A group of scammers is retaliating against me for exposing them and the Reddit admins and legal department completely ignore it.
I consulted with lawyers who told me that my only option is to spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to pursue each individual reddit account that’s doing it.
Is your reddit account tied to your real life information? Why are you consulting lawyers for trolls taking the piss out of you on reddit?
Yes, I was a public figure on reddit.
And what damages can you calculate caused by the libel?
That would be quite difficult due the nature of my project. But certainly I could calculate some; monetary and reputation.
And can you prove the comments were false/lies/intending to mislead?
For example, if you made a product which accidentally explodes and hurts someone, and they post about it on reddit, it wouldn’t be libel.
If someone is telling lies, that would be grounds. But only worth it if theres significant repetitional harm.
Also, what if people are in a different country? Different laws on libel?
And can you prove the comments were false/lies/intending to mislead?
Yes, very easily.
But financially and reputational damage is next to nothing?
Not sure what you mean.
It’s not up to Reddit to decide what is libel under the law (yet), that’s the court’s job, but even if it were on Reddit what would you expect them to do? Ban the people? They’ll make new accounts. IP ban? VPN.
Your real goal here is to make the people stop posting what you say are lies, and the only real recourse is legal. Find a lawyer, you might be able to get someone to work on contingency if your case is solid.
even if it were on Reddit what would you expect them to do?
Supposedly they have dedicated “anti-evil” teams that deal with this type of thing.
Ban the people? They’ll make new accounts. IP ban? VPN.
Reddit can deal with that much easier than lawyers can. It would be a continual, massive money-sink to use legal action to continually take down the new accounts. Whereas reddit can track trends and things that are occurring on their own website much easier. They already deal with stuff like this on a regular basis in regards to spam, etc.
that’s the court’s job
Find a lawyer, you might be able to get someone to work on contingency if your case is solid
It doesn’t appear that defamation is something lawyers take on contingency. They all asked for a retainer and hourly rate and made it sound like it might not even be possible even after spending tens of thousands of dollars.
Ideally you’d be able to simply go to a judge and show that the info was defamation and get an order for reddit to take it down, but apparently it doesn’t work like that, and you have to hunt down the individual people behind the accounts and be able to get them to court.
They all asked for a retainer and hourly rate and made it sound like it might not even be possible even after spending tens of thousands of dollars.
Yes, much like HTML the law is an interpreted language and it’s never certain how a judge or jury will interpret it, no matter how good an argument your lawyer makes.
Reddit can deal with that much easier than lawyers can. It would be a continual, massive money-sink to use legal action to continually take down the new accounts.
Betraying your naïveté there; you have it backwards. Reddit are the ones that would be playing whack-a-mole with accounts. Proper legal discovery (yes, against Reddit, they will respond to a subpoena) would get the IP addresses and maybe personal info of the posters. Trivial to find which company owns an IP using a tool like https://mxtoolbox.com. Then, subpoena the ISP for the subscriber that IP was assigned to in a window of time, around when the comment was posted, your lawyers contact them with a scary letter and hopefully they stop. If they don’t, you then have to go to court to get a court order or injunction or whathaveyou. And if they still persist, then you have to go to court again to enforce the previous judgement and probably apply stricter consequences.
That’s how it works. Yes, it’s expensive, and yes that bars some from getting justice. Yes that sucks, and I wish it was different. But it is the (legal) solution to your problem.
A subpoena would do nothing if they were using a VPN, and if they were in another country I expect it would be just as difficult/impossible.
Taking legal action doesn’t stop a whack-a-mole.
But it is the (legal) solution to your problem.
Yes, I noted that in the OP.
Taking legal action stops the problem at the source, thus no need for whack-a-mole. The law is less about prevention and more about remedy, because this isn’t Minority Report.
Regardless, if you’re now going to make the argument that Reddit has or “should have” more power to stop this kind of thing than the US legal system, then I’m gonna have to bow out. I’m sorry there’s not a more satisfying answer than the one you’ve gotten. Good luck.
Expose them harder, it’s that simple.
Well, it’s not that simple because when people search for my project they see a bunch of disinformation and libel that these people are spreading.
