The Wikimedia Foundation Successfully Sees Off Another SLAPP Suit, But More Protection Is Needed Globally
Wikipedia seems such an essential and benign aspect of the online world that it is hard to understand why people would want to attack it in the courts. But it is nonetheless subject to lawsuits that try to force it to censor its articles because they contain facts that are inconvenient for someone. The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that runs the Wikipedia family of sites, has just seen off another such attempt to bully it into deleting true information. The case, reported on the Wikimedia blog, exposes some of the difficulties that the Wikipedia Foundation and its community face. As the post notes, this legal action has all the hallmarks of a “SLAPP” lawsuit: a strategic lawsuit against public participation:
The Wikipedia article in question names Mladen Pavlovic as one of three co-founders of Tipico, a major European gambling company headquartered in Malta. This was already public information: Pavlovic has been named in reputed sources within German news media, and in official documents held by Malta’s official company register. The Wikipedia article also mentioned that some Tipico shares had been acquired by a Jersey-based investor — information that also became a focus of the lawsuit.
The Wikimedia blog post notes that Pavlovic could have attempted to convince the Wikipedia community that the article would have been improved by deleting the material under discussion. Instead, Pavlovic decided to choose “legal escalation”:
Pavlovic’s lawsuit was especially intensive for our team because of the unusual number of legal briefs to which we were asked to reply. Every time we comprehensively answered the arguments Pavlovic’s lawyers had raised, they would file a new legal submission with the court. These usually repeated earlier arguments, and introduced—in our opinion—increasingly thin or irrelevant new ones. Even after his lawyers had orally debated the case in front of a judge—which is typically the last step before a ruling—they continued their legal submissions.
That approach seems a conscious attempt to deplete Wikimedia’s limited financial resources, increasingly under strain:
The Foundation’s legal team now also has to deal with a wave of new and very demanding “online safety” laws across the world: for example, the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) and the UK Online Safety Act. These conditions force us to be as efficient, creative, and effective as possible, including in lawsuits like this one.
On 16 November 2023, a court in Munich ruled that the Wikimedia Foundation correctly refused to censor Pavlovic’s name from the Wikipedia article about Tipico. But rather than accept the result, Pavlovic opted once again for the heavy legal approach:
Pavlovic initially indicated the intention to appeal the case, potentially for years. However, when the case actually went up to appeal, it appeared increasingly likely that he was going to lose. Rather than continue, he ultimately dropped the case, which led to a final judgment that protected the Wikipedia article as correctly sourced and relevant public information!
That’s good news, but it’s only one SLAPP suit, and Wikimedia’s post notes that the organization typically has to deal with several of them each year. As the blog post says, what is needed is that:
legislators all over the world will push forward with ambitious and effective anti-SLAPP reforms. When doing so, they should remember that in addition to protecting journalists and whistleblowers, it’s important to also protect projects like Wikipedia and the thousands of citizens and organizations that make them possible.
Some progress has already been made. In March of this year, the EU passed a Directive on “protecting persons who engage in public participation from manifestly unfounded claims or abusive court proceedings (‘Strategic lawsuits against public participation’)”, which will enter into force in 2026. The UK has also passed anti-SLAPP legislation, but it applies only to publications about “economic crimes”. The situation in the US is still unsatisfactory, for reasons the Public Participation Project explained in 2022:
The current patchwork of state-based anti-SLAPP laws, which some but not all states have, leaves concerning gaps for aggressive plaintiffs to forum shop, for example, calculating the place to sue where they would have the least amount of anti-SLAPP restrictions. This type of behavior frustrates the intent of state laws and leads to situations where plaintiffs can fight on their chosen terms, no matter how unfair. A federal anti-SLAPP statute would close the loophole that lets retaliatory plaintiffs file state-based claims in jurisdictions with looser First Amendment protections or file federal claims in federal court. Rather than picking the easiest state to win in, plaintiffs would be forced to litigate in federal courts.
SLAPP suits are bad wherever they are used, but they are particularly egregious when brought against charitable organizations like Wikimedia that are working selflessly for the benefit of everyone. Strong and effective anti-SLAPP laws everywhere are long overdue.