It’s not libel. Defamation requires a false statement of fact. Marking a website as “unsafe” is an opinion.
No, it's not.
You're welcome to cite case law if you want to insist. Otherwise, unsafe (in the context of infosec) has a definition of likely or able to cause harm or malfunction. Something that is provable or falsifiable with evidence.
For clarity I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, but what means sense to the layperson (including experts in a particular field) is sometimes at odds with what the law says.
I reported a falsely flagged site repeatedly for weeks with absolutely no action from them.
Mozilla and Microsoft both did actually remove the warnings after the reports (Edge and Firefox stopped displaying the warning). Google did not. Google strong armed me into registering for google products, like a fucking bastard of a company.
This was the moment I went from "I don't love google anymore" to "Google can get fucked".
I wish them bankruptcy and every damn legal consequence that is possible to enforce.
"In addition to establishing that the defendant was aware of his statement's defamatory meaning, the plaintiff also must show that the defamatory statement is false. The falsity requirement has evolved gradually through a two-step process. Initially, the courts recognized that truth was a defense in a defamation suit. With time, however, the burden of proof on the issue of the statement's truth or falsity shifted to the plaintiff, so that now a statement is not actionable unless it can be proven false."
https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?params=/c... (pp. 851ff).
If the opinion is meant to be just another opinion, then it shouldn't cause any blacklisting of any sorts anywhere.
I agree with this! The registrar should not have triggered a suspension because of this. They're not obligated to, and the two processes should be decoupled.
No.
The source should be more careful. It's the equivalent of a renowned newspaper printing warning a restaurant being unsafe to visit. Should the customers' willingness to visit be magically decoupled from this opinion?
I'm not saying they should "ignore" reports of abuse but treat them as they are -- reports. They can then perform their own independent investigation.
That may well have happened here. I suspect the author isn't telling us something.
“unsafe” is a term that is both broader and more vague, so I would consider it opinion unless backed up by appropriate facts (like “contains CSAM”, “contains malware”, and so forth).
Except when it isn't. CSAM may be easier to define and identify than pornography, but there still exists material that treads a moral grey area.
Fuck Google.
This is absolutely libel. They put a big fucking red banner on top of my site, telling the world that it's unsafe, using all the authority they have as one of the largest tech companies in the world.
In my case - it was a jellyfin instance I'd stood up to host family videos of my kids for my parents.
It was not compromised, and showed only a login page. I reported it as a false flag repeatedly, for weeks, with Google doing jack fucking shit.
Only after signing up in their search console and registering the site did the warning disappear.
They are abusively forcing people into their products. Fuck Google.
In case it wasn't entirely clear - Google can get fucked. Fuck Google.
> Libel is the publication of writing, pictures, cartoons, or any other medium that expose a person to public hatred, shame, disgrace, or ridicule, or induce an ill opinion of a person, and are not true
They literally show a giant red banner to every user of their browser that tries to access my site, calling me unsafe. Which is factually incorrect, and absolutely induces a negative opinion.
There's nothing on my site except a login page, it wasn't compromised, and it wasn't available for public access or registration. They can't "opine" on safety - it's just factually incorrect.
Convenient for them that the only way to resolve the issue is to sign up for Google products, though. Wonder how that works...
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Next you'll try telling me that calling someone a cheat is also just an opinion, but it's standard legal libel.
What you can't do is imply non-public knowledge, aka "I heard from my cousin who works in law enforcement that Kyle murdered a hobo when he was 12 but the records were sealed", or state specific facts that can be proven true or false: "Kyle murdered a hobo on September 11, 2018 out back of the 7-11 in Gainesville, FL"
The standard for libel/slander is much, much higher than people think. It's extremely difficult to meet them, and for public figures, it's almost impossible.
That's ... not quite true. I wouldn't go that far.
1A rights are construed really broadly. The courts don't do the 'he wasn't legally convicted therefore it's illegal to call him one' thing.
In other countries local TLDs are of course normal (e.g. .it for Italy, .za for South Africa, .cn for China...) and not only used for scam links.
