Law Librarian Blog reports: "Horizon Group Management, of Chicago, who filed a libel lawsuit against a former tenant who tweeted 'Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.'" The blog post has a pointer to the complaint, and a news story.
Libel law generally speaking applies equally to newspapers, blog posts, Twitter, and pretty much any other written medium. And the important medium distinction — that under 47 U.S.C. § 230, online services aren't liable for things posted by their users, while offline institutions such as newspapers and even bookstores potentially are, especially if they are notified that the material is libelous — doesn't apply here, since the lawsuit is against the author, not against Twitter. Still, this struck me as worth noting, since it's one of the first Twitter libel lawsuits I've heard of. Many thanks to Vicki Steiner for the pointer.
UPDATE: I should note that, as this Chicago Breaking News post points out,
In March a Texas-based fashion designer sued Courtney Love, the wife of the late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, claiming Love defamed her on Twitter.
The suit alleged Love called Dawn Simorangkir a "nasty lying hosebag thief," said she was a drug addict and a prostitute and accused her of stealing thousands of dollars.
Also, as the Chicago Breaking News post points out -- and as followers of cyberspace libel law (and even libel law more generally) have long known -- such lawsuits tend to be pretty bad for the plaintiffs even if the plaintiffs are in the right, since they vastly increase the audience for the original libel.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect :
"The Streisand effect is an Internet phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be widely publicized. Examples of such attempts include censoring a photograph, a number, a file, or a website (for example via a cease-and-desist letter). Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet, or distributed on file-sharing networks."
And clearly quick recourse to litigation is the way to do that!
Many more have seen it now. Just on this site.
Very dumb.
BTW, she said "Horizon realty". Is that the same as "Horizon Group Management"?
It's this company. They are doing damage control with a press release (warning PDF). If the claims in the response are true it was still a poor decision on Horizon's part not to do better PR control, but I can understand a countersuit.
The first trick is to make sure it doesn't spread to the Intertubes. If at all possible don't reference something as "hot" as Twitter.
So, a libel lawsuit like this is basically a calculation, or guess, on the plaintiff's part that the audience for the libel would have eventually grown large enough to be a problem for the plaintiff with or without a lawsuit.
This looks more like a countersuit, but IANAL. Regardless, bone headed PR move. Maybe there's a niche market for advising people on how not to end up in social media outlets in negative ways...
The case certainly shows the risk with off-the-cuff Twitters about others, that aren't clearly statements of opinion rather than fact, can pretty easily expose the sender of the Tweet to potential liability for defamation and the expense of defending a lawsuit.
The real fun will be when an employee of a company says something off-the-cuff and the statement is defamatory or otherwise liability-causing over Twitter and the company gets sued for it.
Hah. "We're a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization" is obviously far more damaging than the original tweet.
It makes one wonder how they would respond to a tweet that said "Horizon Realty is a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization"
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