The High Court has ordered Twitter International Company to provide limited subscriber information and login IP addresses in two journalists’ applications for disclosure. The applications seek information to identify people allegedly responsible for defamatory posts. The court did not decide whether the posts were defamatory or who wrote them.
Mr Justice Mark Sanfey delivered the judgment on 5 December 2022 in proceedings brought by journalists Aoife Moore and Allison Morris. Both had sued journalist Eoghan Harris for defamation and sought Norwich Pharmacal disclosure orders against him and Twitter. Such orders can require disclosure to help identify an alleged wrongdoer.
The judge found that each plaintiff had made a prima facie demonstration of wrongdoing sufficient to apply for disclosure. He stressed that the applications did not permit the court to assess the merits of the defamation claims, which remained for trial.
For the Barbara J Pym account, Mr Harris had sworn that he was its sole operator and publisher. The court noted that this account differed from his public statements describing it as a group account curated by a panel, and said he had not explained the apparent inconsistency. That gave the plaintiffs a stateable basis to contend that others may have published tweets from the account. The judge made no finding about whether Mr Harris’s sworn account was true.
Twitter must provide the subscriber information it holds and login IP addresses for the specified periods: 10 March 2020 to 21 April 2021 for Ms Moore’s application, and 5 August 2020 to 26 April 2021 for Ms Morris’s. In Ms Morris’s case, the order also covers the Northern Whig account, for logins from 10 to 24 April 2021. The information is to be provided within ten days of service of the order. The plaintiffs’ solicitors must give a written undertaking that the information will be used only to seek redress for the alleged wrongs. The court said the data might not itself identify the user and could need to be matched against the dates and times of tweets.
The judge refused disclosure orders concerning the Dolly White account, finding insufficient evidence to support them, and refused requests relating to alleged retweets because there was no evidence that the specified tweets had been retweeted. The remaining applications against Mr Harris concerning the Barbara J Pym and, for Ms Morris, Northern Whig accounts were adjourned pending the Twitter disclosure process. He ordered each plaintiff to pay Twitter’s application and compliance costs, to be adjudicated if not agreed. The parties could make limited written submissions on practical implementation difficulties; the court said it would not hear a renewed argument on the substantive issues.