 In what appears to be a first, a court in Switzerland has fined a man the equivalent of over $4,000 just for clicking the “like” button on what a judge said were defamatory Facebook comments. Kessler has sued a number of people who participated in those discussions, which began in 2015 during a debate over which animal-rights groups should be allowed to participate in a vegan street festival, according to a Swiss newspaper. Several of the people who made specific comments about Kessler have been found guilty of defamation, but Swiss legal experts said the defendant in the most recent case is the first to have been fined just for “liking” such comments. According to court documents, the judge in the case ruled that by clicking the “like” button, the defendant “clearly endorsed the unseemly content.” 
 
 To complicate matters, Kessler was convicted of making racist comments (something that is illegal under Swiss law) in 1998, and briefly served time in prison. But the judge in the recent case said that the defendant had failed to prove that the comments he “liked” were accurate. The Swiss case, however, appears to be the first in which a man has been found guilty of defamation just for clicking the “like” button on someone else’s comments on Facebook. In her decision, the Swiss judge argued that by doing so, the man had made the comments “accessible to a large number of people,” since Facebook showed them to all of his friends and followers. His actions should thus be considered as an “affront to [Kessler’s] honour”, it added.
– Be careful what you like online, especially if you're in Switzerland—it may get you in trouble for defamation. In what Fortune reports could be a first, a court there has fined an unidentified man the equivalent of more than $4,000 after he liked defamatory comments on Facebook that accused an animal rights activist of racism and anti-Semitism. The activist, Erwin Kessler, had been the subject of heated Facebook conversations in 2015 about which animal welfare groups should be allowed in a vegan street festival, reports the Swiss daily Tages Anzeiger. In stark contrast, a US federal court ruled in 2013 that an online "like" is protected by the First Amendment. Kessler sued over a dozen people involved in those online exchanges, several of whom have already been convicted for comments they made, reports the Guardian, but this latest fine appears to be the first time someone has been convicted for merely pressing "like." The court, however, ruled that even though the defendant didn't write the comments, he "clearly endorsed the unseemly content and made it his own." A defense attorney says that if courts want to prosecute people for simply liking content, "we could easily need to triple the number of judges in this country," adding it could "easily become an assault on the freedom of expression." (See how Facebook likes are linked to lower self-esteem.)