This is going to be quite an important ruling. Libel laws are different in every country but this could be quite an influential precedent for many future rulings. It may very well have a large impact for a lot of websites with both comments and user-generated content.
If websites choose to enforce a system whereby commenters have to sign up with their verified personal details, many people may be put off and conversation rates could dwindle. This in turn may reduce traffic and said websites may suffer from it.
Some websites may choose to forgo commenting systems altogether because they may be too strapped to enforce such a system, or they may be risk-averse and wouldn't want to have their necks out anymore after this ruling.
A big problem is that a slander lawsuit may hit any time and the only things you can do to prevent it is to moderate the hell out of your UGC. That may not be feasible though. Business insurance against this kind of scenario is crazy expensive and as a business cost may be unrealistic to most. One of the people that co-run a decently sized e-commerce store in South Africa told me once that one's best bet is to have enough money on hand for a lawyer because the insurance will cripple you.
Over at http://www.mybema.com I've played around with many ways around this sort of issue. Right now, negative consumer reviews cannot be seen if you visit the site. Only the category of the review can be seen. In fact you can only see the review if you sign up and subscribe to the author. However I doubt that provides any sort of defense because legally slander is slander once another party is exposed to it. Alas, my pondering continues...
I don't know about EU or the states but in South Africa there have been rulings like the one in the article where the plaintiffs had their cases thrown out because it would be unreasonable for the media owners to moderate every comment made.
What do the other UGC platform owners on here think? How do you manage these kinds of scenarios?
My local paper (a paper in a smallish Midwestern city) did forgo commenting systems and doesn't seem to have suffered for it. In fact, I think it makes reading the online version of the paper better.
Their argument was more about quality, at least publically. The comments were a cesspool of backbiting and misinformed readers using the medium to make themselves heard and the paper basically said: "If you've got an opinion you want published and are willing to put your name to it, you can send us a letter and we will consider it for the op-ed page." I frankly think this was a mature way to approach the issue.
Like any other scheme to make commenting more expensive (resource wise), it implicitly makes the assumption that the value of what one has to say, somehow correlates with how much resources one has at ones disposal to be heard.
In the web era, the most important job a publisher has to ensure his site is a good one, is to write and edit content in such a way that he attracts an audience of interesting readers. Who will in turn, offer interesting comments. It is not, as may have been the case earlier, to hire the "best" journalists, to write their version of the truth. Sites that still use the latter approach, rarely, if ever, reach the level of truly interesting, simply because no one, or small group of, writer(s) will ever cover all bases, the way a whole community of interested and interesting commenters will.
I pointed this out in another comment, but I don't see why content and community have to coexist on the same site. Sites like Reddit and HN leverage the power of hyperlinking to merge the two models so each can do what they are best at: creating content for news sites and moderating and curating for social sites. I don't want to see what a bunch of wackos write in the comment section of my local newspaper. They added no value and the very few comments that did were not worth the overhead. HN has a community of interesting commentators, but it still relies on journalists to provide the basis for that community.
If websites choose to enforce a system whereby commenters have to sign up with their verified personal details, many people may be put off and conversation rates could dwindle. This in turn may reduce traffic and said websites may suffer from it.
Some websites may choose to forgo commenting systems altogether because they may be too strapped to enforce such a system, or they may be risk-averse and wouldn't want to have their necks out anymore after this ruling.
A big problem is that a slander lawsuit may hit any time and the only things you can do to prevent it is to moderate the hell out of your UGC. That may not be feasible though. Business insurance against this kind of scenario is crazy expensive and as a business cost may be unrealistic to most. One of the people that co-run a decently sized e-commerce store in South Africa told me once that one's best bet is to have enough money on hand for a lawyer because the insurance will cripple you.
Over at http://www.mybema.com I've played around with many ways around this sort of issue. Right now, negative consumer reviews cannot be seen if you visit the site. Only the category of the review can be seen. In fact you can only see the review if you sign up and subscribe to the author. However I doubt that provides any sort of defense because legally slander is slander once another party is exposed to it. Alas, my pondering continues...
I don't know about EU or the states but in South Africa there have been rulings like the one in the article where the plaintiffs had their cases thrown out because it would be unreasonable for the media owners to moderate every comment made.
What do the other UGC platform owners on here think? How do you manage these kinds of scenarios?