All it takes nowadays is one click of a button, and bam! You’re slapped with a lawsuit. The digital climate today has empowered people and entities to share information at the speed of light, whether true or false. With social media serving as one of the primary avenues to voice an opinion, and an abundance of likes and comments that can flood a web page in a matter of minutes, that very power can open the door to a claim of defamation if the communication begins to spread like wildfire, while causing a certain level of harm to an individual or business.
What exactly is defamation? Well, on a general scale, it is a (1) published statement, which is (2) false, and (3) injurious to the plaintiff’s reputation. The number of people that are able to view the publication will not serve as a means to lessen or defeat the publication requirement. So for example, if a site only has a viewership of 50 people, that satisfies the publication requirement just as much as a site with a viewership of 500,000 people.
Once it has been identified that an individual or business has been defamed, suit must be filed. But despite the belief that the Internet Service Provider (ISP), such as youtube, facebook, Twitter, or any other social media outlet, is to be the target of a lawsuit, think again. ISP’s are protected from claims of defamation through the Communications Decency Act, which removes them from excessive claims that are likely to arise due to providing the forum for the defamatory speech, and places the focus on the party that provided the actual speech. So any thought of winning a large settlement against Instagram should be scratched, as a plaintiff’s claim is likely to sit with posting party of the picture or comments in the popular social networking platform.
Upon identifying the party that essentially hit “send” or “post”, suit should be filed in the appropriate state court. Usually, at this point, an attorney should be consulted in order to conduct the relevant jurisdictional analysis, so that the claim is filed in the appropriate court.
Common defenses to the claim of defamation include truth (statements of fact) and opinions. In the case of opinions, the basis of the opinion may be taken into account in determining whether or not the opinion can be determined to actually be a fact. For example, if the statement of “I believe Bobby is an avid drug user and constantly steals” was made, to determine if this was an actual opinion or a profound allusion to a fact, a circumstantial analysis of the statement may be made based on the relationship to Bobby, why that belief existed, and other historical grounds that may have led to such a statement being made.
So before making any statements that could have a long-term and damaging impact upon an individual or business, be mindful that claims of defamation are far easier to assert now more than ever through the advent of social media and the ease of bad information that can spread.
Find more helpful information at http://www.nolo.com/.
Clinton is an Attorney in the Intellectual Property and Entertainment fields whose interests are peaked by way of the realms of law, sports, culture, lifestyle, the arts, and humane interests. Follow him at:
Twitter – @ClintonJEsq
