My understanding of truth as an absolute defense to libel (disclaimer: law student, not lawyer, and referring to hastily examined case law, not deeply researched understanding) is that it refers to the truth of the core statement, not the truthful replication of defamation. In other words, I believe you can still be liable for publishing “A claims X” when X is false and you had reason to know that, depending on the circumstances.
If people are interested in reading more about this, I think the thing to look into is “republication liability”, and in the US seems to be pretty unsettled, with some state-by-state variation.
It doesn’t look like a bare defense of “I wrote ‘Alice told me X’ and can prove that Alice told me X” is sufficient, but it also looks like just demonstrating that X is false is not enough. Some considerations, depending on where you are:
Did the author know X was false?
Did the author put sufficient effort into assessing the truth of X?
Was the author acting as a neutral reporter of facts?
Did the author know X was false? -- I doubt it, with the possible exception of not updating the post after receiving Spencer’s screenshots 2-3hr before publication.
Did the author put sufficient effort into assessing the truth of X? -- Probably not, since the general goal was signal-boosting the concerns and the final ‘adversarial’ fact checking was quite short (especially for any allegations first raised in the draft NL received right before publishing).
Was the author acting as a neutral reporter of facts? -- Probably not, since Ben’s post is pretty clearly trying to signal-boost a bunch of allegations about NL.
You could be right. I don’t practice in this area and thus don’t claim to have greater knowledge than you on this. I still disagree, but people should understand this is a sorta equal epistemic status disagreement.
My understanding of truth as an absolute defense to libel (disclaimer: law student, not lawyer, and referring to hastily examined case law, not deeply researched understanding) is that it refers to the truth of the core statement, not the truthful replication of defamation. In other words, I believe you can still be liable for publishing “A claims X” when X is false and you had reason to know that, depending on the circumstances.
If people are interested in reading more about this, I think the thing to look into is “republication liability”, and in the US seems to be pretty unsettled, with some state-by-state variation.
It doesn’t look like a bare defense of “I wrote ‘Alice told me X’ and can prove that Alice told me X” is sufficient, but it also looks like just demonstrating that X is false is not enough. Some considerations, depending on where you are:
Did the author know X was false?
Did the author put sufficient effort into assessing the truth of X?
Was the author acting as a neutral reporter of facts?
(Not a lawyer, or even a law student)
As these apply to the allegations in Ben’s post:
Did the author know X was false? -- I doubt it, with the possible exception of not updating the post after receiving Spencer’s screenshots 2-3hr before publication.
Did the author put sufficient effort into assessing the truth of X? -- Probably not, since the general goal was signal-boosting the concerns and the final ‘adversarial’ fact checking was quite short (especially for any allegations first raised in the draft NL received right before publishing).
Was the author acting as a neutral reporter of facts? -- Probably not, since Ben’s post is pretty clearly trying to signal-boost a bunch of allegations about NL.
You could be right. I don’t practice in this area and thus don’t claim to have greater knowledge than you on this. I still disagree, but people should understand this is a sorta equal epistemic status disagreement.