Editorial | October 3, 2021

However, a recent High Court ruling that media outlets and organisations can be sued over defamatory comments made by Facebook users has everyone rethinking the risk over the reward.

The Tasmanian government has joined any organisations who use Facebook to promote messages or articles in turning off comments when there is not a moderator on deck. Many say such actions silence democratic free speech, however, it is more a case of the law punishing the wrong people.

Individuals should be held accountable for their keyboard words of defamatory remarks and misinformation - not the "publisher". This must be looked at and laws must be changed.

The 5-2 ruling in the case of former Don Dale detainee Dylan Voller, who sued the publishers of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and Sky News Australia over a handful of comments posted by individuals to the media companies' Facebook pages in 2016 and 2017, is a flash point in media defamation law and something must be done to turn the responsibility back on those making the illegal comments.

Keyboard warriors, who often hide behind fake names and profile pictures, have long been problematic and a source of online bulling and spreaders of disinformation.

Moderating comments takes time and The Examiner takes its responsibility seriously to monitors healthy public debate. But this can not happen unchecked.

Lately, we are to be spending far too much time trying to moderate the comments against defamatory or derogatory remarks or trying to weed out conspiracy theories and misinformation. Yet we know when we share certain stories on social media, we have to closely moderate comments - and even have to turn them off.

Because while we welcome fair comment and even constructive criticism, personal attacks on people is not something we can condone. Nor do we wish to have our site used as a place for people to disseminate conspiracy theories or link to sites which have zero credibility.

And that's our comment.