After a ruling in the High Court yesterday, it seems that we should all be minding our Ps and Qs more carefully in internet chatrooms or maybe even on blog comment threads. Keith Smith, a Ukip parliamentary candidate, won £10,000 and a restraining order against Tracy Williams, for false allegations she made about him in a Yahoo! discussion group on rightwing political debate.
What disturbs me about this particular case is the fact that the judge saw fit to award £10,000 damages to Mr Smith despite the fact that only 100 people were members of this particular discussion group. Alistair MacDuff QC handed down a very chilling judgment where he reasoned that "These statements have been made to a restricted audience and it is likely that few people have read these statements. But they were available to the whole world." Oh dear.
So if availability is going to be the proof of a libel rather than the ACTUAL number of people who read the comments, then we are all in potentially great trouble. I tend to think that the law in this case is a bit of an ass - but as the potential can carrier for similar cases on Guardian Unlimited I probably would - in that it seems a disproportionate response to an abusive poster, where the size of the audience was small.
The proliferation of nonsense and untruths, once the preserve of the press, is now a hallmark of a particular kind of cyber discourse. The courts do not seem to have adjusted at all for the fact that a media literate audience should really be able to tell the difference between idle, ill-informed malicious gossip in a tiny rightwing chatroom, and idle ill-informed malicious gossip sent round the world by international media organisations.
However, before you flood this thread with your own inaccurate and abusive comments, bear in mind that in this case it is not the publisher but the perpetrator of the libel who is picking up the bill.
