• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, October 13, 2009

On Monday, the U.K. paper The Guardian reported that a court had issued an order banning the newspaper from writing about a matter currently pending in the country's parliament.

The article was vague, but a legion of journalists, bloggers and Twitters soon pieced together the details: The oil company Trafigura had obtained the injunction, which prohibited the paper from reporting on a parliamentary investigation into Trafigura's alleged dumping of toxic waste in Africa.

Not only did people figure it out, but they spread the news throughout the Web. By this morning, Trafigura had become one of the most popular terms on Twitter. A few hours later, the company threw up its hands and agreed to lift the injunction. The Guardian's editor, Alan Rusbridger, had tweeted that the paper was preparing for a 2 p.m. court hearing to fight the ban, but Trafigura's lawyers backed down before then.

Trafigura's clumsy attempt to censor news of a governmental investigation might have been futile even before the Web. But certainly today, when anyone online can create a Twitter account and publish instantaneously, efforts to squelch reporting on the news are almost guaranteed to backfire.

That's not to say that secrets are impossible. Sites like Gawker voluntarily held back on publishing reports about reporter David Rohde's kidnapping -- and for good reason, given that The New York Times said that publicity would have endangered him.

But a company's attempt to ban reports that might embarrass it are a different matter entirely. That's exactly the type of news that bloggers are most likely to distribute. The only surprise here is that Trafigura hadn't anticipated just how badly its attempt to stifle reports would go over online.