Bulletin board supervisor faces charges for not deleting message calling girl ‘ugly’
Just a reminder: it seems that you can be charged with defamation of character in Japan if you aren’t timely enough when deleting an insulting message posted by a third party on your bulletin board:
OSAKA — A company executive who supervised an online bulletin board has been reported to prosecutors for allegedly failing to delete a message that called a junior high school girl “ugly,” police said on Friday.
The 26-year-old executive of an Osaka lumber wholesaling firm, whose name is being withheld, stands accused of abetting defamation of character.
Sometime around Aug. 20 last year, a junior high school girl wrote on a bulletin board that another junior high school girl was “ugly.”
The student who was called ugly came to learn about the message in October after a friend informed her. The girl’s mother emailed the provider of the bulletin board and asked them to delete the comments. The provider told the mother to file a request with the bulletin board’s supervisor.
[...]
The supervisor of the bulletin board reportedly deleted the message soon after the mother of the 13-year-old victim talked with police.
“I knew that what was written was slanderous,” he said. “But I thought it was not serious enough to delete immediately.”
Watch out, forum/blog administrators!
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I feel reassured in the fact that ridiculous court decisions are not a monopoly of the West.
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Yeah in the “West” we have much more sane (tainted in Sarcasm BTW) lawsuits like the old lady suing McDonalds for coffee that was too hot for her.
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OH great its affected Japan too. Wont people grow up and let things slide.
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But if she IS in fact ugly, doesn’t that have any bearing on it? Or does the fact that it’s uncomplimentary trump the fact it may be true?
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There is no barometer on beauty. As they say “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. Who is to judge people as beautiful or ugly? You? Me? Society?
That’s like saying that the cup of McDonalds coffee is “hot”. To me it may taste lukewarm (while that old lady said that it burnt her mouth). At least in the case of coffee, society can regulate the temperature of the coffee and deem it too hot or not hot enough. While the notion sounds perposterous; how can society regulate beauty?
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nah, for the most part you can look at someone and tell if they’re ugly. just because there’s the phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” doesn’t make it absolutely true
also, i think it was a joke
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