After a long weekend of work (a ridiculous 18 hours on my feet) I've turned to my laptop and google-news to find out the days drama. Astonishingly what my trusty news sources report is that twitters causing quite a squawk on the public agenda.
One of the fun aspects of Twitter is that you can pretend to be someone else-or just make a name up for yourself-and express your true feelings about so very many things.
However, if your feelings happen to be seen as libelous, you might now have a problem. Cough-cough: Imogen Thomas.
Should you have missed seeing Giggs' Manchester United humiliated by Barcelona in yesterday's European Champions League Final, you might also have missed that Giggs reportedly tried to sue thousands of tweeters who revealed some slightly humiliating information about him.
Giggs is one of many wealthy-but, perhaps, not ultimately wise-British people who took out a so-called superinjunction preventing a woman from publicly revealing details of a personal relationship with the married player. What resulted was that thousands of tweeters-some famous, some not--took to Twitter to reveal his name, until, ultimately, a member of the U.K. parliament decided to make it official by standing up and blurting it ou tloud. (Well, thats MPs for you.)
The question is whether Giggs-and anyone else who feels that they have been illegally besmirched on Twitter-will now go through with the idea of simultaneously suing tens of thousands of people?
Again- South Tyneside Council says Twitter has released information after it acted in a US court to identify a Twitter user behind allegedly libellous statements. The council went to court in California after three councillors and an official complained they were libelled in a blog called "Mr Monkey" (sounds dubious enough).
The Mr Monkey blog has made a number of accusations against the council's Labour leader Iain Malcolm, as well as David Potts, the former Conservative leader who now serves as an Independent councillor, Labour councillor Anne Walsh, and Rick O'Farrell, the council's head of enterprise and regeneration.
These aren't the only flaws to the twitter news today- Only Way is Essex star; Chloe Sims, revealed she cried over critical Twitter posts she read on the micro-blogging site, which criticised her for being 'false' over her fake boobs and facial plastic surgery.
Not alone in the abuse-Coronation Street star Shobna Gulati was left shaken up after being bombarded with vile racist abuse on Twitter. And New York City Democratic Congressman Anthony Weiner reportedly says that a nefarious hacker infiltrated his social network's undercarriage and posted a photo with..um..little discretion shall we say...
But I think these examples in the news aren't a fair depiction of the usual use of twitter- to stalk celebs and follow our friends that we cant be with for now. And as the United Kingdom struggles to deal with the conflict between freedom of speech and the laws on privacy, privacy will innately win. Because the one is more potent than the other, and as privacy is seemingly only a mechanism for the wealthy to invoke, the rest of us have to face the fact that freedom of speech comes second to the injunction-ridden culture we have found ourselves in.
-ZB
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