A concerted effort by twitter users 13 October has forced a London law firm to alter the terms of a high court injunction which prohibited the Guardian newspaper from reporting a story on toxic waste dumped off the coast of Ivory Coast. Less than an hour after “twitterati” and bloggers broke the news themselves, the law firm that demanded the injunction, Carter-Ruck, telephoned Guardian lawyers to say that they had asked for the injunction to be altered.

The Guardian received the injunction from Carter-Ruck on 11 September in response to a story about an oil and gas exploration firm, Trafigura, which allegedly had dumped toxic waste in the sea off the Ivory Coast and is being sued by 31,000 Ivoreans. The terms of the injunction prohibited the newspaper from reporting on a parliamentary debate about a report into the alleged incident. The Guardian, Wall Street Journal