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!
