Payday lender Wonga has backed down on its attempt to remove a parody advert criticising them from Twitter after thousands of users (and the Pirate Party UK) defied the company by reposting the picture.

Wonga said:

"We accept that we were a little heavy-handed last week when we issued a Twitter Takedown notice for @BrandySnap's image, and having seen the full ‘Streisand Effect’ ourselves, we won’t be pursuing the notice"

The Streisand effect occurs when an attempt to remove or cover up information leads to it gaining significantly more attention than it would have done otherwise.

Wonga was on shaky legal ground by using a copyright claim under the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to ask Twitter to remove the image, although Twitter complied at first. Parody and criticism are protected as "fair use" under US copyright law.

 Today, the BBC published a survey on worldwide public attitudes to the internet. The results are a loud and clear wake up call to political parties that thought they were safely in the middle of the road.

75% of UK adults agree, or strongly agree with the statement "Access to the internet should be a fundamental right of all people." To put this into some perspective, that's a wording that we, the Pirate Party UK, thought was too extreme to put in our manifesto. All the major political parties in the UK are collaborating on a Digital Economy Bill that will give copyright holders an unprecedented new power of collective punishment, a power to cut off people's internet connection. They will be able to do this to you even if you can prove that that you are innocent of any copyright infringement, and prove that somebody else is responsible.