Internet search engines facing defamation suits by Brisbane businessman over false slurs
"Trump to Dictators: Have a Nice Day"
The [...] omitted content is only the images and their captions.
Exclusive by Josh Robertson
Updated Thu at 9:35am
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A Brisbane businessman believes he is the first in the world to sue all three global online search engine giants in defamation claims worth more than $4 million.
Jarrod Sierocki has filed fresh lawsuits against Microsoft and Yahoo as part of his bid to wipe false slurs from internet searches of his name.
His claims in the Queensland Supreme Court are in addition to his ongoing suit against Google, which he lodged before winning a record damages award in 2015 in the same court against a disgruntled former business partner who defamed him on US site, ripoffreport.com.
Mr Sierocki told the ABC he was not interested in the money but in forcing the search engines to remove links to the defamatory web pages in line with a permanent injunction from the earlier court ruling.
"We've got orders from the court, why don't they just pull it down?" He said.
"Google, come on. Microsoft, Yahoo, what are you guys doing?
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"You know it's false, you know it's a lie. Why are you continuing to publish it?"
Mr Sierocki, who is the managing director of Insolvency Guardian, said he had not received a cent from the former business partner who had gone bankrupt.
The controversial ripoffreport.com had ignored the Supreme Court's ruling that its site falsely claimed he was dishonest and involved in scamming clients, and a permanent injunction placed on the material.
"My children are just becoming old enough to be able to jump onto Google. What's going to come up? That is an absolute travesty and I'm just dreading the day," he said.
Mr Sierocki said he was buoyed by two recent court rulings against Google.
High Court upheld right to sue over gangster link
Last October, the South Australian Supreme Court found search engines were publishers liable for defamatory content, while the High Court of Australia last month upheld a Melbourne shooting victim's right to sue over Google results linking his name to gangsters.
"However, there has been nobody that I'm aware of — or my lawyers are aware of — who has sued all three internet giants," Mr Sierocki said.
"Moving forward, it's not just about those guys. It's also about the people who hold themselves above that in the United States or wherever they want to hide, and these keyboard warriors who think that they can go around and type things without any sort of repercussions whatsoever.
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Mr Sierocki said he understood that few could afford to take on multinational corporations in court, but he hoped that by doing so he would help other Australians being falsely attacked online.
"We've been in the ring for six years and I'm never giving up. I think they picked the wrong horse," he said.
In court papers, Mr Sierocki's claim states that Microsoft-owned Bing.com and Yahoo sites, owned by US-based Oath Inc and Seven West Media, had ignored his requests from October 2016 to remove links to the slurs.
"If our courts make a decision that something is false, it's defamatory and give you injunctive relief and you send that to these companies, they should remove that," he told the ABC.
Each claim, filed on July 4, seeks $1.75 million in damages for non-economic loss and aggravated damages for defamation.
Mr Sierocki said he would donate any damages awarded to an online bullying charity.
Queensland University of Technology internet law expert Nicolas Suzor said laws around online defamation were "pretty messy at the moment" and needed cleaning up.
He said there were contrary rulings across Australia about whether or not search engines were responsible for removing libellous content and it was still up individuals to press their cases.
"In defamation, the volume of complaints is still low enough that my understanding is it's still handled on a case by case basis," he said.
Associate Professor Suzor said there was a public interest in search engines not being the judges of whether or not an allegation was true.
Court rulings made it more likely they would act but sometimes they would remove obviously defamatory material without them, he said.
Microsoft and Seven West Media declined to comment.
Google is defending the defamation suit and has previously declined requests for comment.
The absence of a ‘strong US voice on human rights’ is fueling Saudi Arabia’s deepening rift with Canada, Middle East expert says
"Trump to Dictators: Have a Nice Day"
* Saudi Arabia and Canada are currently locked in a deepening feud over human rights.
* "Absent a strong U.S. voice on human rights and democratic values, Arab leaders have become less willing to tolerate Western advice on either political reform of governance," Ayham Kamel, head of Eurasia Group's Middle East and North Africa practice, said in a research note published Monday.
* In a statement released Monday, Amnesty International called on the broader international community to follow Canada's lead and speak out against human rights abuses.
Sam Meredith | @smeredith19 Published 7:21 AM ET Tue, 7 Aug 2018 Updated 7:45 AM ET Tue, 7 Aug 2018
Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images
Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (L) meets with US President Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on March 20, 2018 in Washington, DC.
At least Canada still believes in standing up for civil rights.
It’s time for Canada to take the next step against Saudi Arabia Stephen Maher
1 day ago
Editor’s note: The opinions in this article are the author’s, as published by our content partner, and do not necessarily represent the views of MSN or Microsoft.
Teflon populism See the article below. Firstly, lengthy excerpts from an article more relevant today than it was six years ago
"Trump to Dictators: Have a Nice Day
[...]
Watching President Trump recently accuse Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of stabbing him in the back prompted me to Google a simple question: How many Canadians were killed or wounded since April 2002 fighting alongside Americans in Afghanistan? The answer: 158 were killed and 635 wounded.
