As The Spectator reports, the Guardian has had an injunction served on it preventing it reporting a written question table in Parliament.
This being the internet age, not only is #trafigura a trending topic on Twitter but more substantively the question in answer has been (at the time of writing) republished verbatim just under 300 times elsewhere on the internet (see these Google search results).
I struggle to think of another Parliamentary question that has got that level of coverage. (Know otherwise? Do post up a comment.)
The result of the injunction, far from stopping the spread of the story has been to highlight and accelerate its spread. How much the mainstream media pick up on the story now will determine whether overall the injunction ends up being completely counter-productive (as, even now, the offline media audiences usually dwarf the online ones).
My bet though is that the media will be much more willing to run stories about Guardian gagged from reporting Parliament than they would have been to pick up on a story that just appeared in the Guardian in the normal course of events.
Although this is an extreme case (gagging a newspaper from reporting Parliament), the overall lesson is widely applicable. Try to stop something being published and it often spreads widely on the internet as a result; a lesson that Barbara Streisand learnt in the 1990s when she tried to stop a photograph of her house being published, giving birth to the phrase the “Streisand effect” to describe this sort of situation.
UPDATE: Here’s an example of a mainstream media story which is now running, mentioning Trafigura and telling readers that “last month [Trafigura] announced that it would pay out millions of pounds without any admission of liability over allegations that it dumped toxic waste in the Ivory Coast in 2006″. Without the injunction, the Telegraph would not have been reminding people of that story today.
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RT @jeffjarvis: New rule/new age: harder one tries to hide a fact, more light others will shed on it. Streisand effect http://bit.ly/qXDoi
RT @jeffjarvis: New rule in new age Harder one tries to hide a fact, more light others will shed on it -Streisand effect http://bit.ly/qXDoi
RT @jeffjarvis: New rule in new age: The harder one tries to hide a fact, the more light others will shed on it. http://bit.ly/qXDoi
RT @venessapaech: The harder one tries to hide something, the more it fights for air (the 'Streisand effect') http://bit.ly/qXDoi
RT @jeffjarvis: New rule in new age: The harder one tries to hide a fact, the more light others will shed on it http://bit.ly/qXDoi
via @jeffjarvis New rule in new age: The harder one tries to hide a fact, the more light others will shed on it http://bit.ly/qXDoi so true
RT @jeffjarvis: New rule: The harder one tries to hide a fact, the more light others will shed on it. > Streisand effect http://bit.ly/qXDoi
Shining a very bright light on Trafigura and the Ivory Coast | Mark Pack http://ow.ly/u7OA Love the Guardian! (Thx 8of12 @jeffjarvis)
RT @jeffjarvis New rule in new age: The harder one tries to hide a fact, the more light others will shed on it. http://bit.ly/qXDoi
[...] been taking a wander round the Trafigura website after all the excitement yesterday and today. The state of the Trafigura website is the least of the company's problems at the moment, but it [...]
New rule in new age: The harder one tries to hide a fact, the more light others will shed on it. http://bit.ly/qXDoi (via @jeffjarvis)
Besides dumping toxic waste on the Ivory Coast, Trafigura is the subject of ongoing criminal investigations in Norway for exposing the inhabitants of a Norwegian village to the danger of a massive leak of lethal gas. According to a retired Norwegian professor of chemistry, this outcome was only averted by an accidental explosion and fire at the site where the unlawfully imported chemicals were being stored See: http://nrk.no/programmer/tv/brennpunkt/1.6816347 for details.