MR JUSTICE WARBY Approved Judgment Monroe v Hopkins [2017] EWHC 433 (QB) (3) The credibility of the publisher in the eyes of publishees. This is clearly a relevant question. Skilfully treading a somewhat delicate line, Mr Price submits that Twitter is the “Wild West” of social media, and not as authoritative as (for instance) The Sun or the Daily Mail, which are established institutions, subject to regulation, that employ lawyers to check copy. On the facts of this case, I do not find this submission persuasive. I shall come to the question of whether Ms Hopkins’ mistake was or would have been obvious to all. But there is no good reason to conclude that a reader would discount the allegation because of who Ms Hopkins is, or the fact that she published on Twitter. She is a well-known figure. She made clear at the time she was a Sun columnist. (4) The absence of evidence that the allegation was believed. There is a dearth of such evidence, but this is a commonplace of litigation in this field and understandable for reasons identified by Dingemans J in Sobrinho. It is said to be remarkable, bearing in mind how uninhibited people are on Twitter, that there is nothing indicating that a person changed their position in respect of Ms Monroe as a result of the tweets. I think this submission lacks a sound evidential basis. I am not persuaded that the absence of evidence of this kind is evidence of a lack of harm. (5) Evidence that “no harm was done” to Ms Monroe’s reputation. This is said to be “obvious” from contemporaneous social media activity. I reject this. There is some evidence of social media activity suggesting that some people paid little attention to what had been said. But this represents only a fraction of the readership, and there is no sound basis on which to infer that it is representative of the whole. Certainly, some people realised that Ms Hopkins had mistaken Ms Monroe for Ms Penny, and did so before the half-hearted early morning tweet of 2 June. But the evidence does not persuade me that this was a universal realisation. I deal with media coverage of 19 May separately, below. (6) The question of whether Ms Monroe suffered or did not suffer a torrent of abuse as a consequence of the tweets (the “torrent” point). This is also an issue to which I shall devote a little more attention below. My conclusion is that “torrent” is probably something of an overstatement, and much of what is relied on cannot be shown to be causally linked to the tweets complained of. But I accept that there was some abuse resulting from the tweets complained of, and reflecting harm to reputation. (7) The state of Ms Monroe’s existing standing or reputation in the eyes of the publishees. As Mr Price accepts, a defendant who wishes to prove that a claimant had an existing bad reputation must plead and prove it. That has not been done. Instead, Mr Price relies on documentary evidence that the (as he would say) few who abused Ms Monroe in the aftermath of the tweets complained of were people who were “already making the same or similar comments about her before the tweets”. That is what the analysis of Ms Harris tends to show. This is a tricky area. In principle, evidence of bad reputation, however it may come into a case, is relevant only if it goes to the same sector of the claimant’s reputation. This evidence is not clearly of that nature. But even assuming this is a legitimate line to take (which may be debatable) I do not think this is a matter to which any great weight should be attached. It is not safe to infer that a claimant’s reputation has not been harmed by a specific defamatory allegation just because a person who