14 DAY TRIAL // Despite all of the fuss in the UK over the so-called "super injunctions," court orders that block the press from reporting on the more intimate indiscretions of public persons, and Twitter, the company is still planning to move to London, as it has been for quite some time now, and, in fact, has started moving employees across the Atlantic for the first stage of the process.
For the past few weeks, super injunctions have been the center of much attention in the British Isles. This is because people have been using the web, Twitter in particular, to break them.
A super injunction, as the name suggests, is more than a mere injunction. What makes it "super" is that, not only is the press not allowed to talk about the subject of the injunction, they're not even allowed to talk about the fact that it exists.
Considering what these things are used for, usually by rich UK folks trying to cover up extramarital indiscretions and the like, making it known that a certain celebrity took out a super injunction would do almost as much damage as finding out the truth, hence the use of the "super" version.
Twitter is not a UK company and it's not a news outlet, it's a communication tool, so, in theory, it should be safe from the reach of UK courts, which is why some people started using it to reveal some of the people that have used a super injunction.
The public and the press in the UK are starting to fight back against the abuse of the law, but they're not the only ones on the offensive. Last week, Twitter got sued for what its users have been publishing and breaking the super injunctions in the process.
There are at least thousands, and likely a lot more, tweets revealing all of the information at this point, so it's unclear what the new lawsuit will accomplish.
In any case, none of this has made Twitter have second thoughts about moving to the UK. The company has been planning to open an office in London, mostly for ad sales, for quite some time now. And it has already started to send some employees there to handle the issue.
The problem would be that Twitter, in theory, will be much easier to attack in court if it has a physical and legal presence in the UK. The company is not worried about that, it seems, at least not enough to make it stop or slow down its plans.