How much damage can a Tweet do? According to property management company Horizon Realty, $50,000 worth.

That's the size of the lawsuit waged against one of its former tenants on Monday, in response to a Tweet about one of their Chicago apartments. Amanda Bonnen was staying an apartment at 4242 N. Sheridan, one of over 1,500 apartments owned by the company. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Bonnen's Tweet on May 12 read, in part:

"Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it's okay."

The Tweet, posted under the now defunct user name @abonnen, was the impetus for the libel lawsuit filed at Cook County Circuit Court, seeking $50,000 in damages. And although the Tweet and username are now deleted, accessing the account via Google's cache shows it has around 20 followers. While the numbers could have dropped since deletion, it doesn't appear the message would have travelled far. @abonnen wasn't a particularly heavy Twitter user, either - she posted somewhere between 1 and 5 tweets per day and often didn't post for 2 or 3 days.

Horizon's Jeffrey Michael is quoted in the Sun-Times as saying "The statements are obviously false, and it's our intention to prove that", adding that Horizon has a good reputation to protect. Bonnen wasn't contacted before the suit was filed or asked to remove the Tweet, he said: "We're a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization".