Libel or fair comment – you decide.

// January 30th, 2008 // Uncategorized

Now, I’m pretty used at this stage to my comments being removed, altered, even directed to spam sites by the grand poobah but claiming a mild attempted rib tickler of a comment based on current events involving a public voting process might be libelous is a bit of a stretch.

Below is the original comment complete with the misspelling of “mislaid” as “misled” which was made in the context of the recent problems RTe had with You’re A Star and losing votes. The grand poobah has been doing some part-time tech support on RTe recently and he has also commenting publicly about the You’re a Star mislaid votes problem on his twitter account hence the references. So, I’d reckon the comment was solidly on the side of non-libelous. Also, given that only Rte and another site are the only entities identified I’m not sure who’d be doing the suing as the publisher would have to be sued, which it would appear might involve someone suing themselves. Or was it all intended to deliberately suggest libelous comment where none actually existed with the intent of lower the public’s opinion of the poster? Now what would be the legal term for that?

and here is the altered one suggesting the text above was libelous.

It’s all kind of petty really when you consider the source. What can we all expect next altering the comments of contributers so that they are libelous?