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posted by n1 on Monday June 05 2017, @03:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-like-stuff-you-are-not-supposed-to dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

A Swiss court has fined a man for “liking” defamatory comments on Facebook, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind.

According to a statement from the Zurich district court, the 45-year-old [un-named] defendant accused an animal rights activist, Erwin Kessler, of racism and antisemitism and hit the “like” button under several comments from third parties about Kessler that were deemed inflammatory.

The comments were made in 2015 during heated discussions on a range of Facebook groups about which animal welfare groups should be permitted to take part in a vegan street festival, the Swiss daily Tages Anzeiger reported.

Kessler sued more than a dozen people who took part in those exchanges, a lawyer for one of the defendants, Amr Abdelaziz, said.

Several people have already been convicted in the case, mainly for comments they made. It appears the man convicted on Monday was the first to be sanctioned merely for “liking” comments made by others.

[...] [The lawyer, Amr Abdelaziz] said the courts needed to urgently clarify whether hitting a like button on social media should be given the same weight as other forms of speech more commonly cited in defamation cases.

“If the courts want to prosecute people for likes on Facebook, we could easily need to triple the number of judges in this country,” he said. “This could also obviously easily become an assault on the freedom of expression.”

Source: The Guardian


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  • (Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Monday June 05 2017, @03:34PM

    by Yog-Yogguth (1862) Subscriber Badge on Monday June 05 2017, @03:34PM (#520792) Journal

    Yeah but those are usually set up, run, and funded by the CIA and/or run Disqus or some other data-hoovering surveillance monstrosity, at least where I live.

    Not that there's actually any need because there isn't.

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