KB-2023-003483 - [2025] EWHC 1799 (KB)

Ahead of the hearing that had been listed for 12 December 2024, the Claimants served a series of documents which appeared to suggest that defamatory statements were still online. However, most came from websites called kantie.org and https://fishandchips.fans/t/topic/5001, neither of which is related to D3. Kantie is a third-party tool that employs “crawl bots” to extract and replicate internet content. It is therefore likely that Kantie had replicated some of the content of D3’s website before the relevant deletions were made: Lin 2 at [25]-[26]. https://fishandchips.fans is a website for which D4 was the domain name registrant: [2025] EWHC 158 (KB) at [12] and [52]-[54].

The 12 December 2024 hearing had been listed to consider the disposal of the claim against D1 and certain other applications. The Claimants and other parties invited the court to consider yet further applications at the hearing.

In [2025] EWHC 158 (KB) at [20] I observed that it was a hallmark of this litigation that the Claimants had made a vast number of applications; corresponded with the court very regularly; and routinely provided the court with voluminous documentation, the relevance of which was not always immediately apparent, and sometimes without permission to do so. It was partly because of their conduct of the litigation in this way that it was necessary to limit the 12 December 2024 hearing to the applications relating to the Claimants and D4: ibid, at [21]. The issues between the Claimants and D1, D2 and D3 were adjourned to be considered at separate hearings.

On 14 December 2024 Mr Nazir on behalf of D3 emailed the Claimants and asked them to set out in a table which posts they alleged were still online, and in respect of each post, the title of the post, the date of the post and the URL. No response to this request was received. Mr Lin’s evidence was that this was because it was not possible for the Claimants to provide such a table as D3 had already deleted all the posts in question: Lin 2 at [27].

On 19 December 2024 the Claimants made an application to add Mr Lin personally to the proceedings as a party under CPR Part 19.

On 25 February 2025, D3 filed a Notice of Change of representatives, confirming Greenberg Traurig LLP had been instructed to act on behalf of D3 in place of Farleys LLP.

By 9 April 2025, the Claimants had already intimated that they intended to discontinue their claim against D3, but did not want to pay D3’s costs. However, on this date they wrote to D3 stating that they had discovered 12 URLs that remained active on D3’s website, which linked to posts published by Overseas Fox Hunter, and which were defamatory of them. The Claimants indicated that they reserved the right to amend their claim against D3 to include one of harassment. They asked for a response by 4 pm on 11 April 2025.

On 15 April 2025, D3’s solicitors informed the Claimants that the comments had been deleted as soon as was practicable, at 8.47 am PST on 10 April 2025. D3 also explained that the 12 posts were in fact published by third parties as “quote comments” of Overseas Fox Hunter’s original posts, which is why they were not caught by D3’s process of removing all posts from the website that were published directly by that account. D3’s solicitors emphasised that the Claimants’ 9 April 2025 letter was the first occasion on which they had drawn these particular posts to D3’s attention, even though they dated back to 2023.

On 28 April 2025 the Claimants made an application for C1 and C2 to be afforded special measures under CPR 1.6 in respect of the future conduct of the litigation involving D3.