The first civil section of the Court of Cassation reiterated, with the recent ruling no. 22999 of 2026, that the blogger is responsible for offenses published by other subjects on the space he manages, if he was aware of them and did not promptly remove them.
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The case dates back, we know how long justice takes, to about ten years ago, when a journalist spread the news of a demonstration in front of a certain police headquarters by immigrants protesting because the reception center hosting them did not have a connection to the Sky television network. From the little that can be gathered from the reasoning of the ruling, it seems that another journalist conducted an investigation on the same fact, concluding that the news was not true or at least not sufficiently verified, spreading the circumstance on his own blog. This had led, among other things, to some reader comments considered defamatory.
Both the court and the court of appeal had convicted the blogger because, although he was aware of these comments, he had deleted them only at the beginning of the first instance trial.
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The Court of Cassation confirms the decision on the merits, emphasizing how “liability was affirmed by finding a lack of ex post control by the blogger and not a preventive control obligation.” Referring to precedents, more or less in terms, the Court then reiterated its own stance, according to which the manager of an online space is responsible for defamatory messages spread by others when his conscious and voluntary participation in the dissemination is proven. This would happen if, although aware of such content and its nature, he did not remove them, as inertia would correspond to the “conscious sharing of the harmful content.”
A similar position, not isolated in truth, aims to (and ends up) holding responsible those who provide the space, if only because it is often the most easily identifiable subject, compared to the author of the message, who often manages to hide behind a veil of anonymity. On the one hand, in fact, the legislator has never imposed on those who write to show their identity, or at least to reveal it in case of dispute, on the other hand, investigators do not have enough resources to chase every “anonymous,” let alone private individuals.
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