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> then the question is whether you actively participated in

There is another important question: intention. In the US, "for a public official (or other legitimate public figure) to win a libel case in the United States, the statement must have been published knowing it to be false or with reckless disregard to its truth" [1].

It seems to me that most of the problems come not from having the defamation law to begin with like you said, but from the law applying even to defendants who believed the information they were creating or disseminating was true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation

I very much believe that intent matters, and should matter, but the problem with intent in a legal setting is that often it is incredibly difficult to prove intent, and the defendant just has to say "I never intended it to mean that; I was thinking $INNOCENT_THING when I said it" to inject some doubt into the proceedings, often enough doubt to avoid a guilty verdict.

I agree that there needs to be a balance. I'd argue that US defamation law is close to the "right" balance, by making a stronger case needed to prosecute defamation against public figures (like public officials or celebrities), and by focusing not exactly on intention but on whether the defendant within reason could have believed the statement was true.

Singapore is a different culture, and they see public figures differently.

Being disrespectful to your boss, and those higher up the authority chain, is a strong cultural taboo. Authority is respected. It's complicated for us Westerners to understand, and totally goes against how we view the world and our place in it. But that's the culture, and changing it because it doesn't agree with ours would be wrong.

So yes, the US defamation law is right for the US. It's probably not right for Singapore. I'm not sure Singapore's actual law is "right" - this article and the popular support for the defendant in this case shows it may not be. But that doesn't mean they would be better off with the US version.

Let's say the NYT publishes an article about the president. You, believing it to be an accurate representation of facts, share the article. It turns out the NYT writer made it all up. Do you think it's reasonable to punish you for libel?

What about newspaper stands that sold the libelous paper?

I think it's clear this ruling is totally incompatible with a free press and free speech. Only the original source should be held accountable.

Disseminating defamatory material is legal __provided you did your due diligence__. Whether taking the journalist at face value is due diligence, I don't know.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innocent_dissemination

Does sharing a NYT article mean "look at this article I believe to be true" or does it mean "look what the NYT said"?

This is a common dilemma in social media. Does "liking" a post mean you agree with it? Does "angry face" mean you disagree? What about "laughing face", "shocked face"? It is dangerous to read legal responsibilities into an action which is probably meaningless.

Is disseminating a link to defamatory material illegal? Should it be? In this case, it was a link, not the content itself, which was shared. If Facebook added an excerpt, I would think liability falls to Facebook.

Also note that I'm more interested in what is moral/just, not legal according to any specific system, since this is a discussion about laws which vary across nations. The American/English system isn't necessarily ideal.

Sounds great in theory. In practice I, like most people, only do the due diligence on stories I disagree with. When a story confirms my biases, I accept it at face value. I don't even realise I'm doing it. It's not a conscious decision.

I recently found a subreddit where people had shared an article from a newspaper with a decent reputation. The story strongly implied that the government had engaged in crony capitalism. 96% upvoted, all the comments castigating the government. Normally I would have agreed and moved on. I certainly wouldn't have spent time fact checking an article that I agreed with. Except it was about something I knew a bit about (solar energy). The article was wrong and misleading. Perhaps even "fake", considering how many people had been misled.

When I tried to correct the record on the same subreddit, there was huge pushback. People nitpicked my fact check to death. It got a small fraction of the upvotes and comments the original fake/misleading article did.

None of those people did the due diligence, like you want them to. All of them took a journalist working for a reputable newspaper at face value. Should they all go to jail now for upvoting and commenting?

There's a lot to unpack here...

Defamation is not a criminal offense. Nobody goes to jail for defamation. You can be sued for damages from defamation in civil court.

I never said what I wanted, or gave any opinion. I'm just adding a bit of color to the conversation by stating relevant facts. The accusatory tone is not very conducive to interesting discussion.

More to your question, I highly doubt upvoting a reddit post counts as dissemination / publishing. The comments people wrote could themselves be defamatory, but I also doubt a reddit comment will cause demonstrable damages to a person's reputation. There has to be damages for you be sued, otherwise there is no reason for the suit.

I don't know the article you are referring to, but something to the general effect of "The government did a bad thing" is not defamation either. Again, you have to cause demonstrable damages to an individual for them to win a suit against you. If the article was something closer to "The government did a bad thing, This is the person responsible, This is where he lives, Let's get him fired", or if the reddit comments were of that flavor (as they often are), the case for defamation is a little stronger.

