Libellous and defamatory comments on local Facebook page

Question

As a new parish councillor I am wondering if we have any protection against a previous chair making untrue, potentially defamatory and libellous comments about me on our local Facebook page. She is accusing me of collusion with regards to a failed planning appeal (the failure is good news for our area) she has accused me of siding with the appellants which is completely untrue, I attended the hearing as a representative of the PC but I had only been in office a week and had no prior knowledge of the application or appellants. All information gathered by the PC, she withheld and kept for herself and attended as a private citizen. However after the appeal hearing she posted incorrect and misleading information on our village public FB page. I brought it up at a neighbouring PC meeting when prompted by the chairman who asked my views during a discussion about the hearing. I mentioned no names merely said that any information in the public domain should be factual and correct otherwise could be actionable. Since then I have received numerous emails to my personal email criticising me and this has now spread to false accusations on FB, can I do anything via the PC or do I have to look at fighting this privately or indeed reporting this as harassment/malicious communications via the police?

Answer 1

Oh, the joys of Facebook! For clarification, is the previous chair still a councillor? Is the good news element of the failed appeal your personal opinion, or the view of the majority? What was the PC's opinion on this? Were you asked by the PC to attend as their representative? If not, you attended as a member of the public. What information had the PC gathered and how?

The answer to your main question is that you cannot do anything via the PC. If the former chair is still a councillor, you can submit a code of conduct complaint to the district council's monitoring officer, whose powers are limited, so it is unlikely that they will go beyond a cursory investigation of the facts. You are, of course, free to pursue this privately, but it is unlikely that the Police will wish to get involved unless the wording of the communications breached any of the statutory triggers. What would happen if you do absolutely nothing? Just a thought.

Comments

No the previous chair is no longer a councillor and isn’t even a parishioner anymore, she remained the chair as she was just few yards within the boundary although she had moved. Yes the failed appeal is the majority view, yes I was asked to attend as the representative. There was information gathered by the PC with regards to objections to the planning of a large scale project which had already been rejected at county level. The offending post has now been removed by the page. I will ignore the issue for now. The ex chair stepped down due to a number of code of conduct complaint submitted by parishioners, two of which were complaints of harassment which reached the level where the police were aware. So I guess if this continues I’ll go down that route, thanks for your reply

Answer 2

Defamation is a tort. Regardless of whether that person is a councillor or not, if you feel they have damaged your reputation by making false statements and you have deep enough pockets you can pursue a claim through the High Court.

Answer 3

Here's a tip - keep well away from FB.

Comments

I had, this was a comment on another persons post, not mine, this person has form for making spurious and inflammatory posts so it probably shouldn’t have come as much surprise. The post is now removed.

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If you have got the post taken down great. My point is this, FB can be a very fickle arena, where it is easy to get into a no win situation whatever you say. Often better to leave it to the experts and watch things blow up in their faces.