Lawyer Sues Yahoo for Message Board Name-Calling

Yardboy writes "Yahoo! News has a story concerning one Stephen Galton who has filed a class-action lawsuit against Yahoo claiming the company 'unfairly protected people who post negative messages on its bulletin boards and falsely advertised that it prevents such abusive messages.' Seems he was subjected to name-calling (such as shyster) when he signed up under the username 'stephengalton' in order to respond to a negative post about an unidentified client. As other users chimed in with negative remarks, Galton filed suit against them (it's not clear from the story for what) and sought their personal information from Yahoo via a subpoena. The lawsuit seeks restitution, a permanent injunction and other forms of relief. What's really interesting is all the message board posts relating to the story have been deleted."

Comments

Re:Let's get this straight.

[Exmet Paff Daxx]

I don't agree with Slashdot being moderated for political or religious affiliation. But hey, it's Rob Malda and company's site. They can do what they want, when they want to, I just wish they'd make it known IN WRITING in the FAQs section about their political or opinion background - I wish they would just admit that what you described does occasionally go on.

Well one thing you should be aware of is that Slashdot is going to put in a politics section: politics.slashdot.org. This is going to be to compete directly for eyeball-share and ad revenue with sites like DailyKos. And I think that it will be the quick and ruthless banning of dissent that Slash has been designed to provide that will truly allow them to be the value-leader in the marketplace and ultimately prevail.

Respectfully, I don't agree with your quote, above. I think that Rob, Jamie, et al are making a reasonable inference that technically literate people are generally intelligent, and intelligent people are generally Democrats. If a few Republicans do happen to wander onto this site, they will be moderated down and IP banned rather quickly. If you don't agree, see the Farenheit-911 story in my parent post, there were probably at least a hundred people banned in just that thread alone for posting Repub-crap stuff. The process is really very efficient, and it's not censorship.

So, the problem really just takes care of itself.