Defamation & Reputation Management 2025

Tech and Protecting Privacy and Reputation Across the Globe

Having reached the age of 50 in 2024, and having spent half of those years as a media lawyer in the UK, perhaps I am becoming a dinosaur. From my viewpoint, clients are facing unprecedented risks to privacy, reputation and security as powerful tech brands dominate the media as well as data and communications. My generation grew up consuming information via newspapers, books, magazines, radio and TV. Specifically, news and political comment were provided by professional journalists who were overseen by editors.

Although we have adapted to an online world, many of us continue consume information directly from established news publishers. Our children, younger colleagues and vast swathes of the world’s population are provided information ‒ and provide information (sometimes unwittingly via cookies) ‒ using platforms and algorithms established by a relatively small number of corporate institutions, mostly based in China and the USA. I share the concerns of many about not only the impact this has on democracies, but also on the value we place on reputation, discretion and privacy. These are valuable commodities that we are losing at our peril. And, for media lawyers, it creates enormous challenges.

We have become all too familiar with the consequences of the vast reach of tech platforms. I doubt that I am alone in finding that, rather than litigating against newspapers or broadcasters, most of my instructions concern material posted by private users on X (formerly Twitter) or Facebook. The slow and unpredictable response from the media platforms when they host unlawful material can be enormously frustrating, particularly when posts are published via anonymous handles. In terms of US legal liability, Section 230 of the Communications Act can be an insurmountable hurdle.

In addition to these frustrations, many watch with trepidation as the political influence of social media platforms grows. During the recent US election campaign, social media enabled extremist voices and promoted stories of pet-eating immigrants, of the democratic candidate being involved in a hit-and-run offence, and even of the weather being manipulated by malign forces. Perhaps this had very little impact on Trump’s sweeping electoral victory, but there is no question that his online campaigning and the support of Elon Musk bolstered his position in defiance of reporting in the traditional US media.

Musk’s recent interventions into UK politics have been equally striking. Musk posted on X that “civil war is inevitable” in Britain. Most recently, he has posted that “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government”. While X may be a public forum rather than a news publisher, Musk has ensured (as owner of the site) that his own account has the greatest reach, and that reach is beyond anything a newspaper baron could ever have dreamed of. His musings are absorbed in every corner of the globe and carry enormous weight.

This media influence and his political support has led to immediate reward for Musk as a central figure in the Trump administration. And, just as Musk removed any attempt at restraint from X, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta announced that Facebook will follow suit by removing its use of fact-checking “to get back to our roots around freedom of expression”. Along with his fellow tech billionaires, Zuckerberg took pride of place at Trump’s inauguration.

Misinformation, defamation, and misuse of private information are not new; nor are many of the consequences. Reputations have been left in tatters by the publication of falsities and intrusions into private and confidential information since the dawn of the printing press. Political elites have always sought to manipulate public opinion by spin, propaganda, and forming alliances with those buying ink by the barrel. But Musk’s political and communication overreach through X, coupled with Facebook’s latest capitulation, demonstrate how uniquely exposed clients now are.

The personal impact on all individuals, and particularly on children, of unrestrained digital content fed to phones is already being felt. Sexual, violent, fraudulent and self-harm content have led to lost and ruined lives. Posts from stalkers or those carrying an animus destroy reputations and expose images and information that should remain private. Media lawyers see this on a daily basis.

Social media sites provide the means for this wrongdoing and want no responsibility for the consequences. Facebook’s latest position makes it clear that they, like X, believe that political discourse should be a “free for all”. This is in spite of the knowledge that, in addition to their own overt political campaigning, social media sites may be used to facilitate dark-arts political campaigns such as those by UK firms Cambridge Analytica and Bell Pottinger during the past decade. It needs hardly to be said that increased utilisation of AI will provide rocket fuel for these behaviours.

Expansion of data privacy

The current trend for greater liberalisation of online publication may seem unstoppable but important progress has been made in the face of similarly overwhelming odds. While the predominance of Google searches may be threatened by emerging AI brands, during the past 15 years the former have been central to online reputation. The decision in Google Spain/Costeja in 2014 is a rare example of a case that had an almost immediate international impact (albeit focused on the EU). Google was required to establish a mechanism through which its users (as data subjects) could enforce their privacy rights by requesting the removal of search results that may breach individual rights. It is not perfect, but it was a huge step forward.

The influence of European data privacy protections has been felt across the world, given the commercial incentives behind the need to be able to trade in European data. In the Middle East and beyond, countries are clamouring to establish themselves as world leaders in digitisation and digital technologies and with that comes the need for national infrastructure and data privacy laws. Within the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Dubai led the way with a comprehensive data protection regime seeking to follow the principles of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Qatar issued the GCC’s first national data protection law in 2016. In Hong Kong, there is the Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance and in Mainland China there is the Personal Information Protection Law ‒ with the wonderfully named Cyberspace Administration of China responsible for the supervision and enforcement of data protection. The value of data has woken the world up to the need for data protection.

News, truth and accuracy

With the growth in privacy/data law, defamation laws can feel anachronistic. However, the need for accuracy is more important than ever amid the morass of online nonsense. National newspapers have had a torrid time with the loss of advertising, decimation of hard-copy sales, and difficulties with paid online subscription models. Others have suffered significant reputational damage through scandal.

Yet millions of readers still rely on the brands they trust to deliver news and investigative journalism remains a valued resource. Japanese newspapers have the highest circulation ‒ Yomiuri Shimbun being the biggest of all. In India, millions read Dainik Bhaskar and Dainik Jagran. In the USA, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have demonstrated that their brands can cut through and attract worldwide online readership and that online funding models can work.

My view is that responsible news publishing brands must embrace mechanisms (including effective independent regulation) that impose and encourage high standards and accuracy to help them stand out from the online crowd. They must demonstrate their response to the “fake news” slur. Governments should go further in supporting journalism and news brands so that children learn to access an alternative to the apps currently in use on their phones. However, government support should not mean facilitating diminished standards by weakening regulation or defamation laws.

Online safeguards and diplomacy

Given the US tech bros’ alignment with the Trump administration, it is perhaps inevitable that economic and diplomatic pressure will emerge from the USA seeking to weaken the embryonic attempts governments are taking to protect adults and children from the worst of social media. In the UK, the Online Safety Act is in its infancy and it remains to be seen how effective the regulator Ofcom ‒ empowered by the new Act ‒ can be in policing the social media giants. It will take strong leadership in the UK and elsewhere to legislate in the face of US pressure. The removal of moderators from Meta suggests that domestic measures are needed as a matter of urgency. Internationally, the Global Online Safety Regulators Network brings together 18 regulators from five continents to address online safety issues across the globe. 

Likewise, government must back its judiciary. The Brazilian Supreme Court’s banning of X from that jurisdiction while the platform was in breach of its court orders was met with outrage but sent an effective message that the rule of law must be followed. Similarly, if the Chinese platform TikTok is a threat to US national security (as the US Supreme Court determined), it must be correct to suspend its availability to US consumers. Convenience, ubiquity, and political expedience should not be determinative.

Outlook

These are challenging times for reputation lawyers ‒ albeit exciting times, too, as new problems and opportunities arise. And such work is more important than ever. It is clear that reputation lawyers need to work together across national boundaries to find solutions for clients and for the benefit of the societies in which they live. I hope that this guide will be a platform for good, helping to break down boundaries and enabling us to protect the values we all share.