Law clinic joins fight over anonymous comments critical of Cleveland-Cliffs
CLEVELAND — A law school clinic devoted to protecting the First Amendment will represent the anonymous online critic of Cleveland-Cliffs that the company is seeking to unmask.
The commenter hired Case Western Reserve University Law School Professor Andrew Geronimo and the school’s First Amendment Law Clinic to oppose the company’s attempt. It is urging a judge to order Yahoo to turn over the personal information identifying the owner of an account that has posted hundreds of comments critical of Cleveland-Cliffs and CEO Lourenco Goncalves on stock watching message boards.
Geronimo wrote in a filing last week that turning over the information would “strip [the commenter’s] First Amendment right to anonymity — a wrong that would affect Doe’s substantial rights under the United States Constitution and could not be redressed after-thefact.”
Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court Judge Deborah Turner on Tuesday granted a request from the law clinic to intervene. Turner scheduled a status conference later this month where the parties will discuss how to proceed.
Cleveland-Cliffs is a Fortune 500 mineral extraction company based in downtown Cleveland that owns mines across North America.
Lawyers hired by the company filed a lawsuit in Common Pleas Court in January seeking information to identify the owner of an account who went by the name “Booleansearcher.” The person made more than 3,100 comments on Yahoo Finance message boards.
The profile says the account made more than 3,100 comments on stocks and companies ranging from the online sports betting giant DraftKings and 3M to Cisco and Costco, as well as multiple steel industry companies.
The company said in the filing that it needed the information to pursue a defamation lawsuit against the person making the statements. The company did not identify any specific comments or how its reputation had been damaged by them.
The company filed a similar lawsuit in 2023 and successfully obtained the identities of three men who were posting messages critical of Goncalves and the business on the same message boards.