I have no problem with this rule, but am curious as to why that particular act is considered more heinous than threatening harm. I know threatening harm could get one banned but strict reading of the rules implies you may or may not be, but legal threats will. Why the distinction?
IIRC, it’s because legal action would likely lead to the dissolution of the board (i.e. they’re not able to pay for a lawyer).
Don’t the owners have full-time legal council on staff? Also, say person X threatens legal action. They get banned. But the board would still need legal representation, so the banning has no effect other than removing an irritant. That doesn’t explain why threatening harm isn’t as serious a matter.
If it costs money to run the SDMB, the boards will be shut down. Anything involving lawyers costs money. I’m not sure why you think STM Reader (the current owners) have full time legal staff.
I guess I assumed they were a larger organization.
Still, that doesn’t explain why legal threats get banning and harm threats don’t, or at least they might not.
Generally, if someone is threatening legal action then you want to have a lawyer review anything you say to or about them to make sure you don’t screw up your side of the lawsuit. Banning people means you don’t have to say anything to them other than a boilerplate ‘banned for legal threats’ message. The board would only need legal representation if they actually manage to present enough of a case to get a lawyer or get into an actual court, which people threatening to sue message boards generally can’t manage to actually do - most legal threats online are just hot air. Banning the person makes it so the mods/admins don’t have to worry about what they say to or about the person and removes the chance for anything they do to make the issue worse. Threatening harm is different, as most of the time it’s someone making vague threats, and the board feels that evaluating whether someone is making a real concrete threat or not is just using overblown language.
And like Telemark, I have no idea why you think STM Reader has full time legal staff, much less full time legal staff dedicated to reviewing this message board.
I said nothing about staff dedicated to reviewing the message board. I thought they might have 1 or 2 lawyers around who would review contracts. I’ve worked for smaller companies where sometimes the small (read single digits) staff didn’t do very much; they were there as a “precautionary” measure.
Keep in mind that the Straight Dope and its parent company were recently sold for the grand total of one dollar (Sass, 2017). But in all seriousness they run the second largest newspaper in Chicago, I’m sure they have a lawyer who reviews articles before publication. But STM Reader doesn’t seem to involve themselves in the day to day operation of these message boards, and we probably want to keep it that way. The lawyers are there to avoid libel and defamation in the flagship business, not to review every staff post for some message board on the side.
Sass, Eric. (2017, July 18). ‘Chicago Sun-Times’ Sold For $1. MediaPost. Retrieved January 1, 2020 fromhttps://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/304448/chicago-sun-times-sold-for-1.html
~Max
Other than wanting to avoid the cost of assigning a (internal or external) lawyer to deal with a lawsuit, this would be the other reason. NOT banning the person means continuing to interact with them in various ways that may be used in a court of law.
It’s the board equivalent of telling someone “Please leave my place of business and have your lawyer contact my lawyer if you have anything else to say to me.”
Okay, you all seem to have latched onto the legal part of my question. I get that part.
And BTW, I was under the impression a staff lawyer gets a flat salary, so there is no extra cost of them reviewing matters or representing in court. But no matter.
I was asking why “threatening harm” isn’t met with automatic banning as well. After all threats can lead to legal issues.
I have literally never heard of a company with under 60 people who keeps a lawyer as a staff member where that lawyer isn’t doing a significant amount of legal work. That sounds utterly bizarre, as lawyers are pretty expensive and there are plenty of law firms that will contract with you to provide occasional contract review on an hourly basis.
If you look at the staff listing of the 58 staffers at the Chicago Reader, there is no one with ‘lawyer’ or ‘legal’ or anything similar in their title, which leads me to believe that my understanding is correct. https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/readerstaff/Page
I have never heard of a newspaper having a lawyer on staff who reviews articles daily before publication. They might bring in a lawyer to review a specific article that they are worried might cause a problem, but not a staff lawyer who does that day to day. Do you have any kind of cite for a newspaper following that practice? Again, take a look at the ‘staff’ page for the Chicago reader abov.
