How do superinjunctions work?

[NoCloudsAllowed]

It's common knowledge that the UK press is subject to superinjunctions that mean some royal stories can't be reported here that appear in the news elsewhere.

Not interested in discussing the content of superinjunctions, but how do they work? You post something that breaches one and someone picks up on it and tells you to take it down? Do they get circulated around media outlets so they know what to say?

If you access a foreign news site from the UK, does the content that might breach the superinjunction disappear, but you could see it from another jurisdiction?

They are circulated around UK media outlets, and international outlets with a UK legal entity or broadcasting licence. Foreign media not operating under UK law is outside the jurisdiction of a UK court so injunctions need to be raised in different countries to get wider blocking.

So a bit of an anachronism in a globally connected world really. There have been proposals to censor internet traffic like China does.

I work in the media. Superinjunctions are vanishingly rare and are very difficult to obtain these days. The only way you’d find out about the existence of one is if you were the publication that was trying to run the story, and the court would inform you that the subject had successfully gained a superinjunction. You would be able to make submissions to the court for it to be lifted.

If you were talking specifically about, for example, a health issue then privacy laws and conventions have been greatly tightened in the past couple of years since the Cliff Richard / Bloomberg judgements. You wouldn’t need a superinjunction because existing privacy laws cover medical issues

It would be considered a breach of privacy for example to reveal medical details of anyone in the public eye and a paper would be open to expensive legal action should they do so. This is why you see stories about women ‘looking healthy’ or ‘wearing loose fitting clothing’ when they are clearly 35 weeks gone. Pregnancy is considered to be a medical condition.

Superinjunctions are very rare now because they don’t really work in a world connected to the internet. They are intended to suppress public awareness of something the courts deem is serious enough to be dealt with that doesn’t already have regular reporting restrictions attached - such as health info, privacy as a PP said. Or the restrictions around legal issues etc

There’s almost no point trying to get one for a story that can easily be reported in all the international media because it would then be all over social media anyway.

Most likely to be used now when the story / issue is not widely known - so if a reporter or publication had an exclusive and you could get the superinjunction in quickly to suppress the information before it went anywhere.

Ah thank you, that makes sense.

So if there is a superinjunction, does it apply to social media like Twitter? Is someone charged with sitting and monitoring comments, either from within the social media org or someone representing the subject of the superinjunction?

Yes it absolutely applies to social media. Nobody can sit all day monitoring all the sites continuously but they’ll be all over sites like Tattle, Mumsnet, Twitter and Facebook. If someone does breach a superinjunction it’s likely they’d get a legal letter immediately. But honestly they are so very rare these days that it’s unlikely anyone would inadvertently breach one. You wouldn’t get a superinjunction for example if the information was already publicly available with a quick google.

There are also D Notices: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSMA-Notice?wprov=sfti1

I think it was one of these used to stop the British press reporting that Prince Harry was in Afghanistan. For all his hatred of the British press, it was Australian and American news organisations which first broke the news that he was out there. Even the British tabloids respected the notice.

You don’t get Uk wide super injunctions do you?

wasn’t that the issue with the Ryan Giggs one and the Scottish newspapers - they’re not bound by an English injunction as it’s a separate legal system?