Forum - View topicAnswerman - Defamation Versus Free Speech
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Zendervai
 Posts: 263 |
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I have to be honest, this way too common (and very America-centric) misunderstanding of Free Speech is bothering me more and more. Yes, it is important that people be able to speak their minds. No, that does not extend to calls for violence or harm and if someone actively lies in a harmful way, of course there should be consequences for that. (I have no idea if the allegations this woman made are true or not, caveat)
If the only defense you have for something someone said is “what they said is wrong in a harmful way/repugnant, but this person has free speech” that’s not a good defense and it’s probably worth examining why that’s the knee jerk response. Being able to sue if someone puts out harmful lies about you is not a bad thing and the idea that “yeah, I lied in a really incendiary way, but I have free speech” is a defense is ridiculous. Especially since the US is the only country without hate speech restrictions and that lack of a restriction doesn’t seem to be doing much good. |
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Lactobacillus yogurti
 Posts: 916 Location: Latin America |
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This is called USdefaultism. Thinking that everything from the US applies everywhere is not even laughable, but facepalmable.
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writerpatrick
 Posts: 697 Location: Canada |
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The Kimmel incident recently showed the limits of US free speech. While goverments cannot impose laws against free speech, companies and corporations can limit what their employees say, especially on company time.
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Blanchimont
 Posts: 3847 Location: Finland |
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While that's (supposedly) the letter of the law, otherwise that is a poor example. The reason the Kimmel show was (temporarily) taken down was that a Trump-appointed FCC chair threatened ABC and its parent Disney with up to and including possible fines and license suspension.. |
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SaiyanHeretic
Posts: 108 |
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Regarding the Kimmel incident, legal experts generally agree that if Disney as the parent company had taken up the case to defend Kimmel's free speech rights, they would have won handily. Taking him off the air was an act of cowardly capitulation to an authoritarian regime reaching beyond the limits of their power. Preemptive acquiescence is not how you deal with a bully.
As far as the defamation of Sosuke Toka goes, I'm less interested in whether the statements against him are protected speech so much as what grounds the defendant had for making them. Of course, I've heard about the interpretation that Ranking of Kinds features cultures coded as unflattering depictions of native peoples oppressed by Imperial Japan in the past. But have there ever been formal charges against Toka regarding CSAM? Or is this another case of fictional artistry being given the same weight as illegal acts against real people? |
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Gina Szanboti
 Posts: 12750 |
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If someone tried to use that as a defense, they'd lose upon admitting they knew it was a lie, so nobody does that in court. In the US, at least where it concerns public figures being defamed, defamation relies on what's called "actual malice." This doesn't mean you were angry when you said what you said, or that you intended harm, but rather than you knew what you said was a defamatory lie or said it with reckless disregard for whether or not it was true. Wiki explains it better than I can, since ianal. I'm not sure what the law says when it's public figures or government officials doing the defamation of ordinary people. We may soon find out the limits on the latter, since they've been pumping out defamatory lies by the bushel lately. |
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ANN Forum Mod / Admin
Posts: 5 Location: This account can not receive PMs |
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Let’s please try to keep this conversation focused on the single, specific case this article is about here. —F
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Videogamep
 Posts: 565 Location: CA |
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Adding on a bit to the stuff about US law (I'm a lawyer), it's not quite a question of public concern the way it is in Japan. In the US, public figures have to show actual malice, which doesn't mean what it sounds like. Actual malice requires either knowledge that the statement in question was false or strong doubts as to its truth. Public figure status is also very broad here, it obviously includes government officials and celebrities, but also even someone known just locally or in relation to a particular event. Also, it's the plaintiff's burden to show falsity in the US, not the defendant's burden to show truth.
If this case were in the US, it would almost certainly be protected speech as rhetorical hyperbole, since the US also requires defamatory statements to be factual, not just something harmful to reputation. And criminal defamation laws like the one here still exist in some states, but are virtually never enforced. |
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FishLion
 Crazy Fangirl Posts: 861 |
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I'm glad to know more about how the differing legal systems function.
