Apparently some guy has successfully sued some woman for libeling him on an internet message board. After disagreeing about Iraq she called him a “nonce”, said he was racist and declared his wife to be a prostitute. He was awarded £10,000 in damages.

Obviously the details of this are not to hand. It may well be that Mr Smith was genuinely harassed and that these accusations seriously affected his ability to function in society. But I doubt it. I mean, if everyone who’s ever been defamed online were to sue for libel we’d need a new planet just for the courts, and yet society seems to function fairly well.

There’s something I don’t understand about libel law. Surely the importance of the accuser is relevant? Obviously, if a national newspaper prints that your wife is a prostitute when in actuality she isn’t then you have good grounds to claim libel. Should the same apply to someone cloaked by the anonymity of a message board?

If someone in authority, who is regarded as telling the truth on matters of importance, tells fibs about you then it’s reasonable to assume that anyone hearing said fibs will take them to be true. If, however, said slander is a result of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory then surely it should be seen as such.

(Let me, as I’m apt to do, hark back to the old comics fanzine days in search of an analogy. According to legend someone who ran a zine got successfully sued by some paranoid jerk because he printed a letter from some other jerk who said nasty things about him. This led to a whole bunch of other paranoid jerks (there were a lot of them in 70s/80s comics fandom…) screaming “I’ll sue” whenever someone had the temerity to point out in print they were a paranoid jerk and everyone just wished the jerks would fuck off, except they tended to run all the zines, comic shops and other things somewhat central to the scene. Once again, fanzines laid the groundwork for the modern internet as we know it.)

It all comes down to reputation, I think, which means the libel laws are a little out of date. Back in the day, in order to effectively libel someone you needed a platform from which to do it. A newspaper or a book. Everyone else was just someone in the street. Now everyone has the potential to have some kind of reputation and a potential audience who will listen to them and take them seriously, except these reputations exist in degrees. I have a higher reputation than some moron who posts “U R gay” in my comments (this happens a lot – I delete it because it’s idiotic, not because I’m concerned anyone will think I’m gay or something) but I have a lower reputation than, say, Kottke who in turn is lower than a journalist for the New York Times. Maybe, when dealing with paranoid jerks who want to sue other jerks for calling their wives dirty whores, Judges should look at the reputation of the libeler. Maybe they do already, although I suspect such a thing would be really hard to quantify.

In the meantime, if someone tells lies about you online, please remember that you’re on the internet. This stuff is normal and no-one takes any notice of it, especially on message boards and forums. Get a grip, dude!