Paper about Herbalife-related patient death removed after legal threats

Re:Paper about Herbalife-related patient death removed after... by jrockway on Monday December 21, 2020 @02:05AM (#25492747)

Probably time to relax the laws on defamation a little bit, to prevent cases like these. The laws date from a time when access to media was hard, and just getting your thing published was an impossible amount of work. Now that we have social media, it's not clear that we need the law to "protect" us here. If someone writes a hit piece about you, can probably get more people to read your defense. That's new, and the laws haven't been updated to account for that.

(Unlike more pressing issues facing society, this one doesn't require spending money, or passing a Constitutional amendment, so it feels within reach!)

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Re:Paper about Herbalife-related patient death removed after... by zaroth on Monday December 21, 2020 @10:04AM (#25495513)

Seems like exactly the wrong approach. New technology makes false things you write about someone easier to discover and more likely to be read in the future by, e.g. a company considering hiring you.

Defamation is more damaging to the average nobody than it ever could have been 50 years ago. If anything the laws should be strengthened.

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Re:Paper about Herbalife-related patient death removed after... by curryst on Monday December 21, 2020 @11:09AM (#25496158)

I disagree, for the same reason that forums typically ban trolls rather than just let them be. It takes an order of magnitude more effort to defend against a claim than it does to make the claim.

I could hypothetically accuse you of being a rapist right now. I can just pick a random day I say it happened, let's say last February 23rd. Cool, it took me about 30 seconds to come up with that. Let's say I then blast that all over Twitter and Facebook. Are you okay with having no legal recourse? Are you okay with "jrockway is a rapist" being one of the top Google results for your name? Maybe it's better, maybe you did really well and your rebuttal is the first Google result. I would still be really uncomfortable that my first Google result is me attempting to say that I'm not a rapist.

That's assuming people will even read your defense. There are some classes of accusations where you will be tried in the court of public opinion before you are even aware, and your attempts at defense will only be interpreted as further evidence that you are guilty. The rise of Fake News accusations should tell you exactly how much telling the truth is going to help your case.

Rape is a particularly heinous thing to accuse someone of, but I chose it specifically because of the "believe the victim's narrative" messaging that surrounds it. Accusations of a crime fall under defamation laws, and so long as they don't file a police report about it, defamation is the only law I'm aware of that it would violate.

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Re:Paper about Herbalife-related patient death removed after... by jrockway on Monday December 21, 2020 @12:11PM (#25496917)

Is it worth suppressing life-saving science to clean up my Google profile, though? Everything can be abused, but some abuse is more harmful than others. As the laws stand right now, legitimate science journals are afraid to publish legitimate science. That's super bad.

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Re:Paper about Herbalife-related patient death removed after... by marcus_holmes on Monday December 21, 2020 @06:35AM (#25493957)

First time I've encountered this opinion, and this makes so much sense. Thanks :)

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