A Swiss court has fined a man for “liking” defamatory comments on Facebook, in what is believed to be the first case of its kind. 
 
 
 
 According to a statement from the Zurich district court, the 45-year-old defendant accused an animal rights activist, Erwin Kessler, of racism and antisemitism and hit the “like” button under several comments from third parties about Kessler that were deemed inflammatory. 
 
 The comments were made in 2015 during heated discussions on a range of Facebook groups about which animal welfare groups should be permitted to take part in a vegan street festival, the Swiss daily Tages Anzeiger reported. 
 
 Kessler sued more than a dozen people who took part in those exchanges, a lawyer for one of the defendants, Amr Abdelaziz, said. 
 
 Several people have already been convicted in the case, mainly for comments they made. It appears the man convicted on Monday was the first to be sanctioned merely for “liking” comments made by others. 
 
 The court said it did not matter that the comments had not originated from the defendant, whose name was not given. By clicking the like button, “the defendant clearly endorsed the unseemly content and made it his own,” the court statement said. 
 
 Kessler had been convicted under Switzerland’s anti-racism law nearly two decades ago, receiving a brief prison sentence for comparing Jewish ritual slaughter methods to Nazi practices. 
 
 The Zurich judge ruled the defendant had failed to prove that the comments he had liked on Facebook were true. At the same time, by liking the comments the man had disseminated them to his list of Facebook contacts, and “thus made them accessible to a large number of people”, the statement said. 
 
 His actions should thus be considered as an “affront to [Kessler’s] honour”, it added. 
 
 The court conditionally fined the man 4,000 Swiss francs (£3,190). 
 
 The defendant can appeal, but Abdelaziz said he was not sure the defendant would devote the time and resources needed to do so, pointing out that a number of the other people Kessler had sued had chosen not to fight the cases in court. 
 
 Even though a verdict from a lower regional court holds less sway than Switzerland’s higher national courts, the lawyer said the ruling could have a big impact. 
 
 He said the courts needed to urgently clarify whether hitting a like button on social media should be given the same weight as other forms of speech more commonly cited in defamation cases. 
 
 “If the courts want to prosecute people for likes on Facebook, we could easily need to triple the number of judges in this country,” he said. “This could also obviously easily become an assault on the freedom of expression.” ||||| These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved.Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors.The goal is to fix all broken links on the web . Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. ||||| 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. 
 
 The comments in question suggested that Erwin Kessler, who runs an animal-rights group, holds racist and anti-Semitic views. The defendant (who wasn’t named in the court documents) clicked “like” on some of the comments and linked to some of the posts. 
 
 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. 
 
 Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter. 
 
 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. 
 
 Defamation law as it applies to social networks is a grey area in a lot of countries, including the United States, although the U.S. constitution provides a lot more protection for an individual’s freedom of speech than some other jurisdictions. A federal court found in 2013 that a “like” is protected speech under the First Amendment. 
 
 Even in the U.S., there have been a number of defamation cases involving social media, including a case in which singer Courtney Love was sued for making derogatory comments about a fashion designer and was forced to pay $350,000. 
 
 In Britain, a newspaper columnist was convicted earlier this year of making derogatory comments on Twitter and forced to pay damages of $30,000. 
 
 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. Doing this was an “affront to Kessler’s honor,” the judge ruled. 
 
 In a recent Canadian case, a woman was found guilty of making disparaging comments about her neighbor on Facebook. She was held responsible not only for the damage that her own comments caused, but also for subsequent comments made by her friends.
– 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.)