Defamation and the Protection of Personal Rights: Legal Remedies for Online Attacks

In February of 2003, a photographer named Kenneth Adelman was engaged in work of staggering tedium: documenting the California coastline, one aerial image at a time. His California Coastal Records Project had amassed some twelve thousand photographs of cliffs, beaches, and erosion patterns—the sort of methodical environmental cataloguing that attracts almost no attention whatsoever. One of those twelve thousand images happened to capture a Malibu estate belonging to Barbra Streisand. Before the singer’s lawyers filed suit demanding its removal, the photograph had been downloaded exactly six times, two of those by the lawyers themselves. Within a month of the lawsuit becoming public, the image had been viewed more than four hundred and twenty thousand times.

The case gave its name to a phenomenon that has since become one of the defining paradoxes of the digital age: the Streisand Effect, in which the attempt to suppress information causes it to spread far more widely than it otherwise would have. The lawsuit was dismissed. Streisand was ordered to pay Adelman’s legal fees. And her beachfront home became, briefly, one of the most-viewed properties on the internet.

The story contains a lesson that anyone who has ever been defamed online must eventually confront. The instinct to respond, to correct, to defend—all of it perfectly natural, all of it potentially catastrophic. The internet has created an unprecedented arena for attacks on reputation, but it has also created unprecedented complications in the act of fighting back.

The architecture of defamation law was built for a slower world. Its foundational concepts—the public forum, the reach of publication, the duration of harm—assumed that spreading false information about someone required effort, resources, and at least a minimal threshold of seriousness. A libelous article in a newspaper represented an institutional decision; a slanderous statement at a town meeting required the courage to speak publicly. The barriers to defamation were not merely legal but practical.

Those barriers have largely dissolved. What once demanded a printing press now requires only a smartphone and a moment of spite. The same democratization of speech that has enabled movements and toppled governments has also enabled the anonymous commenter, the vengeful ex-colleague, the bored provocateur. A single post on a public forum can reach more people in an hour than a provincial newspaper might reach in a year. And unlike the newspaper, it never quite disappears—cached by search engines, archived by web crawlers, screenshotted and shared long after the original is deleted.

Polish law, like most European legal systems, has attempted to adapt. The Criminal Code’s Article 212, which addresses defamation, explicitly provides for heightened penalties when the offense occurs through means of mass communication—a category that courts have consistently held to include the internet. The logic is straightforward: greater reach means greater harm. But the logic of enforcement is considerably more complicated.

The psychology of online aggression turns out to be both more mundane and more troubling than popular imagination suggests. We tend to picture the internet troll as a particular type of person—the basement-dwelling misanthrope, the pathological narcissist, the dedicated harasser with a vendetta. Research paints a different picture. In a series of studies examining online behavior, psychologists found that trolling is largely situational: ordinary users become aggressive under specific conditions, particularly when they encounter existing negativity in a discussion or when they are already in a bad mood. The phenomenon has a name—online disinhibition—and it describes the way that anonymity and physical distance strip away the social constraints that govern face-to-face interaction.

This has profound implications for anyone considering how to respond to an online attack. If your antagonist is not a dedicated enemy but merely someone having a bad day, someone who stumbled into an argument and found themselves saying things they would never say in person, then your response may matter more than you think—and not in the way you hope. Every reply, particularly every emotional reply, feeds the dynamic. It provides what the provocateur is seeking, whether consciously or not: engagement, reaction, a sense that their words have landed.

The research on victims’ responses is striking. Studies consistently show that the majority of people who experience online harassment choose to ignore it, and the vast majority of those who ignore it report satisfaction with that decision afterward. This is not passivity or defeat; it is strategy. Most online conflicts follow a predictable arc: provocation, response, escalation, exhaustion. By declining to participate, you deny the arc its essential fuel.

But silence is not always possible. There are attacks that cannot be ignored—defamatory statements serious enough to damage careers, livelihoods, relationships. When someone publicly accuses you of criminal conduct, of corruption, of professional misconduct, the calculus changes. In such cases, Polish law offers two parallel tracks of recourse, each with its own logic and limitations.

The civil path, grounded in Article 24 of the Civil Code, allows for the protection of personal rights—a category that includes reputation, dignity, and what Polish jurisprudence calls cześć: the capacity to defend one’s own world of values in a manner justifying the respect of others. A successful civil action can yield an order to remove the defamatory content, a requirement that the defendant publish an apology or correction, and monetary compensation for the harm suffered. These remedies do not expire; a claim for non-monetary relief can be pursued years after the original defamation, provided the harm continues or its effects persist.

The criminal path is narrower but carries different weight. Defamation under Article 212 is prosecuted through private prosecution, meaning the victim must personally file charges and conduct the case as a private prosecutor. This demands significant engagement and often legal assistance, but a criminal conviction represents something a civil judgment cannot: an official determination by the state that a wrong was committed. The penalties range from fines to restriction of liberty, and in cases involving mass communication, imprisonment of up to one year. Courts may also order the payment of a nawiązka—a form of compensatory damages—up to one hundred thousand złoty.

The two paths are not mutually exclusive. One can pursue both simultaneously, seeking civil remedies while prosecuting criminally. In practice, most choose one or the other, weighing speed against gravity, cost against symbolic vindication.

Yet here is where the Streisand paradox reasserts itself. Every legal action is, in some sense, a publication. Court filings are public. Journalists monitor dockets. A lawsuit against an obscure post on a local forum may itself become the story, transforming a minor slight into a widely reported scandal. The very act of seeking vindication can multiply the audience for the original defamation a hundredfold.

