Professor Benjamin Zipursky shared his expert opinion with Vanity Fair on defamation and liability in the world of social media.
For the next nine months, she would solicit and share unverified celebrity gossip nearly every day. By the end of 2020, @deuxmoi would have 530,000 followers, including some people she gossiped about, such as models Gigi and Bella Hadid. “It was just a domino effect,” the woman said in a phone interview in November. She read hundreds of daily submissions and would select a few dozen to post in @deuxmoi’s Instagram Story, where the tales would be available for 24 hours before vanishing. She published the stories anonymously and verbatim, always as screenshots. Sometimes she broke news. She posted about Scarlett Johansson marrying comedian Colin Jost and covered a sex scandal at Hollywood-friendly megachurch Hillsong. She shared a tip about Zoë Kravitz and her husband splitting, the speculation “based on noticeable changes in their Instagram habits”; a few hours later, Kravitz’s rep confirmed the divorce to People magazine. But the woman also published contradictory rumors and some she believed to be false, including a claim that Harry Styles hooked up with Tracee Ellis Ross, which E! News later discussed. The woman herself became the subject of stories in The New York Times, the Daily Mail, Vice, Vox, Grazia, Elle, the Daily Beast, the Federalist, and the Cut. People she gossiped about would be gossiping about her.
“Statements made on this account have not been independently confirmed…. Believe what you want, or don’t believe any of what is posted. This was started for F-U-N.”
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Benjamin Zipursky, a Fordham Law professor and expert in defamation, noted that publishing online and verbatim may actually shield @deuxmoi from liability. Defense lawyers have successfully used Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the hotly contested statute that shields internet platforms from liability for users’ posts, to protect websites that post user-submitted gossip indiscriminately.