Soccer star trying to take tweeters to court

A pro athelete and alleged adulter obtains a court order to make Twitter reveal their identities

Social media: the enemy of dictators and (alleged) adulterers.

A Welsh professional soccer player who must not be named, due to legal restrictions in the UK, has secured a court order in the British High Court requiring that Twitter reveal the identities of anonymous users on the site that tweeted his name. Here. And here. And here. And from tens of thousands of other Twitter accounts.

Super injunctions prevent UK media from printing details of a legal case, intended to protect the privacy of involved parties. In this case, the world-famous athlete is allegedly being accused of adultery. But super injunctions don’t have much weight against ordinary (and often anonymous) netizens on Twitter.

Though Twitter has declined to comment on how it will respond to the court order, everything we know about Twitter points to my prediction that the company will resist revealing their identities.

“Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users' right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed,” wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and general counsel Alex Macgillivray back in January, when the Arab Spring revolutions were heating up in Egypt. “While we may need to release information as required by law, we try to notify Twitter users before handing over their information whenever we can so they have a fair chance to fight the request if they so choose.”

In general, Twitter tries to steer away from censorship and promotes freedom of speech. The site says the only tweets it removes are illegal ones or spam.

How this whole drama unfolds could have deeper ramifications for Twitter usage in other countries. The most interesting uncharted region for the social media site would have to be China, well-known for its pervasive, almost obsessive draconian censorship laws. If the value of a global microblogging site is hearing about events in real-time and reading what people are saying about them, then you lose some of that behind China’s Great Firewall.

But then, you can’t just ignore a billion potential users.