Twitter 'troll' to pay six-figure sum

There's no question that the UK's speech laws are abusive, especially to American sensibilities. You can find stories of people being arrested for calling a police horse "gay", or saying "woof" to a police dog, or the guy who taught his girlfriend's dog to respond to Seig Heil to troll her, or the 19 y/o who quoted a Snoop Dogg lyric on her Instagram page, or the guy sent to _jail_ for leaving anti-religion cartoons in an airport restroom. These cases are among the ridiculous fringe, so a bunch of them were overturned or resulting solely in fines, but they're the tip of the iceberg of the more mundane gov't suppression of speech and accompanying chilling effects that the UK has decided it wants.

Though that doesn't imply that defamation has no place in speech laws, nor that the case in question was necessarily abusive.

Would it be particularly hard? In the case of Count Dankula, after he refused to pay the fine for his ridiculous wrongspeech conviction, they took it out of his bank account.

"Despite this attempt to destroy his reputation with falsehoods, Mr Nolan has agreed not to name this individual, dependent on his future conduct."

I remember this same line from the CNN Trump WWE GIF guy - the cases are different, for one this is a legal case and it being in the UK. Here is what CNN said in that story[1]:

CNN is not publishing “HanA*holeSolo’s” name because he is a private citizen who has issued an extensive statement of apology, showed his remorse by saying he has taken down all his offending posts, and because he said he is not going to repeat this ugly behavior on social media again. In addition, he said his statement could serve as an example to others not to do the same.

CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.

Exactly when does this kind of behavior become blackmail? How remorseful do you have to continue to be so the corporation threatening to dox you doesn't? A lot of people will say a name alone is not doxing, but the safety concerns are real when there's potentially thousands of people that would hurt you, seeking out the rest of your details. It seems these media companies have near unlimited power to brazenly admit to this, under the excuse of supposed public interest in the identity of private citizens. The identities aren't even relevant to their respective stories.

It should go without saying that defending the post content specifically is not the point, and can easily flip between political ideologies as years go by and this kind of media behavior is left unchecked.

[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/04/politics/kfile-reddit-user-tr...

It seems misleading for the headline to talk about "damages" when the case settled. "Damages" to me suggests court-ordered compensation.

There are also several (known) political mercenaries who operate bot farms specifically to attack leftists and signal boost those attacks to astroturf popularity.