For what seems like the first time ever, Twitter has been sued by a footballer – after a number of Tweeps (Twitter users) planned to reveal his name for allegedly having an affair with a Welsh glamour model, Imogen Thomas. Under the guise of an entity known as “CTB”, the footballer and his legal team have filed lawsuits against the San Francisco-based company and “persons unknown responsible for the publication of information on the Twitter accounts”.
Before writing this post, I performed a simple search for #CTB on Twitter and pretty much found out his identity right away. And with new tweets coming in every few minutes, it looks like this lawsuit isn’t making things better. Somebody should tell CTB about the Streisand effect.
Twitter strives not to remove tweets on the basis of their content, but they will remove illegal tweets and spam so it looks like they won’t be getting any censorship from them. But even if Twitter does remove the posts on the microblog, it’s just going to pop up elsewhere – it’s the internet after all.
Well we wish no ill-fortune to anybody involved, a case like this just shows how much impact a 140 character message can have on somebody’s life. It makes you wonder – are the people who hit “retweet”, just because they thought joke was funny, liable to being charged as well?