saga came late on Wednesday afternoon when Twitter’s European head honcho Tony Wang offered up the 75,000 tweeters saying that people who did “bad things” needed to defend themselves.
The Real Deal
The result of this legal fiasco is that the game has changed- not just
for super-injunctions but also
potentially for the privacy and anonymity of social media.
The question now is whether social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook should be viewed as mainstream publishers of content and whether the Ryan Giggs/ Tony Wang interventions will destroy the anonymity behind which ‘citizen journalists’ attempt to hide on social media sites.
What will long outlive the weeks tabloid headlines
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