Twitter account defamation cases expected to be on way

Recent high-profile cases of hacked Twitter accounts include Genevieve Barr, the 25-year-old deaf actress, who grew up in Harrogate and played the lead role in BBC drama series The Silence.

She told the Yorkshire Post yesterday: “My Twitter account was hijacked but I had no idea how it happened as I change my passwords regularly. I have a responsibility to be a role model and with a sizeable group of followers, being hijacked took some of my credibility away.”

The threat of false endorsement is not only a worry for celebrities. The social networking and microblogging service is also used by businesses worldwide as an important marketing platform.

Richard Martin, an intellectual property and technology associate at global law firm Squire Sanders in Leeds, said: “A person cannot realistically prevent someone from setting up a spoof Twitter account, if that is what someone is set on doing.”

Mr Martin recommends that the first port of call is to report the spoof account to Twitter via their online designated reporting procedure. If this fails then “the victim could potentially bring a claim for defamation and/or malicious falsehood against the spoof account holder, and as part of that seek damages and/or an injunction preventing such further conduct”.

However, this assumes that the victim of the phoney account knows who is responsible.

According to Mr Martin: “If the victim does not know who has set the account up, then it might be possible for them to obtain a court order compelling Twitter to disclose that information which Twitter may hold and which may assist the victim in identifying who the spoof account holder is.”

Farhat Mahmood, a solicitor at Leeds-based Ford & Warren Solicitors, said: “Businesses too should check that they are not being impersonated and even if you do not tweet, it’s probably in your interests to search regularly against your name to ensure that someone else is not tweeting as or for you.”

According to Mr Martin, technically speaking, once Twitter has had notice of a publication on its site which gives the victim a cause of action against the account holder, Twitter should close the account.

If Twitter did not shut down the account, then it was potentially jointly liable for the publication, Mr Martin said. However, Mr Martin said that United States laws on this type of issue are generally less protective of the victim in such circumstances than the equivalent English laws.

Jonathan Grogan, from law firm Dickinson Dees, stressed how powerful a tool Twitter is.

He said: “Someone with an agenda has a vast platform to spread false innuendo. By the time the account is taken down, the damage may have already been done.

“The nature of Twitter poses a problem for law in that a tweet is immediate and hence there cannot be an injunction.”

Last year, South Tyneside Council obtained a US court order forcing Twitter to release information on a user who posted allegedly libellous comments about the authority.