Just a few days ago in Chicago a twitterer named Amanda Bonnen was charged with defamation by her former landlords, for an 11 word “tweet” about the mold in her upscale chicago apt. She wrote the following: “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment is bad for you? Horizon Realty thinks it’s ok.” The suit could end up costing her $50,000 if she’s found guilty.
Before the internet era, casual comments like the one above could be freely exchanged during lunch breaks, while waiting in line etc. Now, with Twitter’s shorthand and 140 character limit, we make the same off-hand casual comments, except with permanent records and a vast unknown audience. In short, Twitter leads us to state things in the same flippant way we once did in the lunch line. We have to be more careful about this as we continue to use social networking to express ourselves.
Fortunately for Ms. Bonnen, Horizon Realty doesn’t have much leg to stand on in this case, and is certainly out of public favor for taking such action. “We’re a sue first, ask questions later type of organization,” a representative for the company said in the Chicago Sun Times. That is pretty hilarious, isn’t it? Like a decent poem about the aggressive litigious instincts of Americans. I suppose there are certain situations where I might even say that was killing it, but not here. Horizon realty has shot itself in the foot big time, and I’m guessing they’ll lose current and future tenants because of this. They claim the tweet could have been read by a million people (on some level possible I guess) even though only 20 people saw the original post. They also need to be able to prove that their apartments really don’t have mold in order to prove Ms. Bonnen’s tweet is a falsehood and therefore a viable defamation of the company. The ironies rear their head for this one. First, you have to think of the Internet itself, which promises such free and unfettered communication, yet also gives us more reason than ever to censor ourselves. It’s a traceable record and you’ve no idea who sees what. But the biggest irony in all this is that by filing a big news lawsuit against a single twitter user, Horizon Realty brings MUCH more negative attention to themselves than if they just let the little tweet lay out to evaporate. This misstep is further hammered home by the fact that twitterers appear to have each other’s back. After the story broke, hundreds of clever and empathetic twitterers reposted Bonnen’s original tweet as a dare to Horizon Reality: Why don’t you just sue us all? Always there is Power in numbers, and twitterers clearly have some group-driven ingenuity too. Horizon Realty will lose their suit, I’m fairly sure; they will lose tenants, and ultimately they will lose the one thing they sought to protect – their reputation. All in all a good example of exactly how not to kill it!
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