In light of Trafigura’s much-reported injunction, is it harmful to put lawyers – rather than communicators – in charge of protecting an organisation’s reputation? This is the topic of December’s @loggerheads debate in Communicate Magazine between Richard O’Hagan, a solicitor at Brittons and me.
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We like to think that the Internet is re-writing the rules of business and the media. And it is, but not as fast as you might think.
Clay Shirky first showed us how crowds can be mobilised online for positive effect. But Ged Carroll sounds a note of caution:
“The door that we have walked through to allow justice and freedom-of-speech through the wisdom of crowds can also easily succumb to the wisdom of mobs. Society hasn’t really thought through how to deal with all the ramifications.”
And so social media watchers got very excited last week when huge number of conversations on Twitter about the Trafigura injunction against The Guardian seemingly forced its lawyers Carter-Ruck to back down.
I thought we’d observed a game changing moment. Not a chance. There are currently more than 300 so-called super injunctions holding tight in the UK according to Joshua Rozenberg on Sky News on Saturday morning (via @rfenwick).
Was the Trafigura incident a one off? I doubt it. But don’t let the Trafigura case fool you. Legal process is alive and well on the Internet.
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The #Trafigura trending topic on Twitter this morning is an example of the Streisand effect, an Internet phenomenon where an attempt to censor a story backfires and generates widespread coverage across the internet.
The conversation around #Trafigura resulted from an attempt to stop The Guardian from reporting on a question about Trafigua in the UK Parliament.
The Streisand effect entered Internet parlance after Techdirt founder Mike Masnick used it to describe the widespread Internet coverage that resulted from Barbra Streisand’s attempts to suppress photos of her Californian home in 2003.
For more examples visit the web site dedicated to The Streisand Effect.
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