[ih] Defamation lawsuit brought by self-proclaimed email "inventor" settles

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Tue May 21 08:00:17 PDT 2019


    > From: Richard Bennett

    > Masnick's claim that Huffington Post published material damaging to
    > "its journalistic integrity"

But those articles _would_ damage the journalistic reputation of a news
organization which published them. (I'm going to avoid the rathole of
whether HuffPo has any journalistic reputation.)

    > strongly suggests that Huffington Post should take actions to
    > restore said integrity

This is a real tar-pit. I get your point, but chastising the HuffPo can't
really be attacking _Ayyadurai_'s speech rights, but rather HuffPo's.

And pointing out someone's busted speech happens all the time, and while
such activity does implicitly call for a reaction from the attackee, i) it
doesn't on its own suggest what the reaction should be, and ii) does this
mean that _all_ such pointings-out are illegitimate (since by this
standard they're attacks on free speech)? If the latter, what _is_ the
appropriate response to someone saying, or publishing, something bogus?
Surely not silence!


I wonder to what degree Ayyadurai's campaign to get credit was just part of
the runup to his Senate campaign? If so, his defeat there is true karma.

	Noel



More information about the Internet-history mailing list