Cleveland-Cliffs’ efforts to unmask anonymous message board critic ‘trivializes’ First Amendment, judge finds (2024)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A judge has rejected an attempt by the Cleveland-based steel giant Cleveland-Cliffs to force Yahoo Inc. to reveal the identity of an anonymous online critic of the company.

Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Deborah Turner ruled Wednesday that the publicly traded corporation amounts to a public figure, and the comments that the user posted on a Yahoo message board concerning the company’s stock prices were largely statements of opinion.

The only statement that Turner concluded could have possibly amounted to defamation or libel was one in which the user wrote that the company’s stock prices were lower under current CEO Lourenco Goncalves than they were before he took over. Cliffs pointed to the closing price of the company’s stock in two months that ran counter to the claim.

However, Turner analyzed the data herself and found that the user’s comment was substantially true.

“Context matters,” Turner wrote. “Cliffs’ partial presentation of relevant data trivializes not only the First Amendment but also the inherent nature of the public stock exchange, which relies on vigorous debate among informed investors.”

The ruling effectively prevents the company from obtaining information it needed to identify the anonymous user, leaving it unable to pursue claims of defamation and libel.

The lawsuit, filed in January, is part of string of similar suits in which the company and Goncalves have gone after people who criticize them online.

A Cleveland-Cliffs spokeswoman said in a statement that the company is disappointed in Turner’s ruling and believed she “misapplied the law” in her order protecting the user’s anonymity.

“Under Judge Turner’s decision, Cliffs will not even know whether this chronic poster cowardly hiding behind a nickname is a person or group of people attacking a local Cleveland employer and its executives,” the spokeswoman, Pat Persico, said. “We are currently reviewing whether to appeal Judge Turner’s decision.”

Cleveland-Cliffs is a Fortune 500 mineral extraction company based in downtown Cleveland that owns mines across North America.

Turner found that the company amounts to a limited public figure, which under prior First Amendment court decisions requires it to show that the commenter had actual malice when the comments were posted. However, Turner also analyzed the case using the lesser standard of negligence.

“The Court finds that under either a negligence or actual malice standard Cliffs has failed to prove that any of the statements, taken in their full context, were defamatory,” she wrote.

The company said in the complaint that it needed Yahoo to turn over personal information identifying the owner of an account named “Booleansearcher” to pursue a defamation lawsuit against the person making the statements.

The company did not initially identify any specific comments it took issue with until after Case Western Reserve University Law School Professor Andrew Geronimo and the school’s First Amendment Law Clinic joined the lawsuit to represent the anonymous user.

In subsequent filings, lawyers for Cliffs identified a handful of comments critical of Goncalves, which Turner found to be expressed opinions that did not amount to defamation or libel.

One January comment, in which the user wrote that Cliffs’ stock price at the time of just over $18 a share was lower than it was in the nine years before Goncalves took over, included a statement of fact that could amount to defamation, she wrote.

Cliffs provided Turner with two months in which the stock prices were lower before Goncalves became CEO, which Turner found to be insufficient.

She looked at the company’s stock price for each month in the nine years before Goncalves took over. She found that its stock price was higher in 72% of those months. She also found that the price reached as high as $98 a share and regularly hovered around $50 a share during that time frame.

“The overall trend shows the gist of Booleansearcher’s comments to be objectively and verifiably true with minor exceptions over a nine-year time period,” she wrote.

More broadly, Turner also said that the very nature of the stock market would correct itself from users of the Yahoo message board making financial decisions based upon faulty information.

The judge argued that if some people sold shares based on message board comments that were not true, then other, more savvy investors who review economic trends and other reliable information would likely buy them up, keeping the stock price stable.

“The primary driver of Cliffs’ price will be its own performance,” Turner wrote. “The public stock market is self-correcting as it relies on multiple individual investors to conduct their own investigations rather than relying on anonymous statements on a message board.”

Message boards are places where users can express opinions, criticisms, praise and speculation about a company’s stock performance, and Booleansearcher’s comments fell in line with that purpose, Turner wrote.

“No reasonable investor, the audience on the subject message board, would construe these statements as anything other than opinion,” she wrote.

The company was also free to have someone create an account and post information to counter any messages that it believed contained false information, she wrote.

In January 2023, the company and Goncalves successfully sued Yahoo to get identifying information on three online posters. A subsequent defamation lawsuit against the trio was settled out of court.

Goncalves also sued a financial analyst last month for comments that he alleges the analyst made under a pseudonym on a Bloomberg Business message board. Goncalves sued the same analyst in 2017 over an article published on a newswire in which the analyst recommended stockholders in the company sell their shares.