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In an historic case of internet people power, Twitter users were able to bypass lawyers attempts in Britain to gag the Guardian newspaper’s coverage of a major scandal. We talk with writer and fundraiser Richard Wilson who started the Twitter feed.
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MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. Earlier this week, Twitter trumped the news media again. It also trumped a British court. The court had placed an injunction Britain’s “Guardian” Newspaper. The Guardian was prohibited from reporting on a particular issue should it be raised in Parliament. The issue concerned Trafigura, a multi-national oil company accused of dumping waste at various sites in Ivory Coast. Well, the issue was raised in Parliament, and the Guardian did not report on it, but word did get out in no small part due to Humans Rights Campaigner Richard Wilson.
RICHARD WILSON: I was just posturing around at home and I was sat at my laptop and happened to be looking at Twitter, and I saw this very shocking message from the editor of the Guardian saying that the Guardian had been banned from opposing a Parliamentary question, which to my knowledge nothing like that had ever happened for probably a couple hundred years. So it was quite a shocking thing. So I immediately got Googling and tried to figure out what was this Parliamentary question that had they had been forbidden from reporting. And it didn’t take me very long to find it because they’d given us the name of the law firm Carter-Ruck. And there was only really one question that it could have been once I looked at the website. Ironically, it was to do with Carter-Ruck’s attempts to suppress freedom of speech around a rather controversial oil company called Trafigura. As soon as I saw that question, I copied the text of the question and published it in a few short tweaks on Twitter and literally within minutes I saw that hundreds of other people were repeating that message and passing it on and the gag was on its way to being overturned.
WERMAN: So clear something up for me. I mean, was there kind of no knowledge of this gag order?
WILSON: There was no knowledge of it until the Guardian reported it. That’s one of the scary things, and as it happens …
WERMAN: Does that mean there was a gag order on the gag order?
WILSON: There was a gag order on the gag order. And I don’t know how the legal system works in the U.S., but this is quite an odd phenomenon because actually for all we know there could be other gag orders on gag orders, and we just wouldn’t know about it because the media has been forbidden even to say that some issue or other has been served with an injunction.
WERMAN: And so what ended up happening was while the gag order applied to the media, it did not apply to Parliament and you were then basically reiterating what Parliament had said, which was outside the gag order, is that right?
WILSON: Actually, I’ve checked it out and I think technically I probably was in contempt of court because the gag order as it had been applied had said you can’t report what’s being said in Parliament, and I was reporting what had been said in Parliament along with all these thousands of other Twitter users.
WERMAN: So what happens now? Does this make the gag order null and void or are you going to have to face some legal proceedings because you might be in contempt?
WILSON: The outrage that came out on Twitter and the way that the information spread gained such a high profile that midway through the following day the law firm backed down and decided not to contest the Guardian’s attempt to get the gag overturned. So thanks to a combination of different factors, arguably Twitter being one of them, we can now talk about that Parliamentary question.
WERMAN: Now, you work also part-time for Amnesty International. Is this kind of case or this case specifically one that you and Amnesty are working on right now?
WILSON: I don’t represent Amnesty. I work as a fundraiser for Amnesty and I was really completely doing this in a personal capacity. Amnesty obviously has been involved in the case and that’s one of the reasons that I’m familiar with the details, but I’m not involved in any sort of official thing for Amnesty.
WERMAN: Richard Wilson a Human Rights Campaigner who started this Twitter uprising in the U.K. Thanks for talking to us.
WILSON: Thank you.
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