Ryan Gigg’s story about Twitter proves the challenge that we are facing in the legal framework. Although Gigg’s phoned his lawyer to stop information coming out on him in the attempt to protect his family, news still escalated around Twitter, and stories were still published in newspapers around the world and in Scotland.
When Gigg’s tried to stop the stream of gossip international laws made it difficult to do so as Twitter has no presence within the UK. What this means is that we are moving away from an era of print media and publishers (which could withhold information on celebrities with super injuctions) to a modern day era where we have to believe all types of different shapes and colours of opinion.
This is the challenge we are facing. Everyone can be a publisher and how successful they are depends on what they write. Everyone has a voice within the social sphere so it is difficult for the law to determine if tweeters are breaching the court orders or if in fact they are just generating a conversation?
It has become so difficult for the law to move quickly enough and keep up with online developments to resolve the cases involved with it, that instead of advising celebrities to take out a super injunction and guarantee amenity, they should advise PR expertise to help generate good news. We cannot stop people talking.
Since the London riots, there has been adequate legislation put into place to address the challenges that are coming out, but the main challenge seems to be the Judiciary. They are not literate enough to understand Twitter and they do not know when to treat it as a joke or as a serious issue.
What we as publishers should consider is that we are in a generation where we need to stay in-the-know. If the UK government had adopted the Egypt internet censorship legislation during the riots would we have been happy? The answer is probably not.
All of us rely upon citizen journalism and information from various sources that we need freedom of speech on the internet.
However, as Twitter continues to grow internationally, the UK government have decided to filter tweets, in order to withhold content from users in specific countries. What do you think about filtering tweets? Do you think this regulation causes underlying concern for freedom of speech?
