You can get sued for these two very common everyday actions online!!

1. Posting a Negative Review Online

In this day and age, it is not uncommon for a dissatisfied customer to head online to voice their grievances about a business or service provider.

However, can these negative reviews ever be the subject of a lawsuit? The answered advice to this question comes down to whether or not the negative comments can be labeled as defamation. Defamation is defined as publicly saying something that damages a person’s reputation.

Libel is written defamation, while slander is spoken defamation. To ensure that you cannot be sued for libel over your online remarks, you must ensure that your comments were veritably true. In addition, if you can prove that your comments were opinion rather than statements of fact, you may be safe from a defamation lawsuit.

2. Posting Pictures on Facebook

When you tag someone in an unflattering picture, not only can it damage their reputation with their job and others, but you can actually be sued for this breach of privacy. In general, there are four ways to sue for invasion of privacy over a Facebook photo.

The first is “unreasonable intrusion of solitude”. This means that someone is secretly photographed in a place where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy, like inside their home.

The second is appropriation of someone’s name or likeness, which usually involves the unauthorized use of a celebrity or public figure’s photograph, but private citizens can also make “right of publicity” claims.

The third way to sue over a Facebook photo is if the picture publicly shares a fact that a reasonable person would expect to be kept private. The final way, “false light”, which is similar to defamation of character, and can be claimed if a photo is misleading and portrays the subject in a false light.

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