Can you sue someone for online harassment if you agreed to it? Say that you're on a toxic online forum and you know that the community is anonymous and that everyone bashes everyone, and you've agreed to the terms of use which state that the owner of the forum is not responsible for any emotional distress/slander you acquired during the bashing. Could the site's owner or the anonymous members be subject of your (possible) lawsuit ?
The site's owners would likely be immune from any civil action based on its users' conduct, under Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. The users, though, could still face liability. Although it would be libel rather than slander (because it is published rather than spoken), any damaging falsehoods could be actionable. The emotional distress component would also be a possibility, but it would probably be a tougher case. The laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but generally speaking an emotional-distress case requires really outrageous behavior and and very serious emotional damage.
No. Absent some collective bargaining agreement to the contrary, you have no recourse because you have not been legally wronged. You have no right to privacy in this regard. You have no right to be free of humiliation based upon truthful statements. If the email is truthful and you were indeed suspended, then the manager is entirely appropriate in sharing that information, and indeed has a need to do so. You would have no recourse in Tennessee, even if your manager gave a national television interview on your suspension and truthfully stated all reasons for the suspension and threw in statements of opinion disparaging you. Humiliation is only actionable if it amounts to "outrageous conduct" beyond mere truthful speech (e.g. throwing your clothes in the toilet or secretly putting some self-disparaging statement on the back of your uniform) and was calculated with a specific intent to cause you extraordinary emotional harm that was not necessary for some legitimate purpose.
Yes. Art 13 requires you to provide “the identity and the contact details of the controller”. You are the data controller. Your name and address are necessary to establish your identity. Using AdSense means you're offering an internet society service commercially. In that case, there's also probably some EU fair competition directive that was implemented in your countries national law and will provide equivalent requirements. For example, my country Germany has a far-reaching Impressumspflicht. Not sure if this is the most relevant EU law, but Art 22 of Directive 2006/123 requires that your country passed laws to ensure that you make available “the name of the provider, his legal status and form, the geographic address at which he is established and details enabling him to be contacted rapidly and communicated with directly and, as the case may be, by electronic means”. I think you would be in scope of this directive since you're acting commercially. This legally mandated self-doxxing is unfortunate for private bloggers, but it's also essential for making it possible to enforce data subject rights: if you were to violate someone's privacy rights, how could they sue you if they don't know where to serve you with a lawsuit? However, all things are a balancing act. These requirements are not intended to limit freedom of expression. If you're just trying to communicate something to the public without jeopardizing your anonymity, then paradoxically social media services can be more attractive.
No. Causing someone "pain and suffering" is not against the law; it is merely one kind of damages that can be awarded when someone has done something that is against the law. You may, for instance, endure pain and suffering from a car accident or shooting, in which case you could collect damages for your pain and suffering after proving that the other party committed the torts of negligence or battery, which are illegal. But if you were enduring pain and suffering from the last episode of Lost, you could not collect damages for your pain and suffering because it is not against the law to write a crappy finale. So in your case, cannot sue for pain and suffering based simply on the existence of a secret audio recording. North Carolina allows secret audio recordings, and it does not make exceptions for audio recordings that hurt someone's feelings. But to go beyond your explicit question, there still remains the possibility that you could pursue a legal action. If the other party used that recording in a way that violated the law, that might give rise to a tort that would support an award of damages for pain and suffering. If they publicly distributed a recording of themselves having sex with someone, that might constitute the tort of public disclosure of private facts. If they edited the recording to make it sound like someone had said something that they had not and then gave it to someone else, that might be grounds for a libel action.
You would need a court order to force them to take it down. There is virtually no chance a court will order them to take it down, because it would be almost impossible to do so without violating the First Amendment. You would have to prove that forcing a publisher to stop saying that you teach at the university would advance some compelling governmental interest, and that there isn't a better way to advance that interest. It's not clear what you mean by "cyberstalking," but if you're talking about someone sending you harassing messages, then the court would probably conclude that the better option would be to punish the harasser, rather than limit the publisher's speech. You could try paying them off or sending a threatening legal demand, but I doubt either would go far. I suspect that the best course would be a persistent campaign to escalate up their chain of command to find a sympathetic person willing to help. Even that, though, I would expect to be tough, because I'm sure you wouldn't be the first person trying this.
