Facebook ‘Likes’ of Anti-Semitic Posts Could Be a Crime in Switzerland

Using Facebook Inc.’s “like” or “share” button to distribute right-wing or anti-semitic material could be a crime if the information ends up being circulated to a third party, Switzerland’s top court ruled.

The Swiss Federal Court upheld a fine imposed on a man for “repeated defamation” by a Zurich court, ruling that “activating both ‘like’ and ‘share’ buttons in Facebook can improve visibility and thereby contribute to the dissemination within the social network of marked content.”

In the case under review, the liked and shared content reached people who weren’t part of the subscriber circle of the original author, meaning he was responsible for wider distribution of the right-wing and anti-semitic content, the court said.

While the Swiss court stressed that each case must be examined to determine the impact of the sharing action, the decision is a potential blow to one of Facebook’s most iconic features. The social-media giant Mark Zuckerberg founded in his college dorm room 15 years ago has become the target of privacy regulators on both sides of the Atlantic and faces accusations it allows misinformation to flourish on its platform.

A spokesperson for Facebook declined to immediately comment.

The Zurich court must go back and render a fresh decision on whether the man’s underlying comments were indeed hateful and defamatory “because it had so far wrongly refused the accused the opportunity to prove the reality of the disputed accusations,” the federal court said.

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