Perhaps you read this week a story about a novel lawsuit recently filed against Twitter-- novel for a couple of reasons. First, the person who filed the lawsuit was identified only by his initials (somewhat odd). And second, the lawsuit not only names Twitter itself as a defendant, but also several hundred (or thousand) of its members. And what, pray tell, egregious act did all these people allegedly commit? They all talked about the fact that they weren’t supposed to talk about person who eventually filed the lawsuit. And they talked about why they weren’t supposed to talk about him. And they used Twitter to do it. Confused? Read on.
Here’s the story: For whatever reason, judges in Britain have recently started to grant the rich and famous a thing called a “super injunction”—an umbrella legal injunction that forbids publications from mentioning a person with respect to some scandal or allegation, or even to disclose that such a super-injunction exists (kind of like “double-secret probation,” I suppose). Ostensibly, these exist as a means to protect the privacy of notable individuals. Apparently there have been a few dozen of these things issued in the last couple of years, and (quite predictably) news organizations in England don’t like them much. Especially news organizations that like to sell newspapers full of salacious gossip and rumors (which as far as I can tell are pretty much all of them these days…but that was another blog entry).
Unfortunately, there’s this thing called the “internet,” and it apparently is “world wide,” which of course presents some issues with respect to these super-injunctions that are valid only in England. When word got out that a well-known soccer star was behind this injunction, Twitter members from all over the world started tweeting about the injunction, as well as the alleged misbehavior that precipitated it. (I say “well known” because he is apparently well known in England and possibly soccer circles, but I suspect most Americans have never heard of him—and no I’m not going to reveal his name…there’s also this thing called “Google” and you can look it up on your own in a heartbeat if you are the slightest bit interested. No word yet if Google has been sued as well.)
So the person behind the super-injunctions filed a lawsuit in England against Twitter (not a company headquartered in England) and “persons unknown responsible for the publication of information on the Twitter accounts” (and who knows where all of them live). Well you can imagine the reaction. If the super-injunction didn’t manage to keep the information off the internet, the lawsuit only served to throw gasoline on the fire. Twitter users all over the world with no interest in either the soccer player or the alleged incident he was involved in started tweeting about it in droves. At one point, so many people were talking about it that the soccer player’s name was a trending topic on Twitter.
This is an interesting social phenomenon. It seems that the more that people are told they can’t talk about a subject, the more they apparently want to. I suspect that even now, some marketing genius is trying to figure out how to get a super-injunction to keep people from mentioning a brand name they represent, in the hopes that by prohibiting mention of it they can drive brand recognition through the roof.
The odd thing is, it just might work.
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