Column – Is the owner of a Facebook page responsible for the comments people post on it? If it were up to the Australian High Court, yes. Last week I read on NiemanLab – and a little later on NOS – that the court had ruled that media that use Facebook are not only publishers of their own content, but also of the comments.
Defamatory comments
This story begins with a 2016
broadcast of the Australian television program Four Corners , which exposed abuses in juvenile detention. The image shows phone number list young prisoner Dylan Voller, chained to a chair with a bag over his head. News organizations published multiple stories about Voller, which they also shared on Facebook. And on these posts, a number of comments were left with all kinds of allegations about Voller.
Voller believes that these reactions – not the media stories or their posts themselves – are defamatory and is starting a lawsuit. But not against the individual respondents, but against the news organizations.
Then just delete those comments?
You probably recognize it in the Netherlands too. You click on the post about a news item on Facebook, and you can bet your bottom dollar that there are horrible reactions underneath. Why don’t moderators just delete those reactions?, I think (how naive). Joshua Benton, senior author at NiemanLab, describes in detail in his article where the problems lie.
First of all, moderation is almost impossible to keep up with on the larger Facebook pages, where hundreds of comments are easily placed under one post. Some comments can be deleted with one glance, but if it is slander, a moderator/journalist should carefully fact-check the comment. The media should also caseno email list hire extra people to do the bulk of the moderation, but do they have the money for that?
Why don’t moderators just delete those comments then?
The risk of lawsuits with associated fines can also result in questionable comments we need to think about what we store online being removed as a precaution. And then you get into the area of freedom of speech and censorship.
Joshua even takes it one step further: someone could even deliberately leave a defamatory comment and then file a lawsuit.