We Are Receiving Anonymous Threats

On Sunday I noticed that at 03:04am early Friday or Saturday morning someone, anonymously, had left us a message in our meebo tip box saying the following:

“All posts about […] must be deleted by June 30th from your site or you will be sued for defamation”.

I am not certain if this was meant as a joke by someone with nothing better to do in the middle of the night. Usually with issues such as an alleged defamation one doesn’t (and any lawyer will tell them should absolutely not) go around threatening anonymously with a lawsuit unless do this or that. That is not how things work.

And not only because it is a felony in many states to intimidate and harass but also because when you go to court and a judge looks at your behavior he or she may not look kindly on threats of this nature. Threats meant to intimidate and harass someone from exercising a lawfully given right!

Blog post vs blog comment

It also appears that this person, or persons, if they are not joking, does not make a distinction between a blog post and blog comment. Me and Alex make blog posts, visitors make comments!

And … as our disclaimer (by which everyone who comments is bound whether they have read it or not) states SFLTV is not responsible for what commenters do or say.

Is this claim even lawfully accurate?
The Communication Decency Act of 1996, Section 230 says yes. And The Electronic Frontier Foundation in their Blogger’s Legal Guide expands further on it in more detail. Wikipedia has more on Section 230 which states:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider

The law defines an “interactive computer service” as:

“interactive computer service” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server.

The Washington Post’s former assistant legal counsel David Ardia explains Section 230 of the CDA and in a recent speech where he also said the following:

One big question that comes up when I talk about these immunity provisions is: What happens if you’ve been notified by someone that a statement on your site is defamatory, or invades privacy, or somehow opens up a lawsuit? Do you have to take that material down? The answer to that is no.

The cases have been very clear in saying that you have no obligation to remove material from your site if you’ve been notified that it’s defamatory or otherwise problematic. If you think about that, it might strike you as: “Geez, that doesn’t sound right.” But courts don’t want to put you in the position of having to determine whether or not if something is defamatory or not.

We have a hands off policy in regard to comments, our disclaimer states we don’t actively monitor them and especially that users are responsible for what they say. And the law is on our side backed up by years of legal precedent even if we had no disclaimer.

In the past however I have, as a courtesy, removed comments that made some current and former TV talent uncomfortable. They contacted me and very respectfully mentioned their concerns and asked for assistance which as the law clearly states they aren’t entitled to. They didn’t resort to threats, name calling,

We will not however be threatened or intimidated and if this continues we will have the proper authorities and our lawyer look into it.

And to those of you out there running blogs it’s a good idea to read up on that EFF link I posted above and visit The Citizen Media Law Project, former assistant counsel to the Washington Post David Ardia is it’s director. The site provides a wealth of information and if anything can inform you and answer a lot of questions as to what you can can’t do as a blogger.