A SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) is a legal action brought mainly to silence or intimidate critics, journalists or activists rather than to win a genuine claim.
SLAPPs typically allege defamation, privacy breaches or similar claims against people speaking on matters of public interest, relying on the cost, stress and length of litigation to make them back down. Many US states have anti-SLAPP statutes that let a defendant seek early dismissal and, often, recover legal fees; their scope and strength vary by state, and there is no general federal anti-SLAPP law.
In the EU, Directive (EU) 2024/1069 protects people engaged in public participation from manifestly unfounded claims and abusive court proceedings in cross-border civil matters, with early dismissal and the possibility of costs and penalties against the claimant. Member States had to transpose it by 7 May 2026, and several countries have adopted national rules of their own.
In practice
SLAPP rules are one reason a lawful removal service acts only where there is a real legal ground. Pressuring a critic or journalist to delete accurate reporting or honest opinion can backfire: a lawsuit may be met with an anti-SLAPP motion, a fee award and wider attention to the original content. Removal requests are strongest when they target false statements of fact, privacy violations, copyright infringement or clear policy breaches — not criticism you disagree with.
Source: Directive (EU) 2024/1069 (anti-SLAPP Directive) ↗
Related terms
- Defamation — Defamation is a false statement of fact, communicated to others, that damages the reputation of an identifiable person or business.
- Cease and desist letter — A cease and desist letter is a written demand that a person or company stop a specific activity, such as publishing defamatory or infringing content, and often that they remove it.
- Content removal — Content removal is the process of getting harmful or unlawful material taken off the website or platform that hosts it, or out of search results, through policy reports and legal requests.
- Section 230 — Section 230 is the US federal law that generally shields websites and platforms from liability for content posted by their users and protects their good-faith moderation decisions.