No Let's consider a similar scenario. If you made a beverage which poisoned a number of people, would you be absolved of liability because you gave it away for free? Of course not. As there is no contract between you, they would have to bring an action against you in the tort of negligence or negligent misstatement OR under consumer protection law. To succeed at tort they would need to prove that you owed them a duty of care; from Donoghue v Stevenson "You must take reasonable care to avoid acts or omissions which you can reasonable foresee would be likely to injure ... persons who are so closely and directly affected by my act that I ought reasonably have them in contemplation ...". Most cases will founder on your inability to foresee the use to which your software may be put. Consumer law is jurisdiction specific but they generally contain warranties that what you provide (gratis or otherwise) is fit for purpose, merchantable and that you do not make false and misleading statements. There is a chance that a case brought under this sort of law could succeed as you have not limited the purpose, specifically declared that it is not of merchantable quality and have (presumable) said what it does so that, if it doesn't do what you said, you have been misleading and deceptive.
To the extent that Admin is running a business rather than a free relay server, Admin will have various legal concerns. As I understand the system as you describe it, a user uploads some content to a machine, operated by AMastodonAdmin, which then makes that content available to others. W.r.t. US law, the admin needs to be concerned with a number of things. Copyright violation is one: he may get sued for contributory infringement. The DMCA safe harbor provision reduce the risk, if complied with. Defamation is another potential issue (a publisher is liable for damages under defamation law, as well as the author). &quot;Section 230&quot; may provide protection, but there is a large body of case law mentioned in there that would heave to be taken into consideration – and two upcoming Supreme Court cases. (Basically, Section 230 says that &quot;No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider&quot;). The administrator has a property right to include / exclude anyone they want to, on their machine, except that a contract between Admin and User might limit his right. A TOS is a contract, which typically says &quot;You can use my machine in a specific way as long as you follow these rules&quot;. Requiring payment in exchange for access limits Admin's right to do whatever they want. For free-access systems, there is typically a clause saying &quot;we can kick you off if we want&quot;, though also implying that they will only kick you off for a specific action (&quot;violating community standards&quot;). In order to legally receive content from User, you need permission from User to redistribute their intellectual property (therefore a TOS is virtually mandatory). This would include a warranty from User that they have the right to upload whatever they do upload, granting a correct license to Admin (read the Stack Exchange TOS), and while you are at it, you should say explicitly that if a user misbehaves, they can be banned. Silence is legally problematic, compared to explicit permission or prohibition, because then there may be a long legal wrangle over whether lack of prohibition is implicit permission. Admin technically should care about GDPR, though enforcement may make this a non-issue. A US company operating as Admin would have a real concern with GDPR, but a guy running a free basement server, having no ties to the EU, might ignore GDPR, the same way they might ignore some other nation's law against apostacy.
Invasion of privacy and false light torts would probably not be applicable here. Very few states have adopted the false light tort because of its conflict with First Amendment principles and there was no agreement or even request to keep the text private. The copyright issue is trickier. First all, the TOS may provide that the copyright belongs to the text service provider or that there is a license. But, even in the absence of an express license, sending someone a message which is equivalent to sending them a letter, probably gives rise to an implied license that the person to whom it is sent can use the message that arises merely from the act of sending it without restriction or qualification. Implied license and fair use also heavily overlap. Publishing the text exactly as it was sent to you protects you from defamation liability because it is true. On the whole it would be extremely unlikely for there to be any legal liability for publishing a text from someone that they sent to you. Of course, one can imagine exceptions. If the person receiving the text was in an attorney-client relationship, or priest-parishioner making confession relationship, or was communicating regarding classified national security matters, or there was a non-disclosure agreement in place, among other possibilities, an evidentiary privilege and duty of confidentiality could apply and disclosing the material without the permission of the privilege holder could breach a duty of confidentiality and give rise to liability. If the picture was a nude picture of a minor, there could be a criminal and/or civil liability issue, and some states have also made posting "revenge porn" a criminal offense and/or a basis for civil liability. If the disclosure was effectively a way to facilitate insider trading that could be a problem. If the contents of the text were accurately transmitted but known to be false and were disseminated without disclosure of its falsity for the purpose of defrauding a third party, that could be a problem. But, no facts that obviously flag any exception are identified in the question. The mere fact that the posting may be embarrassing, or hurt someone's reputation, or was made without someone's express consent, in general, would not be a basis for liability.