Think about that: America, not Canada, was attacked on 9/11. Nevertheless, our ally to the north sent thousands of its own young men and women to Afghanistan to help us destroy the forces of Al Qaeda that attacked our cities — and 158 Canadians gave their lives in that endeavor.
And yet, when their prime minister mildly pushed back against demands to lower Canada’s tariffs on milk, cheese and yogurt from the U.S., Trump and his team — in a flash — accused Trudeau of “betrayal,” back-stabbing and deserving of a “special place in hell.”
A special place in hell? Over milk tariffs? For a country that stood with us in our darkest hour? That is truly sick.
But it tells you all you need to know about how differently Trump looks at the world from any of his predecessors — Republican or Democrat. Everything is a transaction: What have you done for ME today? The notion of America as the upholder of last resort of global rules and human rights — which occasionally forgoes small economic advantages to strengthen democratic societies so we can enjoy the much larger benefits of a world of healthy, free-market democracies — is over.
Mind you, I can support Trump verbally cozying up to North Korea’s murderous dictator, Kim Jong-un, if it actually does reduce the prospects of war on the Korean Peninsula and lead to a process of denuclearization there. Nothing else has been effective — so trading Trump’s phony praise of “Little Rocket Man” for a real end to North Korean weapons and missile testing is a trade I’ll endorse — if it works.
But what’s terrifying about Trump is that he seems to prefer dictators to our democratic allies everywhere.
As Trump told reporters about the North Korean dictator on Friday: “He speaks, and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same.
Trump later said this was a joke. Sorry, no U.S. president should make such a joke, which, alas, was consistent with everything Trump has said and done before: He prefers the company of strongmen and, as long as they praise him, does not care how leaders anywhere treat their own people — including how they treat people risking their lives to model their countries on ours (or at least on what they thought was ours).
While this approach may buy us some time with North Korea, it is hurting us and our friends in many other places
[...]
Take Egypt. On May 31, Human Rights Watch reported that the Egyptian police had “carried out a wave of arrests of critics of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in dawn raids since early May 2018.” Those arrested included Hazem Abd al-Azim, a political activist; and Wael Abbas, a well-known journalist and rights defender; as well as Shady al-Ghazaly Harb, a surgeon; Haitham Mohamadeen, a lawyer; Amal Fathy, an activist; and Shady Abu Zaid, a satirist.
I got to know some of these young people during the Arab Spring. They are not violent, radical Islamists. They are wonderful, peace-loving, rule-of-law-seeking Egyptians — eager to work with any Egyptian leader who wants to build a more open, tolerant, consensual Egyptian political and civil society. Harb, an enormously decent British-educated surgeon, was imprisoned merely for tweeting mild criticism of Sisi’s crackdown on dissent.
“The state of oppression in Egypt has sunk so low that al-Sisi’s forces are arresting well-recognized activists as they sleep, simply for speaking up,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “The message is clear that criticism and even mild satire apparently earn Egyptians an immediate trip to prison.”
Sisi should hang his head in shame for arbitrarily jailing good young people like this — and the U.S. Congress should be taking up their cause if our president and secretary of state are too cynical to do so.
The same is true in Turkey today under the leadership of a real bum, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. I realized the other day that almost all my Turkish journalist friends had been either jailed, fired or exiled by the caliph-tyrant Erdogan.
This is a trend. As the Committee to Protect Journalists reported in December: ...https://cpj.org/reports/2017/12/journalists-prison-jail-record-number-turkey-china-egypt.php ... “For the second consecutive year, more than half of those jailed for their work around the world are behind bars in Turkey, China and Egypt. … President Donald Trump’s nationalistic rhetoric, fixation on Islamic extremism and insistence on labeling critical media ‘fake news’ serves to reinforce the framework of accusations and legal charges that allow such leaders to preside over the jailing of journalists.”
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has initiated some hugely important efforts to diminish the control of hard-line Islamists in his country and empower its women. But the arbitrary, nontransparent way he has arrested and interrogated allegedly corrupt Saudi business leaders — and similarly 17 women driving activists — is contributing to a climate of fear there. This will undermine his efforts to attract the foreign and Saudi investments that are vital to M.B.S.’s vision of reforming the Saudi economy.
In U.S.-allied Bahrain, Abduljalil Alsingace, the blogger and human rights defender, who was sentenced in 2011 to life in prison for writing “critically about human rights violations, sectarian discrimination and repression of the political opposition,” is rotting in jail, noted the Committee to Protect Journalists.
In U.S.-allied Philippines, the outspoken senator and former human rights commissioner Leila de Lima, who has been critical of President Rodrigo Duterte’s antidrug war that has left more than 7,000 dead in the past three years in gun battles with the police and vigilantes, was thrown in jail in February 2017 on trumped-up drug charges and still languishes there.
And in once pro-Western Poland, the country’s most powerful politician, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, is trying to replace the independent judiciary with judges selected purely for their loyalty to him and his party, snubbing his nose at the European Union’s liberal, rule-of-law values.
