Trafigura: Has twitter come of age?

This week’s big news was Trafigura dropping its gagging order blocking UK media covering its alleged environmental crimes in Africa.

The Twitterati claim ‘it was Twitter wot won it’.  It certainly played its part as lawyers and journalists from the Guardian, MPs, Stephen Fry and thousands of internet users across the globe joined forces and made the oil giant back down.

Trafigura had employed legal heavies Carter Ruck to dissuade media outlets around the world from reporting on their alleged dumping of toxic waste on the Ivory Coast.  They persuaded a judge to suppress a confidential but embarrassing document which has fallen into journalists’ hands.  Even the existence of court proceedings and the court orders themselves were kept secret by the ‘super injunction’.

At that point it appeared they had it all sewn up, with no-one legally able to report on the matter.

However, it began to unravel when an MP, Paul Farrelly, tabled a question about the injunction in Parliament on Monday.   The press have a 300 year old right to report whatever MPs say or do, but Trafigura insisted that any media reporting on the question would be in contempt of court.

The power of Twitter

And this is where Twitter comes in. 

Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger tweeted “Now Guardian prevented from reporting parliament for unreportable reasons” just before leaving the office on Monday evening. 

Within a few hours, people who had read his post on twitter, helped along by re-tweets by Stephen Fry and his 830,000-odd followers, had sleuthed down Farrelly’s question and published the relevant links.  Others had unearthed more damaging details and papers on parliamentary protocol from the four corners of the web.

The following morning Trafigura threw in the towel and Carter Ruck wrote to the Guardian saying it should consider itself ‘released forthwith’ from any reporting restrictions.

Was it twitter wot won it?

So, was it twitter wot won it?

The position Cater Ruck and Trafigura had got into was untenable.  Trying to prevent the reporting of Parliament as contempt of court is itself, it would appear, contempt of Parliament.  So sooner or later, it would have had to back down, Twitter or no Twitter.

What Twitter did succeed in doing was creating a massive surge of interest and support in a very short space of time.  The ability to use ‘#hashtags’ to categorise individual tweets and create a stream of information on the subject accelerated the process.  That’s not so say the same wouldn’t have happened if Alan Rusbridger had posted his comment as a blog, or even in the paper itself.  But the fact that the tweets are all ‘out there’ building and multiplying and creating their own momentum, rather than all being funnelled through one place,  meant that it could all happen incredibly quickly.

Undoubtedly Twitter is showing its power as a campaigning tool, as demonstrated by the ‘We love NHS’ movement in response to the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan’s criticisms of the NHS is the US healthcare debate, and this weekend’s outcry about Jan Moir’s nasty little Daily Mail article on Stephen Gately’s death.

Recent research

But recent figures I’ve seen show that twitter is still not as important as its champions might like to think.

The big problem with Twitter, according to the research, is that 40 per cent of those who have tried it have only used it once or twice before getting bored. This is four times higher than the percentage of people who became similarly disenchanted with Facebook.

And recent research from the European Association of Communications Directors shows that senior communicators from across Europe expect Twitter to become more important during the coming year, they still expect it to be the least important of a list of interactive tools that includes social networking sites, online videos, blogs, RSS feeds and podcasts.

Twitter will truly have come of age when Twitter is just part of the media mix that tells the story, and stops being the story itself.