> Defamation is not a criminal offense. Nobody goes to jail for defamation. You can be sued for damages from defamation in civil court.

Since we're in a thread about Singapore…

Criminal defamation [1] is a thing here. :)

[1] https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/PC1871?ProvIds=P4XXI_499-

Just for completeness, many former British colonies inherited criminal defamation from the general body of English common law. Apparently UK only repealed it in 2010.

Of course, Singapore is famous for actually using it, but still, in many parts of the world defamation can technically be a criminal offence even if in practice the legal risk is low..

I think the test here could/should be of visible and definite authorship. A NYT article, with a byline, shared removes the onus from the disseminator. If the article is wrong, the liability goes back to the original author. A share with unknown provenance puts the responsibility on the person sharing. Libel stops with the sharer in this case!

This may have a chilling effect on communication wherein sharing is more akin to bringing up a thing you want to talk about rather than making a definitive statement. A big problem is that a baseless lawsuit can still cost the user tens of thousands of dollars.

Also if the purpose is to reduce the amount of blatant lies and misinformation I don't know that it would be very helpful as it seems like most of it actually has a byline just not one that any reasonable person would trust.

Forcing users to check for a byline and nothing else to avoid accidentally opting in to financial destruction wouldn't help much. Your idea needs expanding.

> I think the test here could/should be of visible and definite authorship

I see an additional test for the sharer as to whether they had reasonable expectation of knowing the information they were sharing was false and misleading.

Sharing from “Totally True News” (where sensational articles have no author and no source are quoted); that “you as a public figure are drinking the blood of babies.”

Comes to mind as probably valid ground to seek redress for defamation.

What if totally true news has a listed author even if he is a lunatic and lists sources even if they are awful. We ought to teach kids in school how to identify this but if we define in law which are good sources or which can get you sued into poverty we are in putting into effect a prior restraint on speech.

> What about newspaper stands that sold the libelous paper?

What about the case that you shared it after it was shown that the story was made up, and it can be proved that you knew this at the time?

What about the case that we find out the reason that the article was made up was that you fed the writer false information, in order to shield yourself from prosecution?

Bright line distinctions are difficult.

Uneven enforcement is a problem in and of itself. Doing nothing to a thousand people and then slamming a fine like this on one guy is not conducive to rule of law.

But this is Singapore, it's not a very free country.

> Uneven enforcement is a problem in and of itself. Doing nothing to a thousand people and then slamming a fine like this on one guy is not conducive to rule of law.

The defendant, Roy Ngerng [1], is often portrayed in Singapore media as a troublemaker, and has been the subject of multiple defamation suits.

Politicians in Singapore's incumbent party seem to mainly use defamation against politicians, activists, and the media, and very rarely against a random person on the street.

It seems to boil down to the government needing to protect their integrity, as former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said in a 1999 interview [2]:

> There are many critics of the PAP in Singapore. They are not all hauled up before the judiciary. Political opponents, so long as they keep within the law, don't need safeguards. They do not have to appear before the judiciary. But if they've defamed us, we have to sue them -- because if we don't, our own integrity will be suspect. We have an understanding that if a minister is defamed and he does not sue, he must leave cabinet. By defamation, I mean if somebody says the minister is on the take or is less than honest. If he does not rebut it, if he does not dare go before the court to be interrogated by the counsel for the other side, there must be some truth in it. If there is no evidence, well, why are you not suing?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Ngerng

[2] http://edition.cnn.com/ASIANOW/asiaweek/interview/goh.chok.t...

> If you accept defamation laws...

And there is the problem. While you propose an interesting academic question, the chain of events starts from a law that I see as harmful. Therefore, there's no value in justifying the legitimacy of the next steps.

The suggestion that defamation should be generally legal is somewhat outside the norm, as far as I know.

If I start a campaign, billboards and all, saying that my doctor is a pedophile once convicted of rape in Australia who has been also implicated in organ trafficking (when she's actually very wonderful) then I should be held liable for the damage to her career and reputation, at a minimum.

Outside the norm? I don't think so, it's perhaps not the majority current but it is a pretty large one.

You think it should be legal to make up complete lies about people and not have repercussions?

I suppose it would not be such a bad thing to educate people to do their own research sometimes and not believe everything they are being fed. Were it the majority of cases, we would probably not be talking about this to begin with. What makes things worse is quantity of people making the same claim, or claims coming from authority figures.

