There have been a number of libel cases popping up over the past few years where random insults on Twitter are turned into full blown court cases. Tragically, these cases have picked up the “twibel” name — a neologism that seems silly and…
Source: www.techdirt.com
I have been making this point for years, and now a court is backing me up.
When determining if a statement (here, posted on Twitter) is defamatory, you must consider the context and the meaning attributed to that word by the speaker. Yes, so some extent, the speaker gets to define the word he uses, not the plaintiff who want to sue him for defamation.
So, in this case, there was a heated debate on Twitter about a horse or something, and at some point the defendant tweeted “Mara Feld . . . is f-ing crazy.” (The actual profanity was used.)
Let’s run it through the analysis. In that context, was the defendant asserting the verifiable fact that Feld suffers from a mental disorder? Of course not. It was offered as the usual “you’re out of your mind” sort of statement.
And even if we set the context aside an assume that the defendant really DID mean to assert that the plaintiff is suffering from a mental disease, how would that be defined? He did not say that plaintiff is suffering from bi-polar disorder or some other condition that could be verified, he simply said plaintiff is crazy. I, for example, think anyone who drinks Budweiser is crazy. With so many good beers available, I can’t fathom why anyone would waste liver tissue on that swill. My definition of “crazy” cannot be proven or disproven, so it could never support a cause of action for defamation. Here, only defendant knows how he defines “crazy”.
Crazy is a common one, but I also get a lot of calls from women wanting to sue because someone called them a “whore”. That one, as least, is more subject to precise definition. “Whore” is another word for prostitute, so calling someone a whore could be construed as accusing them of illegal conduct.
Again, however, context is everything. If in the middle of a diatribe about how the woman stole her man, calling her a whore is not an assertion that she is a prostitute by trade, but rather is a claim that she is a woman of loose morals for taking another woman’s man. On the other hand, if the statement is that she was seen walking the streets and getting into cars, so she is a whore, that would be defamatory if false.
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