Man Fined For ‘Liking’ Facebook Comments

We live in a society these days in which the things we say or do online can affect us in the real world. No longer can you casually throw a comment up online without there being some kind of possible consequence to your real world life. We’ve seen how people have been fired from jobs and land themselves in jail because of that.

To further prove that point, it seems that over in Switzerland, the courts have recently fined a man around $4,000 for “liking” posts and comments on Facebook. Basically what happened is that the man had liked several posts written by a third-party that accused an animal rights activist of antisemitism, racism, and fascism, and because the man was unable to prove that any of those things were true, the court found that by liking them he had basically endorsed the content and “made it his own”.

It is believed that this could be the first time that a like of a post/comment was viewed legally as an endorsement. Like we said earlier, there have been reports and many examples of how people have lost their jobs due to their social media activity, so the next time you want to share a post, throw someone a like, perhaps you might want to think twice about it, but what do you guys think? Should “likes” be considered an endorsement of a post or a comment?

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Facebook, Legal, Social Hit