Defamation Lawsuits on the Rise as Reputation Battles Rage in Courts

The financial consequences of viral reputational harm have also emerged in litigation outside the celebrity sphere.

In Texas, a Collin County jury awarded Asher Vann approximately $3.2 million following litigation over accusations stemming from a 2021 middle-school sleepover incident. The accusations concerning Vann spread widely through news reports and social media. The claims ultimately presented to the jury were for intentional infliction of emotional distress and invasion of privacy rather than defamation, an important legal distinction, although reputational injury was among the damages at issue. The defendants have challenged the judgment on appeal.

Chris Silver Smith, a defamation expert witness and online reputation management consultant, testified for Vann. According to Silver Smith’s account of his work in the case, he analyzed the scale and persistence of the damaging online material and developed models for estimating the cost of mitigating its effects. His proposed remedies included a corrective advertising campaign designed to reach audiences exposed to the damaging narrative and an online reputation management campaign intended to address persistent negative material appearing through search engines and other online channels.

Those approaches effectively treated reputational harm as something that can carry a measurable remediation cost: if damaging information has reached a large audience and remains highly visible online, restoring a person’s reputation may require substantial spending on communications, advertising and search-engine reputation management.

The jury ultimately returned an approximately $3.2 million award for Vann. Independent reports confirm the verdict and that the damages included compensation associated with emotional distress and injury to reputation, although the verdict should not be characterized as a defamation judgment because the causes of action submitted to the jury were different.

The Internet Has Changed the Economics of Reputation

The growth of online communication has fundamentally altered the practical consequences of a damaging accusation.

Before the internet, a defamatory statement appearing in a newspaper or being repeated within a community might eventually fade from public view. Today, an accusation can be copied to social networks, discussed in videos, republished by websites, preserved in archives and indexed by Google. Even after the original controversy subsides, someone searching the person’s name may encounter the allegations months or years later.

Many public figures and celebrities have decried the apparent societal changes that have fueled the trend, and how damaging it has become. For instance, Justin Bieber once said: “The web should be used to inspire others, not spread hate or to hurt others.”

“The web should be used to inspire others, not spread hate or to hurt others.” ~ Justin Bieber

Artificial intelligence introduces another variable. Silver Smith has suggested that AI-powered search and chatbot systems could potentially amplify existing reputation problems by synthesizing information from numerous online sources, including unreliable ones. He cautions that a direct causal relationship between AI adoption and increased defamation litigation has not been established, but notes that the rise of generative AI has occurred during the same general period in which searches for defamation lawyers have increased.

That environment also complicates the calculation of damages. Attorneys increasingly may need to establish not simply that a statement was published, but how many people encountered it, how prominently it appears in search results, how long it remained visible and what it would realistically cost to counteract its effects.

Those questions can involve disciplines far beyond traditional legal analysis, including search-engine optimization, social-media analytics, digital advertising, audience measurement and online reputation management.

Taken together, the available evidence does not establish by itself that the number of defamation lawsuits nationwide is rising at precisely the same rate as public interest in them. But Google Trends data showing increased searches for defamation legal services, combined with highly publicized cases and substantial damage awards, suggests that defamation and online reputation disputes have become an increasingly visible area of legal practice.

The reasons are likely multifaceted: social media allows allegations to spread farther and faster; search engines can preserve reputational damage long after the original publication; high-profile cases have educated the public about potential legal remedies; and emerging technologies such as generative AI create new ways for damaging information to be repeated and rediscovered.

As more of a person’s professional and personal reputation becomes inseparable from what appears about them online, disputes over false statements are increasingly becoming disputes over measurable digital harm. Online defamation appears to be growing in visibility and significance for several interconnected reasons — and the legal profession is seeing substantial growth in the attention devoted to identifying, litigating and quantifying that harm.