Privacy and Injunctions - Evidence - Parliament

Joshua Rozenberg, Professor Steven Barnett, and Professor Brian Cathcart—Oral evidence
(QQ 119–161)
not a counsel of perfection, but I think it is absolutely right that it needs to be Parliament
that does this.
Professor Cathcart: One of the things that concerns me is the idea that Parliament
might be led into defining who is a public figure, or who is a role model, or who is somebody
who trades on their image. I think that is a marsh. You do not want to go there.
Q149 Mr Bradshaw: But in general terms, going back to the question of codifying
this in statute, what about the argument that at the moment parts of the press are able to
say, “This is all a judge-made law, so it has no democratic legitimacy”, giving people the
impression it has no democratic or political legitimacy, although it comes from the Human
Rights Act. Is that not an argument for some sort of codification?
Professor Cathcart: I would caution you against imaging that you are going to
produce a solution with which the press will be happy. My view of the arguments put
forward at the moment is that they are very weak and they are a flailing man’s arguments.
You create a new law, you get another set of a flailing man’s arguments. I think the idea that
you are going to get peace out of this is an illusion.
Q150 Eric Joyce: Perhaps I could address this one to Professor Barnett. You have
made a distinction between mainstream media and social media, and you referred earlier to
people talking down the pub when you talked about social media. It occurs to me that
Stephen Fry has over a million followers; you could not fit all of those in the Groucho, I
don’t think. Counting re-tweets he is probably listened to by several million people. The
main thing it seems to me—I wonder if this influences your calculus—is that we talk about
Twitter now, and it has only been going for two or three years, but Facebook has only been
going for seven years. When you think about legislating for the future and the impact social
media has, what impact do you think social media will have when the reach of social media is
far greater than it is now? Facebook, for example, will have probably peer recommendation
engines, so that people will be reached not just in the terms of hundreds of thousands or
even a million, but by many millions. Would that not equate to the kind of reach that the
regular media have at the moment, and therefore the difficulty of pursuing injunctions with
people who are tweeting?
Professor Barnett: I have two responses to that. I think it is a terribly important
issue. Going back to the Twitter and the blogs argument: people often use the Stephen Fry
argument; it is very unusual for someone to have as many followers as he has. I think for
that very reason he would be very unlikely to reveal Ryan Giggs’s name in a similar situation.
The same thing with blogs: people often use the example of Guido Fawkes. Most blogs are
read by a very small number of people; most Twitter accounts have a very small number of
followers. The Facebook analogy for me does not work, because Facebook is something for
which people have individual accounts. They talk to each other, they talk to their friends;
there are many hundreds of millions of accounts all around the world, or there will be. But
this is not a mass medium in the sense of one person suddenly being able to talk to
50 million people; these are 50 million people having lots and lots of different conversations
with themselves. For me, the pub analogy still works.
Can I just say one more thing about the role of social media? It raises a very
important question about privacy, which is we have to be careful about fighting yesterday’s
battle—phone hacking—because one of the really interesting questions is how do we secure
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