[ Insert: Famed “forever chemicals” lawyer Robert Bilott talks PFAS and policy at Yale Nearly all people in the United States have PFAS in their blood. Attorney Robert Bilott — famous for revealing a decades-long record of toxic PFAS chemical exposure by the DuPont company — spoke on the importance of effective communication in translating scientific research into legislation. Kayla Yup 10:35 pm, Feb 26, 2023 Staff Reporter https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/02/26/famed-forever-chemicals-lawyer-robert-bilott-talks-pfas-and-policy-at-yale/ ]
Populist rule is invariably associated with corruption, nepotism and incompetence. Why, then, do populists appear immune to scandal? Revelations that would have shocked electorates just a few years ago leave nary a mark on populist leaders and government ministers. And, sometimes, what doesn’t kill them even seems to make them stronger.
Examples are legion. When Der Spiegel reported that the far-right Alternative for Germany had misappropriated funds, the party’s supporters couldn’t have cared less. When the same publication unearthed a video of Austria’s now-former vice chancellor, Heinz-Christian Strache, negotiating a quid pro quo with a Russian interlocutor, his far-right Freedom Party lost only a couple of percentage points in the polls, and probably only temporarily. Likewise, the parties of Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán continue to dominate their countries’ politics, despite repeated corruption scandals.
But the most scandal-proof populist of all is Poland’s de facto ruler, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Independent Polish media outlets have revealed new affairs involving Kaczynski and his Law and Justice (PiS) party practically on a weekly basis—all of them damning.
For example, Kaczynski was recently caught on tape arranging for the payment of a bribe to the partner of an Austrian businessman involved in the construction of a skyscraper project tellingly named K-Towers. And just before the European Parliament election in May, Poland was shaken by a documentary exposing paedophilia by Catholic priests, along with a massive coverup by the church hierarchy, which has close ties to PiS. Nonetheless, the PiS government has refused to form a lay commission to investigate the matter.
Also in May, Polish journalists discovered that Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki purchased land from the Catholic Church that has increased in value a hundredfold as a result of a planned road project, but which he has avoided disclosing by using a transmutation agreement with his wife. Citing a former colleague of Morawiecki, journalists also found that he’s due to receive a multimillion-zloty payment from Santander, the bank where he worked before becoming prime minister, upon the completion of his term.
Any one of these revelations would have ended the career of a politician in any previous Polish government. But since PiS came to power in 2015, not a single government minister has resigned as a result of a scandal. On the contrary, scandals seem to have shored up the party’s base. Although polls show that 84% of Poles support establishing a lay commission to investigate paedophilia in the church, a significant share of the electorate still supports PiS. Most Poles believe that scandals are real, but that didn’t stop PiS from securing a substantial victory in the European Parliament, with 45.5% of the vote. If anything, the party has gained even more leeway to engage in malign and corrupt behaviour.
The PiS government is immune to scandal for two reasons.The first is the strong economy, which has allowed it to pursue successive social programs aimed at marginalised voters. For example, just before the European Parliament election, the government disbursed an extra month’s worth of retirement benefits and issued payments to rural residents. Both groups voted overwhelmingly for PiS.
The second factor is propaganda.Because PiS constantly levies spurious, defamatory charges against the opposition and groups such as doctors, judges and striking teachers, real scandals no longer seem all that shocking or compromising. This debasement of public discourse is no accident. Kaczynski has made a conscious effort to create a media environment in which anything goes. That is why he frequently accuses European Council President Donald Tusk of conspiring with the Russians to orchestrate the plane crash that killed his brother in 2010. It is also why he traffics in conspiracy theories about German Chancellor Angela Merkel being installed by the Stasi (communist East Germany’s notorious secret police) and about refugees carrying infectious diseases.
For a politician like Kaczynski, a public sphere with no standards of truth or rules of decorum is ideal. The media and opposition can expose whatever they want; it won’t change anything. While investigative journalists compile fact after fact and receipt after receipt, and publish rigorous year-long investigations, PiS is busy poisoning public discourse through the state-run media outlets it oversees.
Owing to its unscrupulous use of targeted cash transfers and propaganda, PiS is not only immune to scandals but benefits from them. Where everyone else sees the disclosure of ugly facts, PiS supporters see a frontal assault on their own interests. Revelations of malfeasance by the ruling party merely strengthen many working-class Poles’ resolve to defend a government that has assisted them through social-welfare transfers.
The situation might be different if PiS politicians faced the risk of criminal investigation or prosecution. But the prosecutor’s office has been fully co-opted and will not seriously investigate the ruling party. You can hear a recording of Kaczynski bribing a businessman, but you can’t interrogate him (the same also seems to apply to US presidents suspected of obstructing justice). And if you are an investigative reporter who uncovers facts that are inconvenient for the government, you can expect to come under pressure to reveal your sources.
And so, Poland—and Europe—is left with a government that is utterly impervious to scandal and charges of nepotism. The PiS administration is beyond reproach, not because it is a moral authority, but precisely because it is so shamelessly immoral. It may be pillaging the country, but it is sharing enough of the spoils not to have to look over its shoulder.
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