GSB Gold v. Google — Reddit-backed amicus and New York's Dendrite ruling (2024)

The case of Matter of GSB Gold Standard Corp. AG v. Google LLC arose from an effort by a crypto-related company to unmask the anonymous operator of the watchdog blog 'BehindMLM,' who had written critically about the company. GSB Gold Standard sought subpoenas to Google and GoDaddy to identify the blogger; the blogger fought back as a nonparty appellant, asserting a First Amendment right to speak anonymously on matters of public concern.

On 11 April 2024, the Stanford Juelsgaard Intellectual Property and Innovation Clinic filed an amicus brief on behalf of a coalition of online platforms — Glassdoor, Indeed, PubPeer, Reddit, Tripadvisor, and Yelp. The brief urged New York's appellate court to adopt the 'Dendrite' factors, a flexible balancing test for deciding whether to override an anonymous speaker's identity. The platforms argued that anonymous online speech is part of a long American tradition — invoking the pseudonymous authorship of the Federalist Papers — and warned that 'when a speaker loses their anonymity, it is lost forever.'

On 30 May 2024, the Appellate Division, First Department, unanimously reversed the lower court and quashed the subpoenas. The court adopted the Dendrite test, requiring a party seeking to unmask an anonymous speaker to give notice and an opportunity to appear, identify the precise actionable statements, state a prima facie claim, and then have the court balance the equities and First Amendment interests. It found that GSB's evidentiary showing was weak relative to the blogger's right to speak anonymously on a matter of public concern.

The ruling was regarded as the first time a New York appellate court squarely endorsed the Dendrite standard, aligning New York with a number of other jurisdictions that had adopted similar protective frameworks. For platforms that host anonymous reviews, commentary, and whistleblowing, the decision provided clearer ground on which to resist unmasking demands in New York courts.

Reddit's participation reflects a recurring pattern: rather than litigating only its own subpoenas, Reddit has joined coalitions of platforms to shape the legal standards that govern anonymous speech generally. The case is not a Reddit-content dispute as such — the target was a blog hosted elsewhere — but Reddit's role as an amicus made it part of the body of anonymous-speech law that directly affects how its own users can be unmasked.