Sideways News

Not everyone had heard of international oil company Trafigura and its toxic-waste dumping incident on the Ivory Coast in August 2006. That is until Carter Ruck, the company's lawyers, attempted a media gag.

The super-injunction became a super-subversion, as social media caused Carter Ruck’s attempts to keep the existence of a document under wraps to spectacularly backfire.

The Minton Report
On 11th September, libel firm Carter Ruck went to court to prevent the Guardian Newspaper from publishing details of the Minton Report, commissioned by Trafigura in 2006 and detailing the oil company’s toxic-waste dumping incident in Africa.

The injunction was itself declared a secret – hence the super-injunction. The Guardian, which contested the action, was unable to even tell its readers it had been injuncted.

On Monday 19th October, the paper learned that Paul Farrelly (MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme) had tabled a parliamentary question revealing the injunction’s existence. Unable to report this, the Guardian ran a frontpage story saying they had been prevented from publishing the proceedings of parliament.

Social networks instantly got to work; within 12 hours, thousands of people knew about the Minton Report and Trafigura became one of the most-searched terms on the internet.

Exposed by new media, Carter Ruck dropped legal proceedings against The Guardian.

An assault on free speech
Social media may have triumphed, but the attempt to gag the press has set alarm bells ringing.

John Kampfner, chairman of freedom of speech organisation Index on Censorship, described the super-injunction as part of the "unremitting assault on freedom of speech in the UK".

"The episode should galvanise MPs to see the bigger picture – the seemingly inexorable march towards greater censorship and self-censorship in the UK,” he wrote.

MPs gathered for an emergency debate on Wednesday 21st October over the right to report parliamentary proceedings – sacrosanct since the 18th century. However, despite parliament’s recognition of the implications of a gagging order such as this one, Kampfner writes of the serious threat to “strong, investigative journalism” that a combination of zealous law firms, cash-poor news organisations and a media-critical general public produce.

Defiance in the blogosphere
So can we trust social media – the voice of the blogging public – over conventional news sources? Certainly, as Kampfner recognises, there is a mood of defiance in the blogosphere. The internet, increasingly, cannot be gagged.

However, as authors of the blog “A very public socialist” recognise, although social media may be able to force certain items onto the news agenda, we are still dependent on our political structures to implicate change.

Twitter may have triumphed over Trafigura and a pernicious attempt to restrict freedom of speech but we’re still reliant on politics for progression.

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