The week the little bird roared…

As people still wonder whether Twitter is really ‘all that’ and if it really does have much power, the past two weeks have proven that if you get on the wrong side of it, you’ll be taken down in flames…

If you’ve been on the moon for the last few years and you haven’t heard of Twitter, I’ll just enlighten you. It’s a platform that allows you to type in a 140 character message that will then get seen by all your ‘followers’. The more ‘followers’ you have, the more people will see it and the more influence you have. Easy.

Really, that’s it. It’s a way of sending messages to people who want to read what you say. The interface is a small text box where you type what you want to say. When you type it, people will read it and you can move along and get on with your day.

That little box has turned out to be pretty darn powerful.

Two weeks ago, a law firm called Carter-Ruck whacked a super-injunction on the Guardian to stop it running a story that would be extremely damaging to their client, Trafigura. It appears that Trafigura had been dumping toxic waste off the Ivory Coast and they didn’t want this little, errm, problem, being leaked.

However, questions were being asked in parliament and the Guardian was going to report this so out comes the super-injunction. Now, I had to read up on this, but a super-injunction is a way of not only stopping the reporting of an event but also stopping the reporting of the stopping of the reporting of the event.

According to the injunction, the Guardian couldn’t even say that they had been stopped from reporting on the issue.

Private Eye decide it was going to run it anyway because this was an obvious affront to freedom of speech and so a war broke out. The indignation this caused actually went stellar on Twitter with the result that the service was brought to its knees.

Eventually, Carter-Ruck yielded and the injunction was lifted as their only other option was to sue everyone who had tweeted about it. That’s a lot of lawsuits and they realised it couldn’t happen and that they were in fact causing more harm than good.

Chalk one up for Twitter, then. Result for democracy.

OK, so now its quiet for a bit until the death of Stephen Gately, the outwardly gay member of Boyzone who died after a night out.

There’s the general outpouring of grief and a consensus in the press that Gately was a lovely chap who really didn’t deserve to die so young. Who does?

So then the Daily Mail, that paragon of virtuous reporting prints an article by Jan Moir. I’d never heard of Jan Moir and I’m sure many people hadn’t, but she produced an article that even by the Mail’s pretty low standards indulges in such a level of barrel scraping, conjecture and outward homophobia that you could hear the Internet gasp.

This hit the news shops on Friday morning. By Friday afternoon the Press Complaints Commission had received more complaints about that one article than it had received in the last five years. By the end of the weekend there had been over 22 thousand complaints.

This was the outraged many deciding that ‘enough is enough’ and eventually the PCC had to do something, so they’ve asked the Mail to comment.

Not much, but it’s a start.

Of course the obvious Daily Mail apologists have spouted the usual “she’s only saying what we’re thinking” – to which the level headed amongst us would simply say “please stop talking to me you hateful creature”. There are also those that think that this was an ‘orchestrated’ campaign against Jan Moir, a particularly dumb claim but an obvious one if you know nothing about social media.

Free speech means people like Jan Moir can say what they want to say and the Daily Mail has every right to publish it. Twitter and social media in general makes sure that bigoted, racist, homophobic or just generally nasty comment doesn’t go without being challenged. This is democracy, this is the ultimate free speech.

But what does this say about business? It hasn’t happened yet, but what if someone decided to trash Pepsi? Or Coke? What if somebody found out something about a big, national brand that up until now had been hidden behind another super-injunction?

Twitter is big and its getting bigger. Twitter means you can’t simply get away with things any more and slap an injunction to stop people saying things. You’re fighting against millions of people  world-wide, people who wield real power.

You’d better learn about Twitter pretty darn soon, before it learns about you.