“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it” said business mogul, Warren Buffet.

The octogenarian billionaire, who has led a long life in the glare of the business world knows a thing or two about the value of reputation; an intangible asset which is strenuously acquired and easily lost.

Recent PR blunders in the US—an ill-conceived advert by Pepsi, and alarming footage of United Airlines allegedly manhandling an on-board passenger swiftly off-board– has once again brought the importance of corporate reputation to light. Both incidents also expose the significance of social media in an online era.

The slick Pepsi production was in fact stymied by the derision it was met with online. Commentators berated the ad as a cynical exploitation of protest movements. The United Airlines incident was recorded and uploaded by smartphone, and thereafter disgust ricocheted across social media, sending UA’s share price into a temporary tailspin.

Both events show how multinational companies and individuals alike can suffer from reputational damage, often at their own hand. The real question however is what can be done when a reputation is unfairly blighted in the press, or online?

With the rise of social media, a spurious allegation, risqué remark, or incendiary lie has potential to become established as fact in the eyes of many. Social media often has little concern for the difference between the truth and a lie. In many instances, the speed with which a story can travel online leaves little time for its veracity to be investigated. Despite recent efforts by Facebook to alert its users and call out bogus stories, the line between fake or real can become frighteningly blurred.

So how does one respond in the face of such falsehoods? How is a reputation to be defended when the truth becomes an afterthought?

The fight is often through the courts, by applying the law of defamation. The very public twitter spat between Jack Monroe and Katie Hopkins became the centrepiece for the most intriguing libel case this year, heard at the Royal Courts of Justice. The claimant, Monroe, was awarded £24,000 damages over a tweet which Hopkins’ sent alleging Monroe’s support for defacement of war memorials.

The case demonstrates the risks that now come with tweeting, and the cost of words in an online arena. 140 characters can translate into a hefty bill if the words expressed are libelous. What is interesting (from a legal perspective at least) is how this public spat became one of the first cases used to measure the new ‘serious harm’ threshold brought in by the Defamation Act 2013.

Far more significant though, is that the Northern Ireland Assembly has chosen not to enact this legislation. As a result, Northern Ireland now operates under a different defamation framework from England and Wales. Stormont’s reluctance to follow Westminster in reforming defamation law means that the NI press and public live and work under a set of laws with a very different approach to freedom of expression. While Westminster set out to overhaul what some in the press viewed as archaic laws which stifled free debate, Stormont clung on to the old framework.

The key principle has always been to strike a balance between individual rights to privacy and to freedom of expression. As it stands, Northern Irish law remains affixed to a position that was deemed not fit for purpose by England and Wales. The Northern Ireland Law Commission produced a consultation paper and report recommending the introduction of most of the 2013 Act, and was due to be considered by the Department of Finance. As yet, little progress has been made.

Given the transnational (and indeed globalised) nature of social media and its effect on reputational management, and with the court ruling on Monroe v Hopkins ringing in our ears, how will NI & the UK reconcile their differences over freedom of expression going forward? With Stormont deadlocked and drifting into political quagmire, this issue should not expect a speedy resolution.