SXSW: Yes, You Can Be Sued Over a Tweet

Social media is a great platform for testing out jokes, posting pictures of your cats, or airing your snarky opinions about your landlord, or your cable company, or your next-door neighbor. But what happens when one of your snarky tweets rubs someone the wrong way?so much so that they want to sue you?

This was the topic of "Can I Tweet That? Social Media and the Law," a talk here at South by Southwest featuring Dara Quackenbush, a public relations professor at Texas State University and a strategic communications adviser.

The key to keeping yourself out of court, Quackenbush said, is that while the First Amendment protects freedom of speech, it doesn?t give you a license to say whatever you want. What?s definitely not protected is defamation, which consists of libel (written, broadcast, or otherwise published words that do damage to a person or their reputation) and slander (the same thing, but spoken aloud).

A tweet might not seem like the same thing as a newspaper opinion column, but Quackenbush says that when you?re considering whether a tweet you composed could be inflammatory, you should consider the same test of libel that applies elsewhere. It consists of:

Defamation: Does the tweet hurt someone? Is someone getting damaged?
Publication: Was your tweet seen and heard by others?
Identification: Was the person actually singled out?
Negligence: If the subject of your tweet is a private citizen, did you fail to exercise the care that a reasonably prudent person would use in similar circumstances? In the case of a celebrity, public person, or corporation, did you act with malice?
Damages: Did your tweet cause out-of-pocket loss?

Also consider whether or not your tweet meets the defenses for libel: truth, privilege (accurate reports of public proceedings), and fair comment and criticism (an opinion).

These look like rather weighty matters to consider when you?re blasting out 140-character messages. But a few cases involving defamation on Twitter have made it to the courts, such as a 2009 case involving a realty company called Horizon and a former tenant, Amanda Bonnen. Horizon sued after Bonnen tweeted, "Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it's okay." The case was thrown out because the claim was too vague, but Quackenbush said that's only the beginning of this trend. "Laws don?t keep up with technology. More issues will arise."

The best thing you can do when tweeting, Quackenbush said, is to use common sense. Seems simple, but with so many people tweeting first and thinking later, that might be easier said than done.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/sxsw-yes-you-can-be-sued-over-a-tweet-7284868?src=rss

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