Twitter could help enforce super-injunctions in the UK

THE death of the super-injunction, predicted last year following a series of revelations which were spread far and wide on Twitter, might have been exaggerated.

Colin Crowell, Twitter's head of global public policy, has told MPs and Lords that his company could in future censor tweets that breach super-injunctions, The Daily Telegraph reports. The micro-blogging site would use a new system that allows it to block updates in one country while leaving them freely available internationally.

Crowell was appearing before the Joint Committee on Privacy and Injunctions, which was set up last year in the wake of a legal crisis caused by the persistent breach of super-injunctions on Twitter. At one point it seemed the entire country knew that Ryan Giggs had taken out a super-injunction - but newspapers were not able to report the fact until an MP used parliamentary privilege to discuss it.

Twitter unveiled its new censorship system last week prompting accusations it was caving in to repressive regimes. It allows the company to block tweets on a country-by-country basis. Twitter said it would let the user and their followers know when their tweet had been blocked. Any of the user's followers who live in another country would still be able to see the tweet.

Crowell told the committee: "We will also be transparent to other users in that jurisdiction, we won't simply surreptitiously delete it."

Each instance of a blocked tweet will be logged by the website ChillingEffects.org, which already lists a raft of takedown notices sent to Twitter by copyright holders objecting to pirated content.

How effective Twitter's new system will be against super-injunctions is open to debate. Crowell said the company would need some notice to block offending tweets, which, given that a post can spread to thousands of Twitter users in under an hour, means the system might not be speedy enough to protect the interests of super-injunction holders.

Blocked tweets would also still be available to Twitter users outside the UK - and anyone with a moderate degree of computing skill knows how to make a website think they are from a different country.

Perhaps the injunction lawyers know this. Crowell pointed out to the committee that, to date, Twitter has never received a super-injunction in Britain. ·