Twitter came into its own for journalists in June this year, when it became the primary way to get news out of Iran during the aftermath of the election following a press ban. A less dramatic, but significant, example of this happened today in the UK.

The Guardian newspaper was gagged from reporting a question to be asked in Parliament later this week, on legal grounds which appeared to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights. The question related to press freedom in light of injunctions that included the dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast by a giant multinational corporation, as reported by BBC Newsnight in May (they are themselved now being threatened with legal action).

The press injunction was a ’super injunction’, meaning that they couldn’t even tell anyone they had been injuncted or by whom. A worrying legal trend, used by big bad corporations who don’t want people to think they are big bad corporations.

Fortunately, we now have the Internet. Political bloggers have a huge impact on public debate today. The Parliamentary question could be found in full on Guido Fawkes’ Blog last night. And, while traditional news media are still injuncted from reporting the contents of something called the Minton Report, you can find as much mind-numbing detail about it as you can handle, with a simple web search. If you want.

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger tweeted about it today, before appearing in court, and was re-tweeted by Stephen Fry to his 829,207 followers. Once that happened, it’s not surprising that the top three trending topics this morning related to the story. And lawyers Carter-Ruck dropped their injunction.

Rusbridger said on Channel 4 News earlier this evening: “The effect of Twittering… was a PR disaster for Trafigura – if they were trying to keep it secret, suddenly they had the whole blogosphere on their case, and I imagine their PR advisers said ‘for heaven’s sake, this is  causing endless pain, let’s just stop it.’”

The message is clear. It is more difficult to restrain free speech in the age of the Internet than ever before. Wherever the freedom of the press is threatened, from Ahmadinejad’s Iran, to Berlusconi’s Italy, to Brown’s Britain; whether political or corporate; the Internet – particularly the ‘real time web’ – fills the void. The use of injunctions to prevent corporate embarrassment doesn’t work in a world where the culture of top-down publishing has been replaced by mass participation in social media sites. You may injunct the Guardian or sue Newsnight – but you can’t silence us all.

In fact, it has the opposite effect to what you intend: most of us would have been unaware of this Parliamentary question, fascinated as we are – again (yawn) – by MP’s expenses this week. But now the Twittersphere is agog.

People on Twitter are suspicious of big corporations, especially when they behave in a heavy-handed way. We saw a smaller example of this in the summer, when Chicago-based Horizon Realty tried to sue a tenant for $50,000 over a single tweet that portrayed them in a bad light. The company desribed themselves as a “…a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.” Oh dear. We don’t like that at all on Twitter. The resulting backlash propelled Horizon to the top trending topic, and they apologised, but with their reputation damaged perhaps somewhat more than by the orignal tweet.

As Techcrunch Europe said this evening: “There’s nowhere to hide if your name trends on Twitter. Is there, Trafigura?”

Related articles

• The Day Twitter Destroyed a Gagging Order (onemanandhisblog.com)
• Note to Trafigura/Carter Ruck: you can’t suppress Twitter (blogherald.com)
• Guardian gagged from reporting parliament (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
• Twitter users undermine attempt to gag UK media (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Did the Guardian use Twitter as a weapon of free speech? (inquisitr.com)