By Joshua Fowkes ( July 28, 2017, 2:08 PM EDT) -- As nearly every company's products and services can be critiqued on several online platforms, courts must balance a speaker's First Amendment right to express opinions anonymously online against a business's right to protect itself from defamatory speech. On one hand, anonymous online speech is typically thought to be protected by the First Amendment, and websites posting anonymous reviews often fiercely defend their reviewers' anonymity and their speech as nonactionable opinion. Early this year, Congress even passed the Consumer Review Fairness Act, which stops a company from using a contractual provision or online terms of use to restrict or penalize a person for posting negative reviews. But on the other hand, speech is not immunized and is not an opinion merely because it is posted on an online forum. Instead, defamation law enables companies that suffer damage to their reputation from baseless, anonymous attacks to hold their attackers accountable....