May
22
Super-injunctions: Imogen Thomas and her mystery footballer
Twitter mentions of the mystery footballer on Friday. Image: guardian.co.uk
Super-injunctions.
They have been on any editor’s agenda for months, and I doubt they are going to fade any time soon as the conclusion of the case involving the anonymous Premier League footballer and Z-list celebrity Imogen Thomas comes to a climax.
Today, a Scottish Sunday newspaper published a picture of the mystery footballer on the front page, with a black ‘CENSORED’ line across his eyes, and the following strapline:
Everyone knows that this is the footballer accused of using the courts to keep allegations of a sexual affair secret. But we weren’t supposed to tell you that…
The move by the Scottish newspaper may be seen as bold, but they made the decision with a degree of security.
An explanatory article on The Spectators‘ website today, reads:
Careless of CTB’s (the mystery footballer) lawyers to forget to apply for an interdict at the Court of Session in Edinburgh. All Scottish papers have therefore been free to publish these details.
The latest developments raise a serious question, if the Scottish newspaper is distributed south of the border – which given the number of images shared on Twitter by users in England, I’d imagine so – what consequences will they face?
The second issue for me is the suing of Twitter.
While information is shared openly and accessed easily on Twitter, could the same be said of Facebook?
Over the course of the last week, my Facebook news feed has been inundated with comments relating to the super-injunction.
With much of the nation unaware of the dangers of non-existent privacy settings it is alarmingly easy to see who has mentioned the case.
Various jokes, comments and observations have been made and a quick search of the alleged footballer’s name on a site such as Kurrently or OpenBook shows that Twitter is not alone.
Consider Facebook’s terms and conditions, which can be found here, under section 5 entitled ‘protecting other peoples’ rights’:
We respect other people’s rights, and expect you to do the same.
- You will not post content or take any action on Facebook that infringes or violates someone else’s rights or otherwise violates the law.
So, to what extent would a post such as the one below (a quick search on either of the search tools above give you a random person such as this) be in breach of the injunction?
Interestingly, another website that appears to be in breach of the order, is Wikipedia, with the footballer allegedly in question’s page having an interesting additional section added this morning.
To what extent is Twitter taking the flak for breaching this order when it appears other sites are operating in no better manner?