This is the cruel arithmetic that every victim must confront. A post seen by fifty people may, after litigation, be reported to fifty thousand. The human desire for justice collides with the mathematical reality of attention. Sometimes the wiser course is to let the insult sink beneath the ceaseless tide of new content, forgotten within days by all but its author. The internet has a short memory, unless we ourselves refresh it.

The decision requires a kind of cold calculation that is almost impossible in the moment of injury. We want to fight back. We want to be vindicated. We want, above all, to have the last word. But the architecture of online discourse is designed to deny us exactly this satisfaction. Every response extends the conversation. Every rebuttal invites a counter-rebuttal. The forum post you could have ignored becomes a thread; the thread becomes a controversy; the controversy becomes, however briefly, news.

If you do choose to act, the first imperative is documentation. The internet is ephemeral in ways that work against the victim: posts are edited, accounts deleted, entire platforms shuttered. What exists today may be gone tomorrow. Before any legal strategy can be contemplated, the evidence must be preserved—screenshots capturing dates, times, and URLs; complete page archives in PDF format; records of how widely the content has spread.

For matters likely to reach court, the gold standard is the notarial protocol: a formal record, prepared by a notary public, of the contents of a webpage at a specific moment in time. Under Polish law, such a protocol constitutes an official document enjoying a presumption of authenticity. The burden falls on the opposing party to prove that the notary erred—a task so difficult as to be effectively impossible. It is the difference between presenting a printout that your adversary can dismiss as fabricated and presenting a state-certified record that speaks with institutional authority.

There is a particular cruelty in the distinction Polish law draws between defamation and mere insult. Defamation requires specific allegations—accusations of conduct or characteristics that could lower someone in public esteem. To say that someone is a thief, that they accept bribes, that they defraud their customers: these are defamatory because they are falsifiable claims about concrete behavior. To call someone an idiot, a fool, a piece of filth: these are insults, offensive but vague, attacks on dignity rather than reputation.

The distinction matters because truth operates differently in each domain. Defamation admits of a defense: if the speaker can prove the truth of the allegation and demonstrate that its publication served a socially justified interest, the conduct is not unlawful. Truth, in other words, can be a shield—but only when wielded in the public interest. To spread true but private information merely to humiliate, without any legitimate purpose, remains actionable.

Insult offers no such defense. Even an accurate characterization, if expressed in terms sufficiently degrading, remains an insult. The law is not interested in whether you are, in some cosmic sense, actually a fool; it is interested in whether someone has publicly called you one in language calculated to demean.

The most insidious form of online defamation exploits the bonds of community. Affinity fraud—the term comes from securities law but applies equally to reputational attacks—targets members of identifiable groups by leveraging shared identity. A defamatory campaign within a religious community, a professional association, an ethnic network: these cause damage that extends beyond the individual victim to the fabric of trust that holds the group together. Victims in such cases often hesitate to report their losses, preferring to resolve matters internally, which only enables the harm to continue.

The same communal dynamics that make affinity fraud so effective make it especially painful to combat. To pursue legal action is to make the conflict public, to invite scrutiny from outside the community, to become the person who brought in the authorities. The social costs can be as significant as the legal remedies.

There are cases where professional intervention is not merely advisable but essential. When the accusations involve serious criminal conduct—allegations of fraud, corruption, violence—the stakes transcend embarrassment. When the harassment is sustained and systematic, constituting a campaign rather than an incident. When false statements are causing measurable professional harm: lost clients, terminated contracts, foreclosed opportunities. When threats of physical violence enter the picture. In such circumstances, attempting to handle matters personally is not merely ineffective but potentially dangerous.

A lawyer serves multiple functions beyond the obvious. The formal letter demanding removal of defamatory content, issued on law firm letterhead, carries weight that a personal email cannot. The lawyer can pursue the necessary technical and legal steps to identify anonymous attackers—subpoenas to platforms, requests to law enforcement. Perhaps most importantly, the lawyer provides emotional distance, the capacity to make strategic decisions unclouded by the fury and humiliation that naturally attend being publicly attacked.

The internet is not the lawless frontier it sometimes appears to be. The same laws that govern defamation in traditional media apply with equal force online, and in some respects more severely. But law is only one dimension of the problem. The deeper challenge is psychological: how to calibrate response to harm, how to weigh the satisfaction of vindication against the risk of amplification, how to endure attacks without becoming consumed by them.

In the end, the Streisand Effect is not really about information suppression at all. It is about the fundamental mismatch between human emotional needs and the dynamics of networked communication. We want to defend ourselves; defense draws attention. We want to correct the record; correction extends the conversation. We want closure; the internet offers only continuation.

The twelve thousand photographs in Kenneth Adelman’s coastal survey have long since been forgotten by everyone except environmental researchers. The one image that achieved immortality did so only because someone tried to make it disappear. There is a lesson in this, though it is not a comfortable one. Sometimes the wisest response to an attack on your reputation is to do nothing at all—to document everything, preserve your options, and wait for the tide of content to wash the insult away. It requires patience, and it requires faith that the truth will, eventually, outlast the slander.

But it will not feel like justice. It will feel like surrender. And that, perhaps, is the cruelest thing the internet has done to the ancient human desire for vindication: it has made fighting back, in many cases, the worst possible strategy.