Court Awards Damages For Defamation And Breach Of Privacy For Facebook Postings

A UK High Court awarded Matthew Firsht and his company damages

for defamation and breach of privacy after false statements about

him and his company, as well as his personal information, appeared

on Facebook. The information, which was not all accurate, was

posted on a fake profile page and included Firsht's supposed

sexual orientation, relationship status, birthday, and political

and religious views. In addition, a Facebook group had been created

which insinuated that Firsht owed significant money and that he had

avoided paying his debt by lying.

The fake profile and group were visible on Facebook for 16 to 17

days before Firsht discovered them and asked Facebook to take them

down. Firsht then obtained a court order requiring Facebook to

disclose the registration information of the user who was

responsible for creating the false profile and group, including the

user's IP address. That IP address, as it turned out, belonged

to one of Firscht's former school friends, Grant Raphael.

Raphael did not have a substantive defence to either the

defamation or the privacy claim. Rather, he denied setting up the

false profile and the group — he claimed that a stranger,

who had visited his apartment at the relevant time, was the

culprit. After reviewing the evidence, the court rejected

Raphael's account and found him liable.

In determining the size of the damages, the judge noted that the

extent of the publication was not clear. Because Facebook does not

keep statistics on the number of people who view group pages, it

was not known how many people had seen the offensive materials.

Based on the evidence before the court, it appears that only a

handful of people had visited the group page. The judge also

considered the limited time that the group and profile pages were

visible.

At the same time, the judge noted "Facebook is a medium in

which users do regularly search for the names of others whom they

know, and anyone who searched for the name Mathew (sic) Firsht

during those days will have found the false group without

difficulty."

The judge awarded £15,000 to Firsht and £5,000 to

his company for defamation and £2,000 to Firsht for breach of

privacy. Since the judge awarded aggravated damages as part of the

defamation award, the judge declined to award them again for breach

of privacy, even though the breach was apparently motivated by

spite, was deliberate and would otherwise have attracted such

damages.

McCarthy Tétrault Notes:

Two points of particular...