The High Court has declined to unmask two anonymous contributors who left mildly critical comments about an individual below an online newspaper report.

The case, Clift v Clarke, involved an application for disclosure by a woman who had previously won £12,000 in libel damages from Slough Borough Council which had published her name on a ‘Violent Persons Register’ after she complained about anti-social behaviour following damage to a local park’s flower beds.

She later spotted a couple of unfavourable remarks in user-generated content (UGC) posted below a sympathetic news report about her libel victory on MailOnline, entitled ‘I was turned into a pariah for complaining about a yob’.

There were also 38 favourable UGC comments below the news story.

The claimant asked the court to order the website’s publisher to reveal the identity of the UGC contributors so she could sue them for libel, too.

Under the principle outlined in Karim v Newsquest Media Group, media organisations can generally avoid liability for defamatory UGC posted below an online news report, but a libel claim may potentially be brought against the UGC authors themselves if they are unmasked and traced.

One of the contentious posts stated: “My, I didn’t realise the cost of flowers nowadays. This woman would have been better finding another way to enrich her existence…thereby saving lots of public money.”

The other, referring to other UGC postings, said: “I’m surprised to see how many people on here seem to think it is OK for members of the public to issue death threats against council employees, with attitudes like that is easy [sic] to see why so many doctors, nurses and social workers are physically and verbally abused each year.”

The judge, Justice Sharp, said the UGC authors had not purported to have actual knowledge of what they were commenting on, and readers of the newspaper’s website would not have taken them to have any such knowledge.

Justice Sharp said the postings should not be considered in isolation but in the context of the news report and the other UGC comments. No reasonable and sensible reader could understand the words to be anything but loose “pub talk”, and readers would not have taken them seriously.

There had been no concerted online campaign against the claimant. She had only become aware of the postings almost a year after their initial publication, and the publisher had removed the two contentious postings after her disclosure application was issued.

Further, the judge decided that even if the identity of the two UGC contributors was revealed, any libel claim against them was highly likely to fail, not least since both postings could probably be successfully defended on the basis of honest comment.

All in all, bearing in mind the website users’ own rights, ordering disclosure of their identity would be disproportionate.

The decision chimes with guidance given in an earlier case in which a judge said that unflattering remarks published within the confines of a bulletin board hosted by a financial website did not amount to defamation as readers would understand them to be nothing more than ‘vulgar abuse’, not to be taken seriously or literally.

It also echoes aspects of a case in which Sheffield Wednesday FC and various directors sought disclosure of the identity of individuals who had posted critical remarks within the confines of an unofficial supporters’ website. In that case, the judge likewise refused to order disclosure in relation to certain comments that were merely “saloon-bar moanings”.

What is interesting about the Clift case, however, is that Justice Sharp clearly felt the loose UGC “pub talk” on MailOnline did not merit disclosure of the authors’ identity for the purposes of a libel action, even where such comments were posted in the very public glare of a news report on a national newspaper’s website.