Whether it’s on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, a blog, or another platform too trendy for us to know about yet, most speech pathologists in private practice publish or share content.
Recently, a single judge of the New South Wales Supreme Court ruled that operators of public commercial Facebook pages are “publishers” of comments made by others on those pages, and may be liable if those comments are defamatory (even if the original post was not).
It’s far from clear if this applies to all businesses (or just news publishers, like the defendant in this case). It also appears likely that the case will be (or has been) appealed. But, in the meantime, keep a close eye on those comments on your posts, and don’t hesitate to delete posts that may be defamatory.
Principal sources:
Voller v Nationwide News Pty Ltd; Voller v Fairfax Media Publications Pty Ltd; Voller v Australian News Channel Pty Ltd [2019] NSWSC 766 – NSW Caselaw link
MacInnis, A. (2019). We are all publishers now: ignoring comments no longer an option. LSJ 58, 86-87
More analysis:
Bloemental, I. and Furness, L., (2019), “But we didn’t write that! Are we at risk for third-party posts on our public social media pages?”, Clayton Utz website. Retrieved on 8 September 2019.
Image: httpss://tinyurl.com/y2rgtpbn