Monir v Wood

A person who entrusts another with publishing campaign material on his behalf may be liable in defamation where the publication is made in performing that delegated function, even if it breaches express instructions. A person who controls the medium of publication may also authorise continued publication by failing to remove a defamatory statement after receiving sufficient notice of its gist and being able readily to locate and delete it.

A seriously defamatory allegation of involvement in child sexual abuse ordinarily supports an inference of serious reputational harm under Defamation Act 2013, section 1. The inference is not displaced merely because publication is limited or similar allegations were published independently by others.

The claimant was shown in a photograph posted from the Bristol UKIP Twitter account shortly before the 2015 general election. The tweet described him and another man as suspended child-grooming taxi drivers and urged readers not to vote Labour. The allegation was false.

The defendant, Bristol UKIP's chairman and a parliamentary candidate, had created the account and delegated its operation to the branch campaign manager, who posted the tweet. The claimant sued the defendant alone for libel. The issues concerned meaning, reference, responsibility for publication, serious harm, and remedies.

1. Judgment for the claimant. The tweet bore the meaning that the claimant was involved in the sexual abuse of children. Its wording and electoral context conveyed actual wrongdoing, not merely grounds for suspicion or investigation. The court rejected an over-analytical construction of a fast-moving social-media publication.
2. The claimant established reference. The governing inquiry was whether reasonable readers who could recognise the claimant from the photograph would understand the words to concern him. A photograph did not attract a separate or more onerous identification rule. The evidence established both direct publication and republication to persons who identified him, including a substantial WhatsApp republication.
3. The defendant was liable through agency. He had delegated to the campaign manager the task of posting campaigning material for Bristol UKIP and for his own candidacy. The tweet was published while carrying out that task. Under the reasoning applied from Colonial Mutual Life Assurance Society Ltd v Producers & Citizens Co-operative Assurance Company of Australia Ltd, (1931) 46 CLR 41, a principal cannot avoid liability merely because the agent acted contrary to a general instruction.
4. The defendant was independently liable for continued publication after the claimant's complaint. Applying Byrne v Deane, [1937] 1 KB 818, the defendant knew the gist of the seriously defamatory Twitter publication, retained practical control of the account, and could readily have found and deleted it. His failure to act authorised its continued presence.
5. The allegation was exceptionally grave. It caused serious harm within section 1 of the Defamation Act 2013. The defendant did not rebut that inference. Independent publications of similar allegations did not answer for the harm caused by this publication.
6. Damages of £40,000 were awarded. An injunction was refused because there was no evidence of a threatened republication. A summary-of-judgment order under section 12 was also refused because no realistic publication method would reach a meaningful number of the original publishees.

not stated in the judgment.