The people formerly known as the media

"Billy Jones" is not, of course, the first person on Twitter to break (or pretend to break, or erroneously break) a super-injunction. All of Fleet Street knows who is named in the super-injunctions, not least because those injunctions require them to be told so they don't cover the story or name the names.

But over the past day or so Billy Jones' "Injunctionsuper" Twitter account has made a fair job of demolishing the comfortable celebrity fantasy that sending half a dozen letters to the lawyers at Northcliffe House, Wapping and Buckingham Palace Road to say that their papers are not allowed to cover some of the news is the same as keeping that news a secret.

Everyone is a media company now.

I am, you are, Billy Jones is. With a Twitter account or a Blogger page it takes literally a few seconds to replicate what could once be achieved only by the owner of a printing press or a broadcasting license. So outrage at the Mail, amongst others, is hardly unreasonable. News organisations are being forbidden from commenting or repeating news that anyone with a computer or a phone can see at a glance.

That's not just annoying for the news organisations. Since their primary purpose is to validate information we are left as readers to make our own guesses as to which anonymous Twitterers are telling us the truth (the papers know but, ludicrously, they cannot say).

While the matters in question are almost incomprehensibly trivial - some bored, over-paid celebrities have apparently had sex with each other, or with prostitutes - it is in no-one's interests for information that has now published in the public domain as news to remain in the category of unsubstantiated rumour. Some of the people implicated in the rumours have evidently been falsely accused, and news organisations are now left in the absurd position of validating some of the rumours by silent implication as they repudiate the ones known not to be true.

Laws that have apparently been designed to protect the embarassing indiscretions of a handful of very rich men do not even work, because they rest upon a definition of the news media that has been entirely superceded by events. News of Osama Bin Laden's death broke on Twitter. Now news of some celebrities having sex with one another has broken on Twitter too. Everyone is a news organisation and sending pre-emptive legal threats to the people formerly known as the media has merely succeeded in gagging those people. We have moved on.