Anyone who has spent time on an Internet message board has met one: That irritating guy who spouts defamatory nonsense on every subject from partisan politics to racist propaganda—a “troll,” as he is commonly known—is a staple of online discourse.
He may be obnoxious, but now his right to play virtual tough-guy is legally protected. A California appeals court decided Wednesday that online commenters have a First-Amendment right to remain anonymous even when their remarks are perceived as “scathing personal attacks” and potentially harmful to a company’s business.
This particular case involved 10 employees of a Florida company who posted derogatory and sexist comments about their employer on Yahoo message boards. When the employer sued Yahoo to reveal the identities of the commenters, the company refused.
“The appeals court acknowledged that the Wild West of the Internet is still bound by rules about libel, and that especially in the corporate and financial arena, people’s reputations and entire companies can suffer damages as rumors spread over the ‘Net. Still, the judge ruled that what Doe 6 had posted were not assertions of ‘actual fact’ and therefore not actionable under Florida’s defamation law, despite being ‘unquestionably offensive and demeaning.’”
This case is another interesting chapter in the “actual fact” debate (see the post immediately below this one), in which the courts have attempted to draw a line between defamation and constitutionally protected speech in public forums and advertisements.
The question comes down to, what is the difference between hurting someone’s feelings and legitimately harming them? When the Internet is involved, the question gets even murkier due to variation in different companies’ policies on releasing clients’ identities.
An even more extreme version of this case came up last June, when two female Yale law school students sued an online message board to disclose the identities of posters who had, according to the blog Ars Technica, made a “string of public character assassinations, rumors, and (repeated) rape threats.”
Rape threats? Yeah, that one’s probably across the line. But so far the women have been unable obtain a court order or make any progress in identifying the malicious posters.
