Cowardly cuts
Heart of the Matter
Padraig Burns A COUPLE of weeks ago, the committee of Westport United Football Club organised a get-together for all the people who had contributed to the running of the club in the previous 12 months. It was a simple gesture (a few drinks and some finger food) aimed at thanking the voluntary workers within the club, the various club sponsors and the numerous people who gave their assistance and expertise behind the scenes when asked to do so. Around 60 people attended from the 100 or so invited and, as the cliché goes, a great night was had by all.
However, a few days later, while browsing through a chat page on the website, www.foot.ie, this writer came across a reference to the event and the author, who went under the name ‘quay heart’, described the night as a ‘licking-up session’, while also making references to ‘free booze’ and ‘money wasted’.
Now, if that was the case, which it wasn’t, then the forum to air such views would have been the forthcoming annual meeting or a regular club meeting. But because it hasn’t been challenged by anyone within the club, and it is still flying around cyber space, it is only a matter of time before the rantings of ‘quay heart’ become gospel. That’s the way things tend to go on the internet, misinformation is placed and gradually, because it’s not corrected, it gets taken as truth.
Sadly, there are many casualties along the route to the lie being accepted as truth. In the case described above, there are no casualties yet, as the people being targeted are mature enough to treat it as a bout of misguided juvenile sniping, but this is not always the case and many people have suffered greatly from anonymous posters.
There was a case a few years ago when a west of Ireland businessman was targeted via a website which quite viciously questioned his character and his integrity as a businessman. The target of the hate campaign tried to discover who was behind it, succeeded eventually, but by the time he got to the bottom of it, a lot of damage had been done and, while it wasn’t fatal to his business, there was no question that he was deeply shook by the entire saga.
In 1999, in one of the first cases of its kind in Ireland, a man was jailed for two-and-a-half years for posting on message boards and sending e-mails that alleged one of his former teachers was a paedophile. In 2001, a Mayo man paid substantial damages to a business rival after he was convicted of defaming the woman by falsely advertising her as a prostitute on a website. Last year the concert promotion company, MCD, initiated legal proceedings against a website that hosts message forums on a range of topics, following a discussion on the site that made accusations about failings in security at last summer’s Oxegen festival. The offending site no longer allows discussions about MCD or concerts that it hosts.
The huge growth in the popularity of blogging has made internet publishing simple and straightforward for those who wish to get their views to a wider audience. In the main, it’s uncontroversial but we can expect more cases like the one taken by the barrister last year when she objected to the contents of the rate your solicitor website.
Trying to track down who posts what can be difficult and expensive and if a poster doesn’t want to risk legal action then they tend to make their posts from internet cafés or some other form of public access computer.
Digital Rights Ireland, a lobby group for the defence of civil, legal and human rights online, believe that cases such as this underline the differences between Irish and US law in this area. Under current Irish law the host of a website can be seen as a publisher and can be liable for content on the website, even if they didn’t write it themselves, once they are made aware of it. (In contrast, in the US, once the person who posted the content is willing to stand over it, the host can keep it on the internet and the case proceeds to court.)
As a result, hosting companies here have erred on the side of caution and removed any content that they receive a legal communication over. So, media organisations or internet companies that allow the public to post comments on their sites have to be extremely careful. Visitors to blogs can also leave comments that could potentially leave the blogger open to legal action.
There are no legal obstacles to taking a case against a website located overseas that defames an Irish person and is available in Ireland. Defamation is about damage done to your reputation so you can take an action wherever someone reads it and wherever your reputation is. But there are practical issues associated with establishing who to pursue and relatively few people have decided to go to such trouble and expense.
Admittedly, the reference in the opening paragraphs of this column would not constitute a serious character assassination when compared to the other examples and it’s unlikely to result in a legal action. But it is an example of what can go wrong when people holding grudges decide to publish their thoughts online. Having a strongly held view on an issue is all very well, but there is very little merit, or decency, in postings remarks on a website that simply aim to cause personal hurt. Of course, it’s easy to do so because the poster is anonymous so he or she doesn’t have to stand over what they say. It’s the ultimate form of cowardice and the advice from this corner is to do what we tend to do with unsigned letters to this office – dump them.
Blogging A blog (web-log) is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.
They are remarkably easy to create - the example above took less than an hour and updating them takes minutes.
Social networking sites are fast becoming the most popular on the web with the success of
MySpace and
bebo .
