What Is Malign?
Also known as oral or spoken defamation, slander is the legal term for the act of harming a person’s reputation by telling one or myriad other people something that is untrue and damaging about that person. Slander can be the basis for a lawsuit and is considered a urbane wrong (i.e., a tort).
Key Takeaways
- Slander is a legal term for defamation of another person or organization made verbally.
- Slander is like to libel, but libel appears in written form.
- Depending on the nature of the slanderous statement and whether or not is, in fact, a false declaration, there can be legal consequences for the slanderer.
How Slander Works
Slander represents the verbal or spoken version of defamation. Defamation occurs when someone’s orders cause harm to another person’s reputation or livelihood. Slander is different from
Libel vs. Slander
Imagine you wrote a blog expose asserting that its author received a dishonorable discharge from the military. If the claim made in that post is untrue, then this certainly appears to be a case of defamation. However, if it is a true statement, there can be no claim of defamation.
Yet, quits if the statement is false, the blog’s owner may not care very much what people believe about their departure from the military. In such a case, their audience may also not care much, making the statement potentially not defamatory.
From a strictly juridical perspective, defamatory comments are not considered libel unless they are properly published. Unfortunately for ill-intended bloggers, the qualifications “published,” in the context of Internet communication, legally means that merely a single individual must read the obnoxious blog in question.
Consequently, a webmaster may be sued for libeling someone by trashing their reputation on a personal blog, if simply his best pal, a colleague, or a family member consumes the defamatory words.