Twitter triumphed last week in a media battle for free speech. I’m sure you’re now familiar with the Trafigura story, but if not here’s a quick recap.
Trafigura are an oil trading company accused of illegally dumping toxic waste off the Ivory Coast. In a desperate attempt to save face they instructed their lawyers, the firm Carter-Ruck, to impose a super injunction (an injunction on an injunction so said media outlet can’t publicly announce that it can’t publicly announce something) on the Guardian newspaper (who initially broke the story). And so they could not publicly report their findings or the parliamentary goings-on in regards to the Trafigura toxic issue.
However you can’t hold down social media and the collective conscience of the internet, soon the blogosphere was buzzing with the story but of course at that point, no one knew exactly what the story was, exactly why the Guardian had been gagged or what exactly was being discussed in parliament. Twitter soon became the platform on which people were communicating in order to solve this puzzle.
Richard Wilson, a human rights activist based in London was one of the first of the Twitterati to reveal the full story after he discovered Carter-Ruck were trying to silence the Guardian, from a message posted on the social media site. He went on to scour the web and dig a little deeper, quickly finding out that the gag related to questions raised about Trafigura, and not long after that he found and published the actual text of the questions from the website of the parliamentary order papers where they publish all the questions raised in parliament.
A few tweets later and others online, including the political blogger Guido Fawkes who wrote a post on the same subject, had all cracked the mystery and successfully worked out who had applied the super-injunction on the Guardian and the fact that it was on behalf of Trafigura due to their toxic dumping.
Over the last 12 months Twitter has proved again and again its worth as a serious tool for breaking news, in June with the disputed Iranian elections and after the Mumbai terrorist attacks last November. It shows that Twitter and other social media are so much more than just sharing banal snippets of users’ daily routines, and that they can actually be implemented as socio-political instruments for communication and organisation. Power to the people indeed.
