Twitter To The Rescue (And Wikileaks Too)
via The New York Times, Monday, October 19, 2009
Twitter has recieved both praise and condemnation for it’s contributions to the world of journalism, but this story about it’s hand in stopping a gag order placed on UK newspaper The Guardian certainly falls on the side of praise.
Last month, a British judge declared that information discovered by a Guardian reporter about a corporation named Trafigura had to be kept a secret. Not only that, but even the fact that it had to be kept a secret was also to be kept a secret. In other words, The Guardian had received a gag order, but couldn’t tell anyone that they received it.
So, you know it has to be some pretty juicy information if a British judge is trying to stop one of the UK’s largest newspapers from running a story about it, and it is an event of extreme importance. In August of 2006, Trafigura hired a private contracter to dump 400 tons of toxic waste into landfils in the Ivory Coast near the city of Abidjan. This led to approximatley 85,000 people needing to seek medical attention according to a Times report. And before you ask, yes, it gets worse. A year later in 2007 Trafigura paid the Ivory Coast government $225 million in relation to those events without taking the blame, in addition to a court settlement in Britain awarding another $1,500 per person for 30,000 people.
When reports of this fell into the lap of a Guardian reporter, however, Trafigura’s lawyers demanded that a judge protect it. They claimed that it was “confidential communication with lawyers of the company”, and that the information in the report was now outdated due to later, more reliable testing. Thus, on September 11th a superinjunction was issued to protect the report.
So how does Twitter figure into all of this? Well, despite the superinjunction, website Wikileaks posted the report a mere three days after the injunction. A member of Parlaiment mentioned the Trafigura scientific report, and the Guardian and reporter Alan Rusbridger’s Twitter account made teasing remarks about it. Astute readers picked up on this and discovered the Parlaiment member’s question on a government website and proceeded to spread it all over the internet.
Trafigura attempted to quell the Twitter uproar, but with Wikileaks severs sitting securely on United States soil there was little they could do. An army of Tweeters spurred on by British journalists re-tweeted links to the report constantly, leading to Trafigura’s ultimate release of the report.
While Twitter’s 140 character limit may not be enough for many people to consider it “legitimate” journalism, there is certainly a part of it that has a use in the sharing of news. In a way, Wikileaks and Twitter ultimatley broke this story, which is something that one of Britian’s largest and most respected newspapers was unable to do. It’s pretty amazing to hear that something normally used by millions of teenage girls with an unwarranted sense of self-importance can actually bring a multinational corporation to it’s knees.
