The reality is that people within a large bureaucratic organization often need a decision to be made that has impacts which extend beyond their narrowly defined responsibilities. Consultants are brought in to make the decision instead, to put space between the employees and the decision. The decision might be unpopular or popular, that’s besides the point.

If you’re an employee with a role doing x, putting your head above the parapet and volunteering to do y, it’s a huge risk, for little reward. Best case, the big corporate you work for gives you a pat on the back and a gift card. Worst case, you’re the sacrificial lamb at the altar of accountability. Much easier to offload everything onto consultants to dodge any risk of being held accountable for a bad outcome.

So, yes, consultants protect employees, but not in the cynical way the trope suggests.

Big corporations and governments aren’t startups in which everyone is encouraged to do as they please in service of the mission. Corporations and governments hire people for very specific roles with very specific responsibilities. Stepping outside of your responsibilities is discouraged. Employees inside big organizations have to think, “how fucked am I if I make this decision and it goes wrong?”. A startup can write off big losses without a second thought, a big corporate or government has to investigate.

If you need to make a big decision, you don’t let an intern take a shot at it, even if they are convinced they have the perfect idea, because if it goes wrong, it’s on your head — which idiot let an intern fuck it up?

You bring in consultants who are (ostensibly) experts so that your responsibility ends at having done the right thing and if anything goes wrong, it’s not on your head.

You can get back to the world you dream of. Every email I receive into my inbox is an email I want to receive :)

You might also like superhuman.com and similar.

Social anxiety is a condition that cannot be thought away, you cannot rationalize social anxiety nor can it be represented as a cost/benefit analysis of risk of being disliked vs. reward of being liked. You can feel socially anxious without having social anxiety. You can be depressed without having depression. You will be depressed after your beloved pet dies. You will be socially anxious walking into a room full of people you haven't met before.

The courts are very kind to people who choose to represent themselves, especially when the litigants are obviously abusing the system to try and silence individuals. The point you're making seems to be that you must spend money to defend against spurious defamation claims so I have asked you to provide any evidence of a case where an individual is accused of libel and has suffered because they chose not to spend money.

I am not trolling. I disagree with the suggestion that the U.K. libel laws create an environment where people are scared to speak truth because there is a real threat of an expensive lawsuit. My position is that the fear people have of expensive lawsuits comes from other people fear mongering, in comments like yours, either based on a misunderstanding of a case they've seen publicised or because of information they've been given by legal professionals in a different context.

The "Defendant’s Response to Letter of Claim" section is very clear that it is actually that simple. The burden is almost entirely on the claimant, the defendant has very little to do. Can you provide any evidence that any individual has ever been sanctioned by a U.K. court for either not filing a response, or not filing a substantive response?

You are saying that "costs will balloon further" but you haven't yet established there are any costs. How can costs that do not exist balloon? Any individual could satisfy the "Pre-action Protocol for Media and Communications Claims" with ease, no expense necessary.

edit: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/other-site-policies/g...

The situation you are in is very unfortunate and I am sympathetic but in GitHub's defence, this is exactly what I hope would happen when I enable 2FA. I would be very perturbed to find out that GitHub would grant access to my account given identity documents. There are some creative solutions (e.g: a countdown to the reset with progressively more aggressive email notifications to ensure the account holder is aware) but even they are problematic. So, this sucks, but it's the price we pay for security.

A response to a "spurious defamation letter" does not cost "high four figures". Substantive does not refer to the cost of the response. Substantive means that it addresses the substance of the complaint.

The "high four figures" you spent for a lawyer to respond (I disagree with the word "defend") to a legal threat was unnecessary. You paid a bunch of money for some low-paid legal assistants to fill out a template, and then a high-paid solicitor to sign off on it.

As an individual, you can respond substantively to a legal threat for free. And even if you choose not to respond, courts are not punitive, the standard that courts hold individuals to are different to the standards they hold law firms to. A court will not rule in a claimant's favour in a libel case because an individual didn't follow procedure correctly.

If you, as an individual, make a truthful statement about A Big Corporation and A Big Corporation spends £100,000 on a team of lawyers to write an angry letter to you demanding you retract, a simple single-sentence self-composed response of "The statement is true, I will not retract." is substantive.

Despite what catastrophisers like yourself (catastrophisers who are encouraged by participants in the legal system who profit from this misapprehension) might suggest, civil courts are interested in adjudicating fairness, not trapping individuals in an endless legal quagmire.

Can you share examples of individuals who have been sanctioned by the U.K. courts for anything that comes close to not engaging in the Pre-Action Protocol?

You do not need to "defend" against a "spurious defamation letter". The (very profitable) business of sending legal letters is based on the misunderstanding of the law that is perpetuated online. Legal letters are to law firms what bandwidth is to cloud hosting providers: free money.

Noel Clarke's legal team were working on a no-win no-fee basis (before they saw the writing on the wall and dropped him as a client, leading him to represent himself). The Guardian had no obligation to spend over £6 million on their defence, it was a choice they made. Indeed, one could argue that The Guardian chose to spend so much to send a message to those that consider baseless libel legal action in future, that The Guardian is willing to spend any amount of money to defend itself.

If you are an individual who posts the truth online, and you are sued for libel, you can spend very little on mounting a defence (you may even choose to represent yourself for free). Whether the litigant spends thousands, millions or billions on their action against you is immaterial as it is their cost, not yours.

As for Jack Monroe vs. Hopkins, Jack Monroe is a fraud. Justice did not prevail, although Hopkins losing her house was a nice treat.

No. The deference people have to the law as some sort of all knowing all powerful magic spell that can be cast to force silence at any time is to blame. Libel is publishing something you know to be untrue. The truth cannot be libel.

If you want to speak the truth, if you want to act in service of the greater good, you must take the risk that you will attract attention from people who do not want you to speak the truth. And those people may use whatever power they have to suppress you, whether that's judicial or extrajudicial. That's not caused by any specific legal system, it's how people behave.

Investigative journalism is uneconomic the world over. The U.K. has some of the best investigative journalism in the world. The U.K. legal system is far from perfect, but it is wrong to say that in this case, the U.K.'s libel laws (for all their flaws) kept this information secret.

The irony is that the greatest suppressor of the truth is comments like yours which scare people into silence about the truth.

Almost all supposed outrage marketing is just marketing teams making terrible decisions because they’re people and people make terrible decisions.

"Given this dichotomy, which of the two paths should you take? Be a real student and not start a startup, or start a real startup and not be a student? I can answer that one for you. Do not start a startup in college. How to start a startup is just a subset of a bigger problem you're trying to solve: how to have a good life. And though starting a startup can be part of a good life for a lot of ambitious people, age 20 is not the optimal time to do it. Starting a startup is like a brutally fast depth-first search. Most people should still be searching breadth-first at 20.

You can do things in your early 20s that you can't do as well before or after, like plunge deeply into projects on a whim and travel super cheaply with no sense of a deadline. For unambitious people, this sort of thing is the dreaded "failure to launch," but for the ambitious ones it can be an incomparably valuable sort of exploration. If you start a startup at 20 and you're sufficiently successful, you'll never get to do it. [7]"