Over the last few days there have been some interesting things going on with Twitter and a certain footballer. Essentially this footballer has requested information from Twitter about a twitter user that has posted personal information about him. This may have been done to try and circumvent a “super injunction” and thus prompted the action.
It isn’t the rights or wrongs of the story that I find interesting it is the reaction of Twitter users who promptly on a large scale tweeted the name of the footballer, or at least of the footballer they thought was responsible. This kind of action happens on a regular basis but this one was in direct response to their feelings about a legal approach to twitter. It was in their eyes are defense of their freedom of speech.
It seems to me that this footballer underestimated the power of twitter and its ilk to have significant effect on the way people think. What the he sought to do by bringing this action to Twitter was to prevent the twitter rumours from becoming mud that sticks. What he actually achieved was ensuring that the mud did indeed stick, whilst at the same time his action brings suspicion that he was actually trying to cover up a guilty act. The thing is that if he was indeed trying to unearth a news paper that was seeking to use twitter to get around a “super injunction” he would almost certainly have failed. It is highly unlikely that they would have planted such a tweet from their own account and would have done it from an internet cafe because they would have known they were breaking the law. This would have made them untraceable.
The concern people have here is that the masses on twitter et al can be manipulated by a few individuals for their own purposes. It is a danger well understood by the more controlling governments of this world and by the newspaper moguls that have become accustomed to functioning in that role. I suspect it will not be long before all governments seek to act against this is some way. The most likely will be that laws will be passed that ensure that your genuine identity is attached to all such comment. This will mean that any such postings could accurately be tracked and that posters would be responsible for their comments. This will reduce the number of law abiding citizens from contributing as they will fear the repercussions. The less law abiding, however, will continue do this through fake or hijacked identities. This will gain them more believability in doing so as they will be assumed to be genuine people, but the amplification of the subject by enraged law abiding citizens will be reduced. Funny thing is the only way to effectively implement this kind of control will be through some kind of active identity card system...
For the meantime if your company becomes the target of something like this on twitter, think really carefully about whether should attempt to stifle the issue using legal action. If you are truly not guilty you would be better advised to ride out the storm. If you are guilty then you are going to have to be honest and hope a full apology will be accepted.
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