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Comment by fiblye | Hacker News Reader

Japan also has strong privacy laws, extending into excessive and absurd defamation laws.

For example, if you have piles of proof of someone committing a crime like sexual assault and the cops refuse to take it seriously, you can reliably post it on Twitter these days and people will take it seriously. In Japan, the person who committed the crime can reliably sue you for ruining their reputation and win. Stating actual plain facts about a person that harms their image on any public platform will land you in trouble, unless it’s something that’s clearly in the public interest to know (like if a company is putting arsenic in their baby food). It’s likely one reason why incidents of work harassment and abuse only become public after someone kills themselves.

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This seems like FUD. How are the laws itself “excess and absurd” compared to rest of the democratic world? It’s also strange to assert Japan has “strong privacy laws” when the exact opposite is happening in this very article we’re discussing.

> In Japan, the person who committed the (sexual) crime can reliably sue you for ruining their reputation and win

Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon thing outside of Japan [1]. And to be fair, you can’t just put a blanket ban on defamation lawsuits because it’s not wrong to sue for defamation if the allegation of sexual misconduct is in fact false. I don’t believe the majority of them to be the case, but ultimately, it’s for the courts to decide.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/12/arts/defamation-me-too.ht...

> Stating actual plain facts about a person that harms their image on any public platform will land you in trouble, unless it’s something that’s clearly in the public interest to know

Whoa. This the whole point of having defamation laws. Would you rather live in a world where every embarrassing details about your life can be published online?

> Whoa. This the whole point of having defamation laws.

Defamation laws normally deal with disseminating false information, not embarrassing information. True statements cannot be defamatory in many/most legal systems, no matter how much they harm someone's reputation.

The topic was about Japanese defamation laws. Outside Japan, privacy laws would cover these cases.

Also note that facts that “harm someone's reputation” isn’t indicative of illegal or even immoral conduct. For example, having caught the COVID19 disease might harm one’s reputation, but it doesn’t make one a bad person however true it is.

That’s not the point of defamation laws. If someone assaults you and you post a video on twitter, most first world countries will use that as evidence against the person who assaulted you. In Japan, it’s perfectly legal to record someone, but making the fact that the person is dangerous and not in police custody will get you in trouble, and the person who assaulted you will use the video against you. Defamation is generally globally defined to be false statements made with the intent to harm someone’s reputation. In Japan, full context, factual representations are treated as just about as bad as a false claim.

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