I do wonder if these types of suits are common in Japan or if it is mainly for stuff this nasty where they also admit it was a lie to harm their reputation. I know in the US a lower standard of defamation would get abused to hell and back, but maybe the fact they mostly take clear cut cases in Japan also means less frivolous harrassment suits. |
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CountZeroOR
 Subscriber Posts: 96 Location: Oregon |
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A good example of this that Answerman doesn't get into is related to the fall of Johnny's and Associates. There have been multiple stories that came out regarding Johnny Kitagawa's history of sexual assault and predatory behavior within Japan, but often those stories were pulled under threat of litigation or threat of denial of access (either press access or loss of contracted talent for projects the parent company was involved with).
What turned the table enough for the Johnny's empire to (at least where I sit outside of Japan) come crashing down was when entities that couldn't be covered by denial of access or were not subject to Japan's defamation laws (the BBC and the UN Council on Human Rights) investigated Johnny Kitagawa's actions and the talent agency he founded's role in covering them up. |
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AnswerJerome
Posts: 36 |
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Damn it! I really should have asked myself that question when I wrote this. I suspect that cases like this are not very common. I look forward to being schooled by Answerman's far better-informed readers on this topic. I wrote this column about 4-5 weeks ago. It was definitely before Jimmy Kimmel was taken off the air by his network. It is also worth stating here that I have made the comparison between Japanese and US law on defamation cases in this column as a point of reference and context, because most of the readers of this column are based in North America, and so I thought it would be appropriate. |
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FishLion
Crazy Fangirl Posts: 861 |
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I figured honestly! The turnaround on editorial stuff is is always longer than I expect and anytime something seems weirdly connected to an event a week ago it is usually a coincidence. I hate when that creates misunderstanding but I do love it also exemplifies exacly why understanding the topic is important. I really wasn't tried to make a veiled reference to current events either (moderation did ask us not to focus on other incidents) but SLAPP suits are not a recent trend in the US so it felt appropriate to ask. John Oliver did an entire episode on Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation with a song and dance number about 5 years ago when he finally won a lawsuit against a coal executive and was legally allowed to talk about it. Again, don't want to discuss the specific incident or anything as was requested, but i did want to cite that it was well before now and they still felt it was enough of an issue to address it. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 5295 |
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Even putting current events aside, a lot of us in the anime community are at least generally familiar with the concept of SLAPP suits given the legal kerfuffle with a certain...individual several years ago. I won't go any further down that road out of respect for the mod request, but I think we know how that story ended. |
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andramus
 Posts: 221 |
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There was a case where Elon Musk was sued for calling someone a pedo on twitter and Musk won because he claimed he wasn't being literal - he was throwing an insult not making an allegation.
I don't like Musk but I do think that there are numerous instances where people are being sarcastic or hyperbolic and do not mean what they are writing literally but are taken literally by the people who read it. Generally when a person is speaking it's easier to tell from the tone of their voice whether or not they really mean what they are saying. However that's not always the case and it's even harder to tell when reading words on a screen. |
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TokimekiCrisis
Posts: 131 |
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Americans really don't appreciate the freedoms they have even if they aren't even aware of what those are in the first place. Meanwhile I see plenty of Japanese users on X who are terrified to even post screenshots of anime for fear that they'll get in trouble with copyright laws, let alone if you edited those screenshots in some way and Japanese IP holders deemed that defamatory to their brand. I know IP holders in Japan really hated those "Abridged" series coming out a decade ago and saw them as disgracing and defaming their brand. And considering how some of those series have genuinely ruined the perception of the brand in the English speaking countries they weren't exactly wrong. We also just got that story of a politician saying Nintendo was anti-AI and lobbying the government against it and Nintendo immediately swooped right in to correct the misinformation and made the politician apologize. Defamation is no joke there. |
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