The ongoing row in the United Kingdom over celebrity superinjunctions has taken a turn for the strange, as Twitter users have used the social platform to blurt out the details that aforementioned celebrities paid so dearly to protect. What began with a rogue account revealing the sordid deeds of unscrupulous UK celebs has quickly escalated into legions of users flouting the law by posting the details on their own accounts as a protest against the state of national privacy laws.
So-called “superinjunctions” – the granting of which prevents the press from even reporting that an injunction exists, let alone the people involved – are under increasing criticism in the UK as a means for the wealthy to guard against publication of the details of their bad behaviour. However the reporting of the story and the subsequent Twitter protests have led to a bizarre situation where media can report that superinjunctions exist and that lots of people are talking about them, but still cannot name the people involved or even the names of the Twitter accounts that revealed the information.
The critical mass of injunction-breakers on Twitter has now seen one of the unmentionable celebrities taking legal action against “Twitter Inc and persons unknown” – however the fact that Twitter has no physical presence in the UK would seem to render such actions fairly futile. Lawyer Mark Stephens, who represented Julian Assange during his extradition hearing in London, told the Guardian –
“This is not only scraping the bottom of the barrel, this is beneath the barrel. This [injunction] information is already available on servers outside of this jurisdiction and on website outside this jurisdiction.
“You would have to be a moron in a hurry to suggest to this footballer that he throw good money and publicly excoriate himself yet further.”
A BBC survey conducted over the weekend revealed that a good percentage of the public already know the most high-profile celebrity (A popular football player) attempting to protect themselves, almost universally citing Twitter as the source.
