Peter wrote:
Truth is a defence to libel in the UK,
It may be a defence but in the UK legal system it matters not a jot.The UK law, particularly in libel and defamation as quoted by @airborne_again is a haven for the duplicitous of all nationalities. Libel Tourism, I like that…. 
gallois wrote:
" Fred Xxyyvv who lives at hhh st is a lesbian transexual "
A Scottish court held that an employer calling a heterosexual male homosexual was not libel, as there was nothing wrong with being homosexual. That was several years ago.
Compu$erve (I was on it for years) was a terrible model but it owned the market, and back then the whole world wanted to “say things” in communities. Who remembers EFFSIG? All the debates about DES getting cracked, the NSA reading our emails hence PGP… It was also terrible because they forced your username to be same as the name on your credit card – a recipe for all kinds of nasty stuff, not to mention killing off real debate.
When I was with CSI the user name was a number. Later they had the email and user name with full name.
It had its pros and cons. Iˆd never known for all likelyhood that I was communicating with people like John Deakin and Randy Sohn in Avsig or the FS staff in FSForum. It was a different culture. Personal attacks were shot down faster than Lucky Luke shoots his shadow. There were certains no go words. Do it once, get reprimanded, twice, locked out for a month, trice and you were history in that forum. Try to come back or pull a fast one, you could be evicted from CSI altogether. I know people this happened to and at the time that meant you were offline, particularly if you put of AOL as well, as they communicated.
But this is ancient history now, never the less particularly school, the sysop forum, was a true school for mods.
There was a change in the law in 2013 to try and stop libel tourism, basically restricting who could bring a case in the UK.
Many of the historic cases in the UK were against newspapers, which are something of a law unto themselves. They print absolute rubbish all the time, presented as fact not opinion, and such publications obviously damage reputations. I have no problem with a legal system which facilitates libel claims in such circumstances.
If truth were not a defence against defamation, that would basically amount to a restriction on free speech that prevented you saying something about someone which they would rather keep quiet.
I’ll take the libel tourism thank you over a jurisdiction where I can’t truthfully say that the man in the next town is a crook because he’d prefer to keep it quiet. That sounds much more repressive and much more likely to lead to frivolous claims.
All this started over various things being said about the CAA and some angry individuals who see themselves as the thought police in aviation circles making absurd claims that saying some of this stuff might be libel.
When I was with CSI the user name was a number
That’s the email address. In forums, the username was the CC account name.
If truth were not a defence against defamation, that would basically amount to a restriction on free speech that prevented you saying something about someone which they would rather keep quiet.
Exactly. And it would be so severe that what we read here about the system elsewhere cannot possibly be a meaningful summary.
Peter wrote:
Exactly. And it would be so severe that what we read here about the system elsewhere cannot possibly be a meaningful summary.
This is a translation of (part of) the Q&A pages of a Swedish law firm, referring to an actual court case. Note in particular the final sentence.
Identifying someone as a rapist on a forum such as Facebook or Instagram is the sort of thing that is typically likely to cause offence.
[….]
Earlier we mentioned a case from the beginning of July. The purpose of the Facebook group in which the woman named the man was to draw attention to structural abuses. As this was not the purpose of the group, the court found that it was not justifiable to write about an individual.
Since it was not considered justifiable to provide the information, the district court never examined the truthfulness of the information. Thus, the fact that a piece of information is true is not sufficient to make it justifiable to disseminate it
arj1 wrote:
Graham, that is at least what I was being taught for the last three jobs on the “data protection” annual courses – not sure if that is the legal definition in law, it I was taught the same things multiple times by multi providers, and the sexual orientation together with some other things (party membership? some political info) was in that category.
Maybe it is just for the employer to consider?
That’s something totally different, that’s data protection. If I hold data on you and your transgender lesbianism for whatever reason, there are laws that govern how I handle that data.
None of that, nor defamation law, prevents me describing you as a transgender lesbian. You do not have an overarching right not to be talked/written about.
Airborne_Again wrote:
Earlier we mentioned a case from the beginning of July. The purpose of the Facebook group in which the woman named the man was to draw attention to structural abuses. As this was not the purpose of the group, the court found that it was not justifiable to write about an individual.
Since it was not considered justifiable to provide the information, the district court never examined the truthfulness of the information. Thus, the fact that a piece of information is true is not sufficient to make it justifiable to disseminate it
If that is a complete and accurate summary, with no pertinent points omitted, then it is truly weird. What the court has basically done is found against someone for saying something, even though it’s true, because in their view it wasn’t the appropriate place to say it and/or they didn’t have an appropriate justification for saying it.
What a chilling effect on free speech that is – the idea that one’s right to speak the truth should be limited by whether a court thinks it’s the right forum for saying that thing and whether you have a good reason for saying it.
If truth wasn’t an almost-watertight defence to defamation in English law then we really would have uncontrolled libel tourism. Libel tourism in England is/was not so much because of the way the law works (although the courts did tend to put the burden of proving truth, if truth were claimed, on the respondent) but more because of the willingness of English courts to examine cases brought by people/entities with little connection to the country and the fact that London’s role as a global hub meant that many of the parties to such actions have a presence here.
@Graham wrote:- None of that, nor defamation law, prevents me describing you as a transgender lesbian. You do not have an overarching right not to be talked/written about.
If you add to that statement “with good reason” you would be correct in France.
But if you were to make such a statement without good reason you could fall foul of several laws including the right to privacy which we do have here.
It’s why some of the gutter media here spend more time gossiping and rumour mongering about the UK Royal family than they do about prominent people in France.
