On Tuesday, 8 October 2013 at 13:12:19 UTC, Joseph Rushton
Wakeling wrote:
On 08/10/13 13:38, Chris wrote:
Yep, I thought so too. However, I wonder if there is something
that saves the
moderator's a**e, else we wouldn't have so many forums all
over the world. There
are countries (like GB and the Republic of Ireland) that have
very strict libel
laws. Imagine the comments under newspaper articles, if you
could take the
newspaper to court for the bullsh*t some people write
(libelous, racist,
insulting), there would be an avalanche of lawsuits (if it's
just to get some
money).
Which is why British newspapers at least are quite strict about
moderating comment threads on their websites. You also have
contempt-of-court law to contend with -- if an article is about
an ongoing legal case, for example, it is typical for comment
threads to be turned off or at least pre-moderated.
British libel law would be hard pressed to pursue somebody with
no UK presence who published a website hosted outside of the
UK, although there have been cases where the UK arm of a
publisher was targeted with a libel lawsuit for a book
published and theoretically only distributed abroad. It's
sufficient for even one copy of the book to be sold to a UK
buyer by a company like Amazon.
I see. A private person wouldn't possibly be able to moderate the
forum all the time. However, mailing lists (a forum via email)
might be a different beast altogether, because everyone is
writing personal email messages that are not public in the same
way this forum is. So if someone writes "I think that Mr. XYZ is
a **** and a ****! **** you!", nobody could possibly sue the one
who founded the email forum for these comments?
