What was the story with that threatened Scientology lawsuit?

March 27, 2009 9:33 AM

For Those Of You Joining Us Late-filter: What was the story with that threatened Scientology lawsuit?

Last April, Mikey-San wrote:

You're missing the point. It's not about "omg an ad for an organization", it's "Scientology threatened to sue MetaFilter over a comment made by a community member, so we don't want to fucking advertise for them".

My Google-fu turned up this...

You may say I'm an asshat and an idiot, but I don't pay $5 to post a damn thing and you do, so who's the idiot? :P

... but not, alas, the comment in question or any other reference to this lawsuit threat.

So what was the story with that?

posted by Joe Beese to MetaFilter-Related at 9:33 AM (4 comments total)

The story is that it was removed for a reason, and you aren't likely to get an answer printed on this site.
posted by kamikazegopher at 9:40 AM on March 27, 2009

Here's the story.

- someone made a comment on MeFi about a prominent scientologist actor (which I interpreted as a tongue-in-cheek joke comment personally)
- someone within that religious organization wanted it off the web because people thought it was serious
- they somehow tracked down the commenter directly and threatened them
- we removed the comment at the request of the commenter
- there was no direct lawsuit threat to MeFi itself, ever.

That's the entire story. To ensure that's the end of the story (since it's been a couple years) I'm gonna close it. Feel free to email us if you need more info.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:43 AM on March 27, 2009

The CoS stuff is Matt's territory (and probably ten-foot-pole stuff at that), it was before my tenure and I'm not going to try to dig into it regardless.

I have no idea what any of that has to do with your "this" link, though.
posted by cortex (staff) at 9:43 AM on March 27, 2009

Fair enough. But this is a fairly prominent site, yeah? If it was successfully muscled by the Xenu boyz, I would have thought Slashdot or somebody would have commented on it.
posted by Joe Beese at 9:43 AM on March 27, 2009