Events in the last 24 hours alone, during which Jemima Khan has been forced to deny that she has taken out a super-injunction after thousands of tweets and re-tweets wrongly said the contrary, shows just how out of step the British judiciary and authorities are.
In an age which is fast-becoming defined by the power of internet, judges and Parliament alike risk ignoring the power of the civilian’s voice online at their peril.
Existence of the super-injunction was exposed when it was referred to in a parliamentary question; the principle of parliamentary privilege allows MPs to speak freely without fear of being prosecuted for contempt of court.
While newspapers refrained from reporting the question, Twitter users picked up on the story and eventually Trafigura's legal firm Carter-Ruck withdrew its opposition to the reporting of proceedings.
Twitter has come to prominence once again with the latest round of super-injunctions, as users claim to name the celebrities alleged to have taken out gagging orders.
These latest injunctions have been widely dubbed as 'super', but they are not super-injunctions in the traditional sense – their existence can be revealed and certain details of each case can be reported.
Is there any legal redress? Publishing such details may be regarded as contempt of court and the legal system is starting to get to grips with publication on the web.
Recently, the High Court convicted the Daily Mail and the Sun of contempt of court for publishing on their websites a photograph of a man toting a gun during a criminal trial.
According to the UK Human Rights blog, it was the first such case of contempt relating to an online publication and carried the ominous warning that "instant news requires instant and effective protection for the integrity of a criminal trial.
Only at the end of last week, it came to light that journalism watchdog, the Press Complaints Commission (PCC), is looking into regulating journalists’ and newspapers’ Twitter feeds. This is so that it can try and better define what content should be judged on the same legal terms as a newspaper’s editorial content.
With an average of 140 million tweets and re-tweets posted a day, the PCC certainly has a huge job ahead if monitoring media Twitter feeds becomes part of its remit, as do the authorities when they finally wake up to the sheer power of the web.
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