A Caymanian defamed online can now pursue a libel case in Dublin, London or anywhere else the post has done damage to their reputation, according to one of the UK and Ireland's most prominent media lawyers, but the tech platforms hosting that material remain the hardest defendants of all to pin down.

Paul Tweed, the Belfast-based solicitor who has acted for public figures on both sides of the Atlantic over five decades, told The Caymanian Journal that the rise of social media has dismantled the old rule that "what happens in Cayman stays in Cayman".

"Three decades ago, something published in Cayman, in print or broadcast, would only be published within the islands, so you could only bring legal proceedings in Cayman," he says. "Anything published online today will undoubtedly be published all around the world, including in areas where the subject of the allegation has a reputation."

The three tests for libel are broadly the same everywhere, Tweed says: the allegation must be false, it must have been published in the jurisdiction where the claimant is suing, and it must have caused harm. He has no reason to believe the position in the Cayman Islands differs.

Where jurisdictions part ways is on how much harm must be shown. In England and Wales a claimant must prove "serious harm", which Tweed describes as a high bar that turns on evidence rather than the claimant's own perception. Ireland and Northern Ireland have no such threshold, so a claimant need only establish that their reputation has been damaged.

Why Dublin has become the venue of choice

A high-profile Caymanian who is libelled online could, Tweed says, bring an action in Ireland as well as in George Town, provided they can show the material was seen there and they have a reputation there, and provided they do not claim worldwide damages in more than one court. Each claim must be limited to the damage caused within that jurisdiction.

For clients from around the world, including the Caribbean, his firm's preferred venue is Dublin. The reason is corporate rather than legal: most of the major platforms have their European, Middle Eastern and African headquarters in the Irish capital.

"We have had situations where platforms responded to correspondence from our London office saying, no, you can't sue us in England and Wales, our headquarters are in Dublin," he says. "So we change tack and go after them in Dublin, and suddenly they realise, oops, that headquarters was set up for tax purposes."

Tweed says he has long been accused online of "libel tourism", a label he treats as "a badge of honour". The platforms, he argues, are guilty of "tax tourism", which has exposed them not only to Irish libel, data protection and privacy law but to European law as well. He notes the U.S. Speech Act, introduced under President Obama, was designed to shield Americans from foreign libel judgments, but the platforms' decision to domicile in Ireland placed them outside its protection.

Cost remains the obstacle. London is expensive, Dublin less so, but Tweed says legal fees still put litigation beyond many people's reach. He suggests the Irish Press Ombudsman, which has statutory backing, is a stronger model than the UK's voluntary regulator IPSO, to which several major publishers do not subscribe.

Unmasking anonymous posters

Anonymous online abuse is "extremely difficult" to tackle and has become much worse, Tweed says. The standard route in the UK and Ireland is a Norwich Pharmacal application, a court order compelling a platform to hand over the identity behind an account. Platforms rarely consent but usually do not oppose it. The catch is that the applicant must pay both sides' costs, which Tweed puts at £20,000 to £30,000 before any libel claim has even begun.

"We are always very reluctant to advise clients to do it," he says. "Sometimes I feel like telling the client to put up a reward of 20 grand for somebody to unmask the person. It would be much more cost effective."

In one case, a BBC journalist facing persistent defamatory posts hired a private investigator who traced the account to an address. The poster, confronted at the door with a legal notice, turned out to be "a very respected government person" and the matter ended in a six-figure settlement.

"Their rules, not the law"

Tweed reserves his sharpest criticism for the platforms' approach to complaints. Traditional publishers, he says, generally want to resolve a dispute early; around 95% of his cases settle before reaching court, and he regards any case that puts a client in the witness box as a failure. Platforms, by contrast, insist they are not publishers and direct complainants to the anonymous poster instead.

"This expression I really hate: 'this does not breach our rules.' Their rules, not the law," he says. "They'll take six defamatory postings down but not the other 10."

The platforms' deepest fear, in his view, is precedent. With what he calls unlimited funds, an award of half a million dollars and several million in costs is "water off a duck's back", so they will settle rather than lose a judgment that others could rely on. Their promise to comply with court orders in every jurisdiction where one is obtained means, in practice, that a person libelled worldwide must win in every country separately. "Who can afford to do that?" he asks.

He points to AI-generated fake celebrity endorsements as the next front, arguing that responsibility must rest with the platform because "if there was no platform, there'd be no fake ads".

The answer, Tweed says, is legislation, and he cites Australia as the example governments should follow even at the risk of economic retaliation from companies that provide jobs and investment. He does not expect a global agreement in his lifetime, given the competing interests of the U.S., China, Europe, Russia and the Gulf states, and he does not expect the platforms to volunteer for anything that costs them commercially.

"The power balance is now dictated more and more by the financial strength of the opposition," he says. "These platforms have more power than most governments. But at least it's still exciting, so I'm not retiring yet."