{"id":411308,"date":"2010-03-10T05:09:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-10T10:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100122\/1024367874.shtml"},"modified":"2010-03-10T05:09:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-10T10:09:00","slug":"twitter-defamation-lawsuit-dismissed-as-tweets-were-considered-too-vague","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/411308","title":{"rendered":"Twitter Defamation Lawsuit Dismissed, As Tweets Were Considered Too Vague"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year, we wrote about how a property management firm in Illinois, Horizon Group Management, had sued a tenant for defamation<\/a> over a short Twitter message she sent, claiming:<\/p>\n


\n“Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.”
\n<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The woman had a grand total of 20 followers at the time, so it wasn’t like this was likely to have a huge negative impact on the company. Still, what was impressive was how Horizon defended its decision to sue, saying:<\/p>\n


\n“We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.”
\n<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That seemed rather obvious, given that by filing the lawsuit, the company brought a lot<\/i> more attention to the fact that some of its tenants were unhappy. And, even worse, the lawsuit has gone nowhere. Dark Helmet<\/a> alerts us to the news that the lawsuit has been dismissed<\/a> as the comments were considered “too vague” and didn’t meet the qualifications to be considered libelous. This doesn’t mean that there can’t<\/i> be defamation via Twitter, so if you’re going to defame someone, at least be vague about it in your 140 characters.<\/p>\n

Permalink<\/a> | Comments<\/a> | Email This Story<\/a>
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year, we wrote about how a property management firm in Illinois, Horizon Group Management, had sued a tenant for defamation over a short Twitter message she sent, claiming: “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it’s okay.” The woman had a grand total of 20 followers at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-411308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=411308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/411308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=411308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=411308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=411308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}