Those who dismiss Twitter as a pointless waste of time and bandwith would do well to take notice of events last night and this morning. Within hours of the story breaking that the Guardian had had a court injunction served on behalf of libel lawyers to stop them reporting parliamentary question time, champions of free speech and those who follow them had bumped #Trafigura (responsible, allegedly, for using the Ivory Coast as a toxic waste dumping ground, the questioning of which by MP Paul Farrelly was the reason for the reporting ban) and #Carter-Ruck (the multi-national libel lawyers who temporarily successfully invoked press censorship of parliamentary proceedings to protect their client's interests) to the top of the 'trending' stats on Twitter.
This ensured people all over the world were drawn to find out exactly what was going on that was getting everyone so hot under the collar, links to 'traditional' news outlets' websites were flying about encouraging people to request they feature it on their websites and news programmes, and regular updates were bouncing around the world from the horses' mouths and person to person via the power of 'retweet'.
The result, early this afternoon, was that Carter-Ruck dropped the threat of court action against the Guardian for daring to report the news - spotting that not only was their reputation taking a battering, but the full facts of the story were already known by probably 99% more people around the world than would ever have read the report in the newspaper.
Twitter is one of the most recent symbols of the evolution of the internet and 'web 2.0'. What started as blogging and uploading pictures of last night down the pub (both still admirable uses of social web use) has become a powerful medium where multi-national behemoths, politicians and even entire governments (witness #Iran Election) can be questioned and held to account by the concerned majority. It's power to the people - the power of information, travelling at the speed of fibre optics from London to Baku to Buenos Aires and back again - and it is, in a small way at least, helping level the playing field just a little bit.
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