THE BRITISH COURTS have granted a so-called ‘super-injunction’ to the mother of a brain-damaged woman, preventing her from being named – in a move which, for the first time, explicitly bans users on Twitter and Facebook from naming her.
The Daily Telegraph reports that the woman was granted the order was granted by the Court of Protection, ensuring that she cannot be named by the press in reports about the woman and her brain-damaged daughter.
The brain-damaged woman, who lives in a care home, is surviving only through the use of a life support machine – a machine that her mother is currently seeking to have turned off, so that her daughter’s life can be ended.
The order also bans reporters from going within 50 metres of the daughter’s care home without being given prior permission.
It is believed that the order is the first to specifically outlaw references to its parties on social media websites – and is thought to be a direct response to the furore caused by an anonymous Twitter account which this week ‘outed’ many of the celebrities behind a series of superinjunctions.
Socialite Jemima Khan – one of the celebrities named by that account – has denied her involvement in one of the cases, which apparently also involves Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson.
TV hostess Gabby Logan has also denied being involved in another matter subject to a super-injunction, after being accused of an affair with footballer-turned-BBC-pundit Alan Shearer.
Analyst group Experian Hitwise has said that the media storm surrounding the Twitter user naming the celebrities behind the superinjunctions gave Twitter its busiest ever day in terms of UK traffic on Monday.
Visits to Twitter were up by 14 per cent on Monday, and accounted for 0.5 per cent of all of the UK’s internet traffic, the analysts found.
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