A Chicago-based property management company is suing a former tenant for libel, claiming that a Twitter post by Amanda Bonnen "maliciously and wrongfully" accused Horizon Group Management of maintaining a "moldy apartment,"
the Chicago Sun-Times reported Tuesday.
So what's the moral of this story?
According to PC World's David Coursey, the first takeaway is to be careful what you say online -- you just might get sued.
Maybe so, but for our money, Coursey's second point -- "if you're a business, realize that filing suit may get you more publicity than the Tweet you are suing over" -- is the more likely lesson to endure from this episode. Horizon Group Management seems a likely candidate for the Streisand Effect, that venerable Information Age rule-of-thumb suggesting that attempts to censor information via legal maneuvering tend to motivate people to spread said information much further than they would have if you'd just kept quiet about it in the first place.
The Tweet in question -- "Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it's okay." -- originally reached about 15 or 20 of Bonnen's Twitter followers, according to reports. Considering that the story about the landlord's lawsuit is now in top-ranking news clusters on aggregator Web sites like Google News and Techmeme, one has to suspect that, well, quite a few more people are now seeing the words "Horizon Group Management" and "moldy apartment" in fairly close proximity.
But another lesson from this fairly ridiculous affair may be the one about finding yourself in a hole -- at this point, Horizon Group Management's Jeffrey Michael just may want to reconsider the wisdom of digging.
Speaking to Lisa Donovan of the Sun-Times, Michael had this to say about his company's decision to seek $50,000 in damages from Benen: "We're a sue-first, ask-questions-later kind of an organization."
Probably not what most renters are looking for in a landlord.
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