It is the first time this has happened in Italy. The manager of a Facebook page was sentenced to nine months in prison for instigation to commit a crime and defense of a crime. Until now, the owners of blogs or pages on social networks had only been convicted of defamation crimes (including for third-party comments).
The Facebook page in question is called Cartel Town and is dedicated to the fight against urban decay in Rome. The blog defines itself as an "online committee against rape, the sale and delivery of the city of Rome to the cartel lobby". The owner is called Massimiliano Tonelli and his sentence came from the monocratic judge of the Court of Rome. The complaint against Cartellopoli came from a billboard company. The problem, according to the judge, is given by the comments posted by third parties who have remained anonymous. The comments calling for action against the abusive billboards and the organization of protest initiatives have been condemned.
In the motivations of the law sentence: "Since the defendant has exclusive responsibility for the management of the blog and therefore also for the content of the messages published in it, it does not matter whether the contents referable directly to the T. or received from other users, having in any case been the first to take care of their inclusion and consequent disclosure to the public. The T's assertion that it does not check the content of received messages before publishing them is irrelevant for the purposes of interest here, both because it is formulated in absolutely generic terms, and because the quality of the contents of a similar content published on the blog over time is such as to make it unlikely that the defendant could have ignored or misinterpreted the content". Fulvio Sarzana, defense lawyer of the manager of the page and among the top law experts of the Network, said that "It is a sentence resulting from the Italian political climate, which is increasingly authoritarian towards the web".
