johnhemming wrote:JohnB wrote:Standards of behaviour should be the same everywhere.
I agree with you about this. There is, however, an argument that either
a) The board needs sufficient information about all posters to provide legal protection under S5 DA2013 ... or
b) The board needs the same information about those posters posting in PD and anything materially contentious is handled there.
Defamatory comments can potentially be made on any board, regardless of whether that board is intended to handle "materially contentious" matters, so your option b) is not sufficient to completely deal with litigation risk to do with defamation (*). It would probably reduce that risk considerably, due to the discussions elsewhere being less likely to become heated to the point that people make defamatory comments, but it won't eliminate that risk.
However,
Section 5 of the Defamation Act 2013 does not itself say what information the website operator must have about posters. Instead, it says that it's a defence for website operators to actions for defamation that they did not post the defamatory statement(s) themselves, unless they either acted maliciously or failed to respond as required by regulations to a 'notice of complaint' from the complainant. Those and related regulations are in
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2013/9780111104620, and as far as I can see, they don't actually require website operators to be in possession of
any information that personally identifies the poster, nor even any means of communicating privately with the poster. What they say about communicating privately with the poster is basically just that if the website operator doesn't have an email address or other electronic means of doing so, or if they do so but receive no response from the poster, they should take down the statements complained about within 48 hours (disregarding weekends and bank holidays). And what they say about information that personally identifies the poster is basically just that the poster should
either consent to the statements complained about being taken down
or provide their full name and address to the website operator, plus whether they consent to the website operator passing those details on to the complainant, and accordingly either pass the details on to the complainant or inform the complainant that the poster has not consented to them being passed on.
Or more briefly, provided a website reasonably promptly takes down statements simply because they've been complained about, the website operator doesn't even need posters' email addresses, and even if they don't want to take down complained-about statements that readily, they don't need anything more than posters' email addresses.
Caveats about the above: it's a summary, so I haven't even tried to give every last detail; I really do mean the "as far as I can tell" (I'm a layman with some skill at reading formal documentation, not a lawyer, and even if I were a lawyer, I'd require substantial payment for a proper legal opinion!); I cannot be certain I haven't missed a later version of the regulations.
(*) In case anyone is wondering why various subjects have been relegated to Polite Discussions when that relegation isn't sufficient to deal with that litigation risk, that risk is not the explanation we've had previously of why Polite Discussions exists and is handled the way it is. Instead, that explanation is that it deals with advertisers not wanting their products to be associated with various opinions on contentious issues in internet search results, with the way Polite Discussions is handled removing it from internet searches.
Gengulphus