House Democrats get on board with bill requiring media to remove certain online articles

A bill to loosen defamation lawsuit restrictions advanced in the Florida House Thursday, with support from Democrats who said they’d been targets of false information spread online.

For three years, the Florida Legislature has considered GOP-backed bills making it easier to sue news organizations for defamation, but this proposal is drawing wider support from Democrats, with Tallahassee Democratic Rep. Allison Tant co-sponsoring the House measure.

The Senate and House proposals (SB 752 and HB 667) would compel news outlets to take down content from their websites within days of notification that the published information is false or outdated. Failure to remove the content would open them to defamation suits.

St. Petersburg Democratic Rep. Michele Rayner supports the bill, saying she didn’t understand why the media would want to keep false information on the internet.

“I’ve had people get on the internet and say atrocious things about me, things that are actually not true, and I’ve had to sit here and say, ‘Well, can’t do anything about it,'” Rayner said. “And I’m a state representative lawyer. I could file my own motion and do what I needed to do.”

The House Civil Justice & Claims Subcommittee advanced the bill unanimously, with four Democrats in support, despite warnings it amounts to censorship.

The bill was inspired by the case of a Miami man who’d been accused of molesting a child only to see the charges dropped. A TV station refused his request to scrub the story from its website.

“Sometimes innocence doesn’t erase the fact that an arrest and charge occurred,” said Bobby Block, executive director of the First Amendment Foundation. “They may be inconvenient facts, but they are true. If we were to buy into this bill’s logic, we would have to erase the OJ Simpson car chases and every report on Casey Anthony from history.”

Barry Richard, a prominent Tallahassee lawyer who represented that Miami man, said the change is necessary because of the permanence of the internet. Richard is married to Tant, the House co-sponsor. The proposal would allow suits for up to 20 years after the publication of an article.

“If you now have reason to know it’s not true, you can’t keep it up. What is the public interest in keeping this story up for seven years and ruining a person’s life?” Barry asked the panel Thursday.

Democrats’ support for the bill has been more limited in the Senate, where only Rosalind Osgood, of Broward County, has supported it in committee.