British Lawmakers Join Fray as Twitter Tests Law

After he cleverly obtained a court ruling forbidding the news media from reporting on his possible affair with a “Big Brother” contestant, the Manchester United soccer player Ryan Giggs must have thought he had avoided a whole lot of trouble. The tough ruling banned anyone from reporting his name, her name in connection with Mr. Giggs, the supposed affair, even the very existence of the order itself. But anonymity would prove an elusive goal for He Who Shall Not Be Named, as some called the unfortunate Mr. Giggs, who had not reckoned on the wicked anarchy of Twitter.

The clash between old-media law and new-media reality soon descended into a chaotic farce, with Mr. Giggs’s name appearing in some 75,000 postings over the weekend, even as British news organizations were still legally forbidden to print it. In the House of Commons, John Whittingdale, a Conservative member of Parliament, said that “you would virtually have to be living in an igloo” not to know what was going on, and that the use of Twitter was “in danger of making the law look an ass.”