The thing that bugs me the most is that he’s asking for all of his records be reinstated. Even if he wins on all counts of defamation, I can’t see how any court would award this relief.

First of all, records-keepers like these can legally make their own rules as to what records count or don’t count or how they must be submitted or collected, and those rules can be enforced completely arbitrarily and even unfairly. That is, unless you’re alleging anti-competition bias or something (and he’s not), you can’t sue someone for removing a world record from your publication, even for a completely made-up reason. You may be able to sue for the notice explaining why it was removed, but the removal itself is non-actionable. This is important for reasons I’ll get into.

Second, he effectively admits that at least some of his records were done on MAME—or at least he admits he can’t disprove that he did, which is needed to prevail on a defamation claim. This means two things: 1) for those records that were done on MAME, they were absolutely illegitimate by TG’s rules, so he isn’t even remotely harmed in a defamatory way by those records being removed; and 2) by TG’s rules, if even one submitted record is determined to be illegitimate, then all of the records held by that person are presumed to be illegitimate and are removed, regardless of whether or not they could even be illegitimate for the exact same reasons. That rule is in place as a reflection of the untrustworthiness of liars and cheaters and as a matter of practicality. In other words, if even one of Mitchell’s records was legitimately removed for being done on a MAME emulator, that removal is in no way the result of defamation, and the removal of all his other records is fully in keeping with their publicly stated rules, and thus isn’t the result of defamation, either.

Why is all this important? Well, in defamation cases, the available remedies are generally restricted to: monetary damages, removal of the offending statement(s), an injunction on the speaker(s) to prevent them from repeating the offending stayement(s) (after the underlying case is fully adjudicated), and a public statement that the statement(s) was/were false and defamatory. They do not typically include a reversal of associated actions.

Here’s an example: an employee is fired and public statements he made on company-owned property (such as websites) are removed. His former employer makes a public statement about the firing and why it took place. The employee sues not for wrongful termination but for defamation based on the public statement. Since he lost wages for being fired and probably failed to get jobs later that could have earned him money, monetary damages make perfect sense. To prevent future reputational or other harms, the removal of the offending statement(s), an injunction against future republication of the statement(s), and/or a public statement recanting the statement(s) are also reasonable. However, he wouldn’t get his job back because the law doesn’t allow that as a remedy. It also wouldn’t make sense because you can’t force an employer to continue to employ someone they don’t want to. He also wouldn’t be able to force the company to reinstate the removed statements as that would not only infringe on the company’s FA rights but also because that removal wasn’t a direct result of the defamation, so the harm caused by the defamatory statement(s) wouldn’t include the removal of the statements from company-owned property. That is, the requested remedy has no real connection to the alleged harm.

Here, it’s similar. Even if certain statements about the removal of records were defamatorily false and some of the records removed were legitimate, reinstating any or all of the records wouldn’t be a remedy that would be directly related to the harms caused by the defamation. Some of the removed records were illegitimate by TG’s rules, so they were clearly not the result of anything defamatory. Additionally, the existence of some illegitimate record calls all of his records into question because that impugns his trustworthiness, which is reasonable justification to remove all of his records, even if some of them may have been or probably were legitimate. So again, their removal is not directly the result of defamation. As such, reinstating any of Mitchell’s records would not be a remedy for any actual defamation but for reputational harms he brought onto himself by his own actions, which is not actionable.

You also can’t have the courts force a company to keep a record that their rules say shouldn’t be kept. That’s a violation of the FA by forcing them to make a nonprofessional statement that they believe is genuinely false. Their leaderboards, their rules. They can remove any records they want for any reason or even no reason at all. This is especially true for TG, which only publishes records online, and those records come entirely from user submissions, so they can moderate those records as they please under CDA §230. And Guinness was essentially just removing the records because they only consider video-game-related records that appear on TG, so if TG removes them, so too must Guinness. They were essentially following a contractual obligation to a partner, and generally courts can’t force a party to break a contract if the obligation itself is perfectly legal (which it is here).