The footballer who took out an injunction and threatened to sue Twitter users for leaking his name over his affair with Big Brother star Imogen Thomas was sensationally named today in the House of Commons to be Ryan Giggs.

This week the Manchester United star celebrated becoming the most decorated player in the Premier League with 12 titles under his belt and it was just hours before the footballer joined his wife and son at Old Trafford to celebrate Manchester United's Premier League title victory that the news broke out.

Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming used parliamentary privilege during a debate to name the Manchester United player, reports the Daily Mail. Adding that Hemming said, 'With about 75,000 people having named Ryan Giggs on Twitter, it is obviously impracticable to imprison them all.' Mr Hemming named the star just minutes after the High Court refused to lift a ban on naming Giggs

This is the problem facing the courts today, that with social networks reaching far more audiences than mainstream news organisations, the law has to conform to the way media today is consumed.

The political issue is whether it is maintainable to pursue this sort of privacy injunction. Are these types of injunctions practical in the modern world?

Earlier this afternoon Mr Justice Eady rejected a fresh application by News Group Newspapers to discharge the privacy injunction relating to CTB - the initials used to identify Ryan Giggs to the court - on the basis that to continue it would be 'futile', given recent widespread publicity about his identity, read the Daily Mail.

With the widespread use and speed of platforms such as Twitter, of course the recent outing of the footballer has spread like wild fire, so how does one prevent this from happening?

The Prime Minister David Cameron branded the orders 'unsustainable' and 'unfair'.

Speaking to ITV1's Daybreak, the Prime Minister indicated that he knew the identity of the footballer 'like everybody else' but stressed that there was no 'simple answer' and ministers needed to take 'some time out' to think about it and how one route might be to strengthen the Press Complaints Commission.

Labour leader Ed Miliband told Sky News, 'We have got a situation where we have these rulings on privacy, clearly many people are being able to break them through social networks, through Twitter and so on, and I don't think that's a good position to be in, when the law is clearly not working,'
With the amount of kiss-and-tell stories being sold to tabloid newspapers across the world, there have been a number of high profile celebrities taking out such gagging orders, and with the public's seemingly huge interest in celebrity gossip the social networking platforms have had their work cut out.
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