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Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of "not understanding free speech", in America (where Meta is) free speech exclusively refers to our Bill of Rights and the limitation on government to unfairly suppress your speech, specifically your political speech.

It is completely unrelated to a private citizen interacting with a private business in the eyes of American law, American business and Americans ourselves. The only free speech issue here from our perspective is "Is the government illegally restricting Meta's corporate right to free speech?" And no, making Meta identify a user is not a violation of their 1A free speech rights to us.

If you're speaking of a totally different European legal concept, it might be helpful for you to identify that.

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Export the free speech is a red herring. The underlying issue is whether an aggrieved party can compel certain kinds of discovery to respond to libel (which has never been perfected speech). Prime were just able to be libelous with impunity because … the interwebs…

Libel - Another legal concept that varies dramatically by region.

In America, proving libel is extremely difficult and requires you to demonstrate real damages.

So in this case if it were American, unless the aggrieved party can demonstrate monetary damages, under American law there is no libel as we do not consider "hurt feelings" or "damaged reputation" to be libel. So in America we would demand that the offended party demonstrate that they have been financially harmed before we unmask the anonymous individual to fully investigate and adjudicate the claim.

If you're discussing libel under a EU or European nations context, it could be helpful to identify which version of libel law you are referencing, because this case from an American's perspective is no where near our extremely high bar. (And, as a side note, under American law all international libel convictions are automatically unenforceable here, to prevent tourism to areas who do not require sufficiently high bar)

This is a case in European courts between European entities. Why do you think it's helpful to bring in American concepts, and then complain about how the European ones are different?

1. Meta is a multi-national based in America.

2. I am not complaining at all.

3. In fact, I am replying to someone complaining that folks "don't know what <$GENERAL LEGAL TERM WITH REGIONAL DIFFERENCES> means" and I'm explaining: you're on an American website whose readership is majority American, talking about an American business, and you have the audacity to claim "people don't know this <HIGHLY LOCAL LEGAL TERM>?". And so I'm explaining WHY Americans would be confused by the seemingly low-bar for libel or confusion around free speech.

This case may be European courts and entities (and I asked for location specifics as the concepts can often vary country by country in Europe), but this website is not a European website and it's absolutely normal than Americans are here discussing this.

> whose readership is majority American

As far as I know, there are more Americans here than visitors from any other country, but the majority of people is still not American: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35568123

I feel like American readers are sometimes guilty of assuming everyone else is also American and understands their references, but the world is a bigger place than that.

> So in this case if it were American, unless the aggrieved party can demonstrate monetary damages, under American law there is no libel as we do not consider "hurt feelings" or "damaged reputation" to be libel.

Based on my poor understanding of US law, I think you are mistaken. Defamation per se recognizes that certain statements are so damaging to one's reputation that proving damages is not required. From [1],

> In an Alaska Supreme Court case, a woman accused a man of assault, battery, and false imprisonment, and he brought a claim against her for defamation. The court explained that because the statements imputed a serious crime, the man was not required to prove the damage to his reputation and emotional distress.

The case discussed in the article includes accusations that the plaintiff films women without their consent, allegedly in a sexual context (although that's redacted so I could be wrong). That could totally fall under category 1 of Defamation Per Se.

[1] https://www.findlaw.com/injury/torts-and-personal-injuries/w...

This is the right take on it.

The era where you could fax ASCII art of a gun to someone without the Feds following up is gone. It was perpetrated not on any kind of justice theory of the power of the anonymous actor, but on a power inequality: governments hadn't caught up with what the technology enabled, so individuals using new technology could out-maneuver enforcement.

That is no longer true for most Internet users. The tools are in place for mass-surveillance and mass-enforcement. Governments can take down a website, governments can black-hole a DNS entry, governments can honeypot someone into trying to trade Bitcoin for criminal activity, governments can jail citizens indefinitely until they cough up passwords, and governments can require a corporation divulge privately-held information on penalty of loss of corporate privileges (including ability to exist).

The "golden era" of the Internet was a latency hiccup, not a new world order.

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