Web•Tech•Law - Legal Notes - Can you be sued for defamation for a retweet?

see - Web•Tech•Law - Legal Notes - Can you be sued for defamation for a retweet?


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There is no doubt that a tweet can be defamatory. You can quite easily cause harm to a reputation in 140 characters. What is a little scary is that retweeting a defamatory tweet could also be defamatory. There is no "retweet immunity" that I'm aware of. When you retweet something you are also publishing that defamatory message to your network of followers. Things brings me to the challenge with something like Twitter (or any networked social service, for that matter):

Leaving aside the brevity of the typical Twitter post it is important to consider a Twitter user's potential reach. Many of the applications which interface with Twitter allow users to republish, or "retweet", Twitter posts to their users. It isn't difficult to imagine the effect of a defamatory tweet published and republished to thousands, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users on Twitter alone. A number of Twitter users republish their tweets on other social networking platforms automatically. These platforms include Facebook, FriendFeed and their personal blogs and static websites.

If you take into account the users or visitors who frequent those sites and who may pass those tweets along to their followers and contacts there is the potential for a single 140 character tweet to reach a substantial number of people and do irreparable harm to the person defamed.

Anyone who uses Twitter has probably had a tweet retweeted and can appreciate the dissemination potential on Twitter alone. When you add the ability to republish a single tweet on multiple services using 3rd party services like Posterous, Ping.fm and Hellotxt, the a defamatory tweet's reach could grow exponentially. The effect of that could either exacerbate the harm or have little further effect at all. One of the elements of a defamation claim, at least in South Africa, is that the people receiving the defamatory comment will associate it with the plaintiff. This means the plaintiff must be known to those people. Retweeting a tweet to a million followers who have never heard of the plaintiff may have little effect on the harm the plaintiff suffers. On the other hand retweeting to a large group of people who are familiar with the plaintiff could have a significant effect on the plaintiff's potential harm.

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