Legal News

Is Twitter Serious Enough to Get You Sued?

By Brian Harris

Are Twitter tweets, all 140 characters or less, intended to be taken seriously?  Or is the microblogging site just one big forum of hot air, where nothing can be taken seriously and nothing is capable of defamatory meaning?  That seems to be one of the issues percolating as courts face the challenge of applying defamation law that was developed for old media to a host of new fora.  Last year, I blogged about a Chicago woman, Amanda Bonnen, who was sued by her landlord after she tweeted, ?Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you?  Horizon realty thinks it?s okay.?  Last month, a state court judge in Illinois dismissed the case.

Although the court did not issue an opinion, Bonnen?s argument raises important questions about how the law will apply to Twitter, and maybe to other social media.  In particular, she argued that tweets are, by their nature, opinion and that, absent some verifiable factual information included in a tweet, a tweet can offer no basis for a defamation claim.  She went on to claim that most tweets are just ?pointless babble.?  (For now, I?m assuming that she and her lawyers did not have in mind my blog posts, which I typically circulate on Twitter, when she used that description.)  This is an argument that anyone suing over a tweet is likely to hear again, in some form. 

It is not clear whether Twitter?s very nature makes tweets less capable of defamatory meaning.  Certainly, the substance of the medium makes defamatory statements hard ? it is hard to say anything in 140 characters, let alone something that includes verifiable assertions of fact.  And Twitter followers may have learned to take many tweets with a healthy grain of salt.  Indeed, most of the tweets I receive tend to be commentary of one type or another, along with a healthy dose of the pointless babble to which Bonnen referred in court.  On the other hand, Twitter allows its users to attach links to Web sites and other types of factual information that, at least in some circumstances, might allow a reader to think a tweet is an assertion of fact.  In addition, while most tweets are shorter than other forms of speech, they can very quickly reach a broad audience, and the speaker often has no idea who his or her followers are on Twitter.  What is clear is that any tweet is intended by the speaker to be broadcast to a wide audience, and possibly even retransmitted (?retweeted,? in the Twitter vernacular). 

Ultimately, it seems likely that a post on Twitter might be capable of defamatory content.  However, like any other speech, its context will be important.  Anyone concerned with maintaining a particular image, either for branding reasons or otherwise, would be well-advised to keep an eye on relevant tweets and consider whether they, like any other public statement, are really defamatory and worth a lawsuit.  And remember that, in making that determination, context counts.

Joshua D. Wolson is a member of the litigation department at Dilworth Paxson.  He can be reached at 215-575-7295 or jwolson@dilworthlaw.com.  This posting is for informational purposes only and should not be construed or interpreted as legal advice on any matter.

Full post as published by The Legal Intelligencer Blog on February 02, 2010 (boomark / email).