So, superinjunctions. Everyone’s talking about them, right? Well, they were on Monday. Not so much now admittedly, our collective attention span being as hummingbird-like as it is. The papers are still full of them, of course, but they’re acting more out of sheer bloody-minded determination to finally publish what they’ve been blocked from printing for so long than as the result of a married man having sex with a single woman actually being remotely earth-shattering. Anyone who wanted to know the identity of the elusive CTB will have found it from a quick googling weeks ago; the only people to whom Giggs’ unmasking will actually have been news when they picked up their paper yesterday morning will be those who couldn’t care less anyway. Not that pig-headed contrarianism is the exclusive preserve of the press, mind you. The only reason the Twitterverse got interested in where Ryan Giggs’ genitals had been in the first place was because he tried to stop people finding out, and forgot that people on the internet don’t like being told they’re not allowed to know something. Never mind that there’s precisely zero public interest in us knowing this particular gobbet of non-news; anyone, anywhere trying to Suppress Free Speech must be stood up to, no matter how dull or trivial the information that’s being concealed. And no, it’s not enough to argue that free speech is worth standing up for in and of itself, either. Of course it’s a principle worth defending, but, as Reuben (and more recently Polly Toynbee) point out, so is the right to a private life. As I’ve argued before, there are always going to be cases where the principles we value will come into conflict with one another, and when that happens one has to win out over the other. In this instance, privacy should have come first.

Equally, though, we shouldn’t be too relaxed about the wider implications. The fact that Schillings (Giggs’ lawyers) tried to get Twitter to hand over the account details of users who named Giggs before John Hemmings did so in Parliament is pretty damn worrying. And, as has been pointed out, judges getting too injunction-happy is a real concern too. It’s almost certainly true, as Chicken Yoghurt suggests, that during the Trafigura scandal people focused far too much on freedom of the press and far too little on the whole ‘people in Ivory Coast getting poisoned’ thing, myself included, but it would be perverse to argue that therefore we shouldn’t worry about the judiciary being overzealous in muzzling the press and/or users of social media.

Ultimately, though, hand-wringing over the moral niceties of stuff like this is pretty futile (snide remarks at this juncture about how this compares in the pointlessness stakes to political blogging in general are most definitely not welcome). While we can set out why the Streisand Effect was a bad thing in the case of Ryan Giggs but a good thing with Trafigura, ultimately it’s as amoral a phenomenon as the weather. People are nosy, and the internet makes it possible to satisfy that nosiness, irrespective of subject matter. Look at Wikipedia’s list of examples for the Streisand Effect; they range from attempts to stop the publication of a story about Tunisian political prisoners to some storm-in-a-teacup moral panic over a naked picture on an album cover. As long as there’s an internet there’ll be stories like this, for good or ill. All we’ll be able to do most of the time is stand back and watch the fireworks.

It should come as little surprise to hear that Ricky Gervais has quit Twitter after just one month and six tweets. After all, it would be hard to imagine the self-confessed (and not wholly undeserving) egotist getting everything he wants to say about himself down in 140 cringe-worthy characters. Of course, one of his characters – David Brent – might have interacted much better with society, and been much less funny, if he’d had a strict word limit. Gervais’s reason for tweeting his last, however, was that he finds the social networking and micro-blogging site ‘pointless’.

“I just don’t get it I’m afraid. I’m sure it’s fun as a networking device for teenagers but there’s something a bit undignified about adults using it,” Gervais wrote on his blog.

It goes without saying that 90% of what’s said on Twitter, much like 90% of what’s said in everyday conversation, is utterly inane rubbish that will be of very little interest to anyone other than the person writing it. I certainly don’t care what John Smith had for breakfast. I care even less that Emily Bloggs is going to see the sequel to Twilight tomorrow. And as for Dave Brown, well, I dnt cr at al 2 trnslt tht sntnc frm txt tlk.

Neither is The Office star the only intelligent adult to have failed to see the point of Twitter. Writing for The Third Estate back in April, Reuben said he found the idea of micro-blogging “horrific” and profoundly “self-centred”. Thankfully, however, Reuben came to see the error of his ways, and after a cunning bit of detective work by Owen, it was he who helped set the Twitterverse ablaze with the details of the Guardian-Trafigura gag. It didn’t take long for the rest of the lefty, and even the not so lefty, bloggers to re-tweet that one simple link and by the time Charlie Brooker, Derren Brown and Stephen Fry had caught on, the story was truly national, The Third Estate had gained 13,000 hits in a day, the gagging order was destroyed and a message was sent to big corporations up to no good that keeping something secret in the age of democratised mass digital media is not as easy as it once was.

The point is, Twitter ain’t just for kids. Like any kind of technology it is only as good or as bad as the people using it. Are aeroplanes evil just because two of them flew into the Twin Towers? Was it nuclear fission which killed 140,000 people in Hiroshima, or Paul Tibbets and the people who sent him there? Should we blame Gutenberg and the printing press for Mills and Boon, Melanie Phillips and Richard Littlejohn?

Of course, you’re never going to be able to use Twitter to make a grand philosophical treatise. But in a world of declining newspaper sales, where people read far too little and say far too much, it can be a powerful and perfectly dignified tool. A lot of nonsense may be written on Twitter, but it is only useless if you have nothing useful to say.

Victory! The injunction’s been lifted, and the Guardian is allowed to report the Parliamentary question for itself. Good work everyone.

Earlier this evening The Guardian was served with a gagging order forbidding it from reporting parliamentary business. To quote the article in the paper itself:

Today’s published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

The right to report on what’s said and done in Parliament is traditionally seen as pretty important in a democracy, so in an attempt to aid transparency, the Third Estate can exclusively report that the question is (probably) this one:

61 N: Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

Trafigura, of course, is the company that was recently revealed to be not only dumping toxic waste into the sea near Ivory Coast, but also trying very hard to make sure no one found out. Why they and Carter Ruck would be so keen for this question not to be revealed I’m not sure, (especially as it’s clearly publicly available), but they have a history of this kind of behaviour.

All the questions due to be asked in Parliament from tomorrow (Tuesday) onwards can be found here, so feel free to have a browse through the rest of them – it’s possible I guessed wrong, though I think it’s unlikely. And please, please re-post this – the more places publish it, the harder it is to justify a gagging order and the worse Carter Ruck and Trafigura will look.

Edit: This guy found it too (and a bit sooner than me I think).

Edit edit: You can download a copy of the Minton Report, which Trafigura is so keen you don’t read, from Wikileaks here. (H/t Chicken Yoghurt)