A legal crisis in 140 characters

 

Celebrity gagging orders revealed on Twitter. 50,000 followers. Lawyers unable to remove tweets. Is this the end of the #superinjunction?

By Ian Burrell, Media Editor

In what has been described as the "Spycatcher moment" of the internet era, a single user of Twitter has brought the culture of the super-injunction to its knees by drawing nearly 55,000 followers to a list of celebrities alleged to have links with the secretive gagging orders.

The frenzy of activity on the micro-blogging site yesterday makes the super-injunctions as ineff

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Jemima Khan alerted her own followers on Twitter to the 'untrue and upsetting' rumours of an injunction linking her to Jeremy Clarkson

ective as the ban placed on publication of the autobiography of the MI5 officer Peter Wright in the mid 1980s. The ban on Spycatcher was lifted in 1988 when the law lords realised that overseas publication of the book made a gagging restriction pointless.

A mystery Twitter user whose online identity cannot be revealed for legal reasons posted half a dozen tweets in quick succession, with the implication that each of the named celebrities was the subject of a super-injunction. Ironically, the story took off when Jemima Khan, who was wrongly included on the list, sent out her own tweets to her more than 60,000 followers alerting them to the "untrue and upsetting" rumours. She described as a "bloody nightmare" the fact that she had been falsely linked to an "injunction" which the mystery tweeter had claimed had been taken out by Jeremy Clarkson banning mention of intimate photographs of the pair. Ms Khan warned that "my sons will be bullied at school because of it" and later told her followers that Mr Clarkson and his wife Frances had sent her supportive Continued