Tweeter sued by landlord

One of the topics of discussion among tweeters this morning (along with the Yahoo-Microsoft search deal) was a case in which a woman with less than 20 Twitter followers is being sued for defamation.

According to various news reports, a Chicago woman named Amanda Bonnen is being sued for $50,000 by Horizon Group Management LLC for putting up a public tweet that read, "'Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it's okay.'' Bonnen had apparently previous filed a class action suit against the company for violating leasing regulations.

To make matters worse -- or, at last, to make tweeters even angrier -- a representative of the family that runs the company is quoted by the Chicago Sun Times as saying that the company never asked Bonnen about the tweet or asked her to take it down, and added, "We're a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization."

Putting aside the merits of the actual case (or the PR disaster that Horizon Group Management is now having to deal with), this is an interesting view of how what one might consider casual conversation could now be considered, in a court of law, public enough to be defamatory speech. Many of us are now simultaneously sending messages to a variety of social networking sites -- and are being read by more and more people, many of whom we don't know.

It's been obvious for a long time that many people have a less-than-perfect understanding of how public their speech on the Web really is. There have been several cases of people losing their jobs, for example, because they made a nasty remark about their boss or complained about their workplace on Facebook. Now a woman who sent out a casual complaint about her landlord to what she may have thought was a group of about 20-odd acquaintances is facing a lawsuit.

Of course, it goes both ways. Horizon Group Management may not have understood the type of minor firestorm it could unleash when it decided to sue Bonnen for that remark. Before it acted, Bonnen was just one person among thousands in the U.S. dealing with a landlord-tenant dispute. Now, she's a cause célèbre and Horizon has a major PR problem.

The ramifications of the social networking phenomenon are slowly beginning to be felt. It's possible that Facebook and Twitter and all the other such services may be changing our society in ways we haven't yet dealt with. Meanwhile, it might be better for all of us to think twice before we complain about people or companies -- or think twice before we sue for something that might otherwise have remained a reasonably private matter.