Hey, Lausanne has spoken! Now the Federal Court has confirmed what Internet purists have always demanded: freedom should be unlimited on the Internet. The trigger for the legal skirmish: the plaintiff had demanded from Swiss television (SF) the name of a person who published a comment on the SF website under a pseudonym that had little to do with the matter but a lot to do with a private reckoning. But the highest Swiss court turned the plaintiff down: Welcome to the verbal depths of human existence!
User comments, as star advertiser Jean-Remy von Matt has already recognized, are nothing other than the "toilet wall of the Internet". Publishers, like the top Tamedia boss recently, can thailand rcs data philosophize about media quality for a long time - but real life takes place on the Internet: here people swear, rant and slander. The main thing, according to the Federal Court, is that there is a minimum of information content. The scene is jubilant. Now anonymous writers can exercise their freedom of expression with the blessing of the highest Swiss court.
Or so you might think. But the judges in Lausanne are far more pragmatic than you might initially think. If the network operators do not have to reveal the names of those at fault, the verdict says, they themselves will have to take responsibility for defamation in the future. The result is that they will soon no longer publish offensive comments at all - in their own interest. Tagesanzeiger.ch, its boss Peter Wälty hastily announced, already employs three people to pre-select questionable comments. A timid comment is permitted: What kind of times are these when quality media have to protect themselves from their users.