This doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy feeling:

When Richard Johnson began posting online critiques of Aurora’s governance under the moniker “councilwatch,” he never expected he would become the target of legal action from the city’s outgoing mayor.

Now, he is among several residents named in a $6-million lawsuit alleging defamation against Mayor Phyllis Morris, who was ousted by political newcomer Geoff Dawe in a landslide vote last month. Her statement of claim, filed in Superior Court this week, says critical blog posts on the website auroracitizen.ca — including allegations of corruption, lies and extreme fiscal mismanagement — made Ms. Morris the subject of “ridicule, hatred and contempt,” and even led to threats.

The case pits the rights of bloggers to freely opine against the rights of politicians to defend their reputations against online attacks, and raises the question of what constitutes fair comment in the increasingly unwieldy Internet realm, where a solitary comment may be read by millions of people worldwide.

“The wild west, that’s what it’s like out there,” said Lorne Honickman, an expert in defamation law and a member of Toronto mayor-elect Rob Ford’s legal team. “The Internet is the world now. And courts haven’t even caught up with the ramifications, from a damage point of view, of what that means.”

Although the moderators of the blog and wordpress.com are named in the suit, the offending remarks were actually made by anonymous commentators:

Mr. Johnson and his co-defendants, William Hogg and Elizabeth Bishenden, are named as the alleged moderators of the website, though Mr. Johnson denies he played any role in moderating comments. The offending posts are attributed to anonymous individuals, who, along with web host wordpress.com, are also named as defendants.

The site is here.