"innacurate"...that is also a hard one to pin down. Nothing is ever 100%...and chess.com goes out of it's way to give people 'another chance' and does not make those public (here Hans talked about it...so he made it public before chess.com said anything). He would not seem to have a leg to stand on there. The chess.com algorithms seem to be pretty darn accurate, but not 100%.towforce wrote: ↑Mon Dec 12, 2022 5:07 pmMikeB wrote: ↑Mon Dec 12, 2022 4:17 pm I see this was filed in the United States. If a figure is in the public eye, the plaintiff must prove that a defendant made a defamatory statement with malice. That is, the defendant made the statement knowing it was false or with reckless disregard for whether it was true or false. That would appear to me to be a huge obstacle here. Clearly, the defendants had some evidence that there was possible cheating, so, in my opinion, it would never be considered reckless disregard as to whether it was true or false. This will go nowhere fast, ymmv.
From the above quoted text (which looks correct - link), Hans Niemann needs to show that {Carlsen and Chess.com} made statements about him "with reckless disregard for whether it was true or false".
Unless chess.com has compelling evidence that Hans has cheated a lot since he turned professional (obviously I don't personally know whether they have this or not), then it's very clear that they have met the criteria for defamation.
Where it could get murky: complete speculation on my part, but it could get tricky if chess.com used cheating detection, but genuinely hadn't realised that their own cheating detection algorithms are highly inaccurate. In that case, they would have defamed him, but they wouldn't have done so with reckless disregard. However, this defence could be attacked by showing that people had told chess.com that their algorithms are faulty.
Perhaps the only thing is as concerns Magnus (in particular) and OTB chess - that's how one gets to be a GM...how one gets invited to OTB tourneys where clearly Hans was trying to make a living and get his rating higher over 2 yrs or so on the road. Online is really a different animal despite being the same game. Perhaps a jury ( if it goes there ) will have to decide if Magnus is insinuating (at the least) that he will not play in any OTB tourney as Hans and if that is or has (or possibly will...) effect his ability to pursue that when Magnus is signaling him out of all the admitted or 'known' online cheaters.
