It has happened before and it will happen again. Last week, British soccer star Ryan Giggs made the mistake of picking a fight with the internet and 30,000-odd tweets, two major online publications and some bold Scots later, he has guaranteed that the secret he wanted kept hidden — his seven-month affair with glamour model Imogen Thomas — is public knowledge in the UK.

Giggs had obtained an injunction preventing the revelation of the affair by the British media, which, in the absence of a statutory right to privacy, was the only means of keeping a matter that had no public interest out of the news. Thomas, who was not protected by the injunction, unsuccessfully tried to have the order overturned last week amid unsubstantiated allegations she was blackmailing him.

However, the matter was taken out of the hands of the British courts a fortnight ago by a Twitter user who posted details of Giggs’ injunction, along with several others and a non-existent one involving Jemima Khan.

In response, last Wednesday Giggs’s lawyers Schillings (“we use the laws of defamation, privacy and copyright to protect the reputations, privacy and confidentiality of our clients”) started legal action against Twitter and the anonymous user, thereby turning a case about whether Giggs’s privacy had been invaded into a matter of free speech online. The British media were able to report the suit, but not who initiated it.

But somewhere between his treatment of Thomas, the injunction blocking media revelation of his identity, the arrogance of British lawyers thinking they held sway over the rest of the world and the threat to sue, British public opinion turned savagely against Giggs and, over the weekend, Twitter erupted. One tweet in particular, from “FrankLampardUK” (unrelated to the soccer player of that name), now probably has the distinction of being the most retweeted phrase in history — “Ryan Giggs is suing Twitter. I can’t Imogen why. #MUFC” which even days later is still being circulated on Twitter. At one stage on Saturday morning UK time there were several tweets a second about Giggs’s affair, eventually producing by one estimate more than 30,000 tweets identifying him.

Twitter took some steps to curb matters. Despite the velocity of tweets,  “Giggs” and later “Imogen” were removed from its “Trending “ list for the UK (thereby incidentally proving it was Giggs who initiated the lawsuit). But Forbes.com, Ars Technica and Wired.com ran articles outing Giggs and his threat to sue and yesterday Scottish paper The Sunday Herald ran this (Scotland, recall, has a separate legal system from England’s).

Giggs wasn’t the only soccer player considering legal action. There was speculation journalist Giles Coren was facing prosecution after he identified Gareth Barry, who is protected by another superinjunction, during a match the weekend before last, with tweets like “tiny fiver on barry to score at 22-1. wdv been nice to get a double with giggs in the match before …” Coren himself appeared not to know whether he would be targeted, or whether his tweets were being confused with those of Piers Morgan, who made a series of comments on Twitter about Ryan Giggs, including advice that he should get a new lawyer.

Meanwhile, the British judiciary had exploded in rage at Twitter. In a statement so stereotypical it could’ve come from a Peter Cook sketch, England’s Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge (sic) declared that modern technology was “out of control” and compared the “misuse of modern technology” to break injunctions to child p-rnography, as if to demonstrate that for any would-be censor, the temptation to reach for the kiddie p-orn comparison is irresistible. Judge Judge called for social media to “be brought under control, maybe through damages, very substantial damages, maybe even injunctions”.

Presumably some other, better injunctions than the ones that failed to prevent Giggs from humiliating himself.

It was a bad week for Lord Judge and the British judiciary. Judge took it on himself to criticise MPs who breached superinjunctions by revealing details in Parliament, where the media can then report them with impunity. You can imagine — or Imogen, perhaps — how well that went down with British MPs on all sides. Until recently, Liberal Democrat maverick John Hemming’s calls for “hyperinjunction” judge (where injunctions prevent people from telling anyone else about it, including their MP) to be investigated for contempt of Parliament might have been considered extreme, but in response to Judge, Tory MPs were calling the judiciary that splendidly British term of abuse, “asses”.

And while British media outlets had to stay silent, or at best provide readers with elaborate puzzles to lead them to the truth online, Twitter was the platform for an explosion of rage at Giggs. Tens of thousands of British people attacked him for the affair or for threatening to sue, with virtually no support for him of any kind. Many appeared to be from people genuinely shocked at the revelation, having formerly regarded Giggs as an exception to the rule that highly paid soccer players are slimebags.

What was interesting was that this wasn’t the usual Twitterati reaction to a perceived threat to free speech. There was no Stephen Fry to act as a catalyst for online activism, as there was over the Trafigura injunction; the usual network of Twitter free speech advocates were nowhere to be seen. As several tweeters pointed out while attacking Giggs or simply repeating his name for the pleasure of potentially being sued by him (“can we carpool to the court” asked one wag), all that was happening was that common talk at the local pub was going online. “Next, Giggs to sue grapevine” said one tweeter.

Tony MP Douglas Carswell summed that up, perhaps over-eloquently, when he responded to Judge’s comments by saying “there is something poetic about both the bill of rights and Twitter pointing towards the supremacy of the people”.

Carswell’s observation, in contrast to the braying of an outraged judiciary, and for that matter the snitty reaction of the British media (complete with a senior Guardian commentator calling for Twitter to be censored), reflects an understanding that social media isn’t some new form of traditional media, just another stage in the evolution from newspapers to radio to television, but a mechanism for connecting people, regardless of geography, translating the physical and unregulated networks of, say, the local pub, into global networks.

It’s a lesson surprisingly few have learnt so far, particularly in Australian media circles. News Ltd and Fairfax see social media as just another competitor, rather than a means of interconnection for their erstwhile audiences. One News Ltd title continues to wage war on social media and regularly editorialises against it; Fairfax has an editorial policy of prominently running any story that can portray social media in a bad light. It’s the media equivalent of an elderly British judge invoking child p-rn.

What has happened before and will happen again isn’t just a celebrity being stupid enough to screw with the internet and getting humiliated. It’s also the sight of the mainstream media forced to sit silent and say nothing while the people who used to be its audience carry on their own conversations and their own exchanges of information untrammeled by the dictates of gatekeepers.