I'm not a lawyer, but I think the USA has a reasonable position on how much defamation should be tolerated.

Slander and libel are illegal, but the threshold at which the law takes effect depends on how public the target is.

As such care has to be taken when making statements about a private citizen, e.g. "Mr. X is [something horrible]", but one can say almost anything about a public figure like the president, or senators, without fear of legal trouble.

Careful with that though, as we saw with the covington kids, if powerful interests want to slander AND libel you, they will drag you kicking and screaming into the spotlight. Now you are a public figure, now you are fair-game, but they've always seen you as fair-game, they just needed to manufacture justification.

And that's just how minors are treated.

That's absurd, though. It's pretty easy to determine when someone passes the threshold from private/unknown citizen to public figure. If the alleged slander/libel happened before that point, it shouldn't matter that they've since gained notoriety.

Based on your example, I guess that's not how it always works, but there's no reason in principle why the laws and legal standard around it could not be fixed to be more fair.

The legal libel standard for public figures from NY Times v. Sullivan and Curtis Publishing Co. v. Butts is that you need to be able to prove "actual malice" (rather than something merely being untrue) which is of course hard to do because it speaks to intent.

"Public figure" does not mean "elected official". It means literally anyone who publishes (makes something public) themselves. So anyone with a social media following is a public figure. If you have to worry about being defamed, then you are already outside the protection of defamation law.

There's also the concept of a "limited-purpose public figure", which means that just commenting on something can make you a public figure in certain contexts. For example, if you were to merely say that I was a pedophile, you probably have defamed a private individual. However, if you replied to this post with something like, "You probably just think defamation law is good because you're a pedophile that doesn't want to get caught"; defamation law could take your side. After all, I joined this particular controversy by commenting on it, that makes me a limited-purpose public figure. So even if you're not a public figure, it's very easy to accidentally become one.

It is interesting that you specify Australia there. As articles like https://www.wsj.com/articles/australia-tries-to-shed-status-... indicate, Australia has a reputation for being one of the easiest places in the world to sue for defamation.

Australian views on this should therefore NOT be taken as a norm.

What you're proposing here doesn't scale. What if everyone decided that there's no value in justifying the legitimacy of the next steps following the existence of laws they each saw has harmful? If everyone did that, there would be no laws left to enforce...

Republishing libellous content can indeed be defamation. I don't know the details for his case and IANA but retweeting/sharing can land you in hot waters not only in Singapore but also in the UK for instance:

"In 2013, a defendant named Alan Davies was ordered to pay £15,000 in settlement after retweeting a Sally Bercow tweet that suggested Lord McAlpine, a former leading Conservative politician, had committed child abuse." [1]

"Defamation is apparent when one person publishes a statement or material about another person that is untrue and is damaging to the claimant’s reputation or likely to cause such harm – this is the case even if the defendant has simply republished a statement made by another." [1]

[1] https://www.daslaw.co.uk/blog/distinction-in-defamation-slan...

Is Sharing (or sharing a link!) the same as Publishing?

The law needs to be updated for this nuance.

Is giving a magazine (containing a defamatory article) to a friend Publishing?

A retweet is visible to the public. A magazine shared to a single person doesn't have the same effect. The practical difference between publishing and private sharing with friends was about the greater reach of publishing. Social media means everyone has the same reach as a publisher, with some of the same responsibilities.

There seems to be an argument to be made that sharing an article resembles saying "I heard that X" where X is the contents of the article. It seems a bit dumb to have the heard that distinction and not apply it to sharing on social media. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that by sharing an article a person is asserting they consider everything in it to be unquestionably true. It generally means they found something they heard/saw interesting.

> sharing an article resembles saying "I heard that X"

That can absolutely be the basis for slander and defamation though.

It's also worth mentioning that the shared article claimed that Malaysia, under former Prime Minister Najib Razak, had signed unfair deals with Singapore in return for help to launder stolen funds, so this is a big allegation.

However, a guy has to wonder what the odds are of the state levying such a fine in defence of an ordinary citizen.

> IANAL, and I don’t know if dissemination is somehow different from creation in defamation cases. I expect it has to be - otherwise “Mr. X is a pedophile” can be illegal while “I heard that Mr. X is a pedophile” isn’t. Which seems dumb if one’s intent was to make defamation illegal in all ways.

It is different. Opinion is also exempted. I don’t think that’s dumb at all. Otherwise it would be impossible to report on a controversy without risking a lawsuit.