Journalist sentenced for not deleting offensive comments to his post

It will be up to the Cassazione to decide whether or not the journalist who publishes a post on his or her social profile is obliged to delete the comments of readers that may be defamatory. On 10 April, at 10am, an Italian association of videomaker journalists met in front of the Court of Cassation for asit-in in solidarity with their colleague and associate, on the day the Court is due to rule on his case. The video-maker was condemned in first and second instance to pay 33 thousand euros for not having removed some comments written by third parties under his post published on Facebook, a post that previous sentences have judged not defamatory.

The affair dates back to 2018 and - as reconstructed in a note from the association - the videomaker had contested the reconstruction, made by the Journal of Vicenza article, of some asylum seekers from a centre in the Veneto city who had allegedly protested in order to be able to watch the championship on Sky. "News that was relaunched by leading politicians that had triggered hate speeches towards migrants but that - according to the journalist's verification - was the result of an inaccurate reconstruction of the facts. Taken to court by the author of the article, the judge ruled that what was written in the post was documented and legitimate. In the second part of the ruling, however, came the surprise. The video maker was convicted of failing to remove some of the hundreds of comments that appeared under his post, despite the fact that there was no interaction with them by the author and no one had ever asked him to remove them, not even through Facebook's reporting tools.

In the association's view, if the conviction were to be upheld, it would impose a obligation to remove based on alleged knowledge of the comments, which would be too onerous for any writer. A sentence that would lead users to self-censor themselves, as the international organisation Article 19 warns, with the risk of limiting freedom of expression and public confrontation, especially for journalists who use social media.