{"id":3911,"date":"2013-10-21T09:09:00","date_gmt":"2013-10-21T09:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/media.am\/users-comments-becoming-dangerous-for-online-media\/"},"modified":"2013-10-21T09:09:00","modified_gmt":"2013-10-21T09:09:00","slug":"users-comments-becoming-dangerous-for-online-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/critique\/2013\/10\/21\/3911\/","title":{"rendered":"Users&#8217; Comments Becoming Dangerous for Online Media"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/echr.coe.int\/Pages\/home.aspx?p=home\">European Court of Human Rights<\/a> (ECHR) has issued the final ruling in the case of <a href=\"http:\/\/hudoc.echr.coe.int\/sites\/eng\/pages\/search.aspx?i=001-126635#{&quot;itemid&quot;:[&quot;001-126635&quot;]}\">Delfi AS v. Estonia<\/a>, which will have a serious impact on online news media.<\/p>\n<p>This unprecedented ruling refers to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.humanrightseurope.org\/2013\/10\/court-estonian-news-website-liable-for-readers-offensive-comments\/\">liability of an online news portal for comments posted by users<\/a>. The site was obliged to compensate for moral damages the party affected by offensive comments left by readers below an article posted on <a href=\"http:\/\/rus.delfi.lv\/\">Delfi<\/a>&#8216;s website in 2009.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The internet news portal took the case to the ECHR, which issued a judgment that will have an impact also on Armenian news media.<\/p>\n<p>The ECHR stated that the ruling of the Estonian courts was justified and proportionate, and there had been no violation of freedom of expression. As a basis for its judgment, the ECHR noted:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The insulting and threatening nature of the comments<\/li>\n<li>The fact that the news portal failed to remove the comments in a reasonable period of time, even though it removed them the same day<\/li>\n<li>The news portal encouraged the comments, since its profits increased as a result<\/li>\n<li>Furthermore, the court took into consideration that the fine imposed by the Estonian courts (320 EUR) was not disproportionate<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This judgment suggests that websites in Armenia should also be concerned with comments left on their sites \u2014 since it&#8217;s clear that any offended individual might accuse a website for using comments to increase its ratings, drive traffic to its site, and to increase its resulting profits.<\/p>\n<p>For instance, the case <a href=\"http:\/\/www.media.am\/en\/comment-moderation\">Artur Grigoryan v. Hraparak<\/a> would have had completely different consequences today (if we ignore the fact that Grigoryan was asking for a disproportionately large amount).<\/p>\n<p>This, of course, should motivate news (and not only) websites to adopt a more serious and responsible approach to readers&#8217; comments.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Moderating comments, without a doubt, is a complicated and scrupulous task, especially if we consider that there are sites that get hundreds or thousands of comments daily.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Particularly difficult is the task of those sites that allow users to leave comments through their social media accounts.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><strong>Samvel Martirosyan<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/echr.coe.int\/Pages\/home.aspx?p=home\">European Court of Human Rights<\/a> (ECHR) has issued the final ruling in the case of <a href=\"http:\/\/hudoc.echr.coe.int\/sites\/eng\/pages\/search.aspx?i=001-126635#{&quot;itemid&quot;:[&quot;001-126635&quot;]}\">Delfi AS v. Estonia<\/a>, which will have a serious impact on online news media.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3912,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-critique","author_posts-samvel-martirosyan"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}