Gagging orders are revealed on Twitter - but how much is genuine?

The messages on the microblogging site, which can be read by anyone online, were an attempt to get around gagging orders supposedly taken out against the media.

By this morning the user had attracted more than 20,000 followers and the content of the posts was discussed very widely on Twitter.

But the messages contained serious errors, including a false claim that socialite and campaigner Jemima Khan had stopped publication of pictures of her with Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson.

Khan wrote on Twitter: “Rumour that I have a super injunction preventing publication of ‘intimate’ photos of me and Jeremy Clarkson. NOT TRUE!”

There is growing disquiet about celebrities’ use of injunctions and “super-injunctions” - whose very existence cannot be reported - to prevent publication of details about their private lives.

Prime Minister David Cameron has sounded a warning about the way judges are creating a new law of privacy rather than Parliament.

BBC presenter Andrew Marr revealed last month that he took out a super-injunction in January 2008 to prevent reporting of an affair.

On Thursday, an injunction was granted to a Premier League footballer who apparently wanted to hide an affair with an 18-year-old model from his wife.

A committee examining the use of injunctions to bind the media was set up in April last year by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, and is expected to report later this month.

The 24-year-old woman at the centre of an injunction preventing a married actor from being identified told BBC Radio 5 Live she believed the release of the names on Twitter made a mockery of gagging orders.

Helen Wood, who reportedly had sex with Wayne Rooney and another call girl Jennifer Thompson before England’s World Cup campaign last summer, said she no longer worked as an escort.

“Injunctions have been put there for a purpose. Obviously, I don’t agree with them and I am certainly not a fan of them by any means, but to publicise them like that on Twitter without actual proof... I think they are doing the wrong thing,” she said in an interview with Victoria Derbyshire.

Asked if it was making a mockery of the law on injunctions, she said: “Yes I do, actually, because Twitter is a social website, it is a network, isn’t it? It is basically for just everyday people as well as celebrities.

“So I think when somebody like a judge has made a formal decision and then it is gone and broadcasted all over something as petty as Twitter, it is absolutely ridiculous.

“It has made them look like a complete joke.”

She said if names had gone on to Twitter that were incorrect, that was “totally unfair”.