Literally any statement anywhere ‘can’ lead to legal issues, so that’s a pointless fact to introduce. There is not a significant risk of the board getting sued from a statement that would get a warning like “We should go to war with all the Muslims” (which does threaten harm against some board members) and so there’s no reason to get rid of that poster, while a statement like “[Poster’sName], I am going to come to your house at 323 West Avenue and stab you with a knife” is something that would probably get an instant ban.
Yep. Most businesses have a policy along the lines of ‘if they threaten to sue, tell them to leave and send any further communications to legal’.
Yes, that’s what I mean. I would think they have a go-to firm in case they want to press a particularly sensitive story, charged by the hour.
ETA: Chicago Reader is now distinct from the entity that owns the Straight Dope. The Chicago Sun-Times is a substantially larger newspaper.
~Max
I don’t know why you think “strict reading of the rules” means threatening harm is a maybe, but threatening legal action is an absolute. Both types of threats are in the same rule.
Do you have a particular post or something else where a poster wasn’t banned for threatening harm?
Agreed. It is pretty standard. Once you know that an individual is inclined to sue you, it is just common sense to get rid of them instead of having them hang around looking for additional reasons to add to the lawsuit, even if it is without merit.
Apparently none of you who question this policy have ever been to court.
Legal costs for anything over small claims court are quite spendy. Do you have an attorney? Ask them what they charge to prepare a case and go to the courthouse on your behalf. You’ll be shocked. Somebody’s paying for those nice suits and in these situations, it’s you.
The Chicago Reader is now a nonprofit. It’s a whole different deal over there now.
While the Chicago Sun-Times still owns a piece of the Reader, they are not managing or running the Reader in any way. This has been true for like a couple of years now.
The Chicago Sun-Times is a for-profit organization and someday they might make one, though it’s hard going in the dead tree newspaper business these days. It is “larger” than the Reader only by benefit of the fact that it prints daily; the Reader is a weekly. Or was last time I checked; that may have changed as well. (As a side note, look at Creative Loafing, who owned us once upon a time; now they’re a MONTHLY.)
It was always the Reader’s position that the day they received a lawsuit on our behalf (no matter how frivolous) was the day the SDMB would be closed down. Their attorney informed us that the cost of representing even the most ridiculous lawsuit would be in the tens of thousands of dollars and probably lots more. They weren’t going there.
When you look at some of the media lawsuits in the news, when you look closely you will find that someone with an interest – a wealthy financier or a well-heeled outside organization, a foundation, that kind of thing – has supplied funds to go to court. We don’t know Peter Thiel and we’re not hanging with the ACLU, we don’t have friends with deep pockets.
There is no reason to believe it’s any different for the Sun-Times. We’d like to stay in business if we can. We discourage lawsuits. In the same way the guillotine discourages recidivism.
Jenny
your humble TubaDiva
Administrator
I suspect it’s because there are different levels of threats of harm. There are threats that are definitely legal issues, like if you directly threaten another poster in a way they’d be reasonably afraid you’d actually harm them. Those are clearly legal issues, and I would expect to be a bannable offense.
However, there are also more rhetorical threats, like “I would punch someone if they said that to me in real life.” Those are also against the rules, but I don’t believe are legally actionable.
There are also statements like “I wish [public figure] was dead,” which are arguably not a threat at all, but are treated as such here, as far as the rules are concerned.
So I think the mods want to keep their options open on that one. But they can’t when it comes to threats of legal action. They have a mandate from the people in charge to ban these people for reasons stated above. They have no choice, even if the threat is perceived as meant in jest.
I worked for the Old LA Herald Examiner, and iirc, they had no such person to review all or most articles. I suppose the publisher had one on demand to check certain articles that were doubtful, but I dont remember anyone saying “we’ll run this past the legal teams”, except for contracts.
I knew Doug Krekorian and, Sir, you were no Doug Krekorian!! :p:p