It was the final act in what Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper called “one of the biggest acts of civil disobedience in modern times.” Chafing under a court order that banned the press from naming a top player with an English soccer club who was alleged to have had an affair with a reality TV star, Britons took to Twitter. By May 21, details of the affair had been leaked so widely on the internet that over 50,000 users had tweeted the name of the player: Manchester United midfielder Ryan Giggs. By Monday, a British member of parliament felt the situation so absurd that he named Giggs in a parliamentary session knowing full well that, under an 1840 law granting parliamentary privilege, the courts can’t restrict MPs’ comments in Parliament — nor the publication of those comments. So British media outlets were free to splash headlines about Giggs’ alleged infidelity, breaking the worst-kept-secret in sports.
Britain’s privacy law is one of the most protective in the developed world. It is also one of the most immature. Since the law came into force in 2000, celebrities have been able to obtain injunctions that prevent the publication of personal details ranging from carnal indiscretions to more serious issues, as long as the courts agree that the details violate their right to privacy and aren’t matters of real public interest. In some cases, so-called super-injunctions even prohibit newspapers from acknowledging the existence of the court order.
But while Britain’s mainstream media have been reluctantly inhibited by these laws, the cacophony of new media has proved almost impossible to police. In the Giggs case, various judges have suggested that Twitter users could be in contempt of court-but how to prosecute tens of thousands of people, many of them anonymous? Giggs has sued Twitter for the identity of the user he believes was the first to leak details of his affair, but obtaining information from the California-based company is a jurisdictional nightmare. Speaking on the thorny task of balancing a right to privacy with a right to free speech, Prime Minister David Cameron on Monday admitted that Britain should review its privacy law, saying that “it is rather unsustainable, this situation where newspapers can’t print something that everyone else is clearly talking about.”
