[OT] Liability of Moderator

Chris wendlec at tcd.ie
Tue Oct 8 06:56:48 PDT 2013


On Tuesday, 8 October 2013 at 13:12:19 UTC, Joseph Rushton 
Wakeling wrote:
> On 08/10/13 13:38, Chris wrote:
>> Yep, I thought so too. However, I wonder if there is something 
>> that saves the
>> moderator's a**e, else we wouldn't have so many forums all 
>> over the world. There
>> are countries (like GB and the Republic of Ireland) that have 
>> very strict libel
>> laws. Imagine the comments under newspaper articles, if you 
>> could take the
>> newspaper to court for the bullsh*t some people write 
>> (libelous, racist,
>> insulting), there would be an avalanche of lawsuits (if it's 
>> just to get some
>> money).
>
> Which is why British newspapers at least are quite strict about 
> moderating comment threads on their websites.  You also have 
> contempt-of-court law to contend with -- if an article is about 
> an ongoing legal case, for example, it is typical for comment 
> threads to be turned off or at least pre-moderated.
>
> British libel law would be hard pressed to pursue somebody with 
> no UK presence who published a website hosted outside of the 
> UK, although there have been cases where the UK arm of a 
> publisher was targeted with a libel lawsuit for a book 
> published and theoretically only distributed abroad.  It's 
> sufficient for even one copy of the book to be sold to a UK 
> buyer by a company like Amazon.

I see. A private person wouldn't possibly be able to moderate the 
forum all the time. However, mailing lists (a forum via email) 
might be a different beast altogether, because everyone is 
writing personal email messages that are not public in the same 
way this forum is. So if someone writes "I think that Mr. XYZ is 
a **** and a ****! **** you!", nobody could possibly sue the one 
who founded the email forum for these comments?


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