Italian Wikipedia temporarily suspended due to new draft defamation law

    The Italian parliament is currently considering a law that any website should, at the request of any person, insert within 48 hours a refutation of any information that this person considers to be damaging to his reputation. The participation of the court or the police in this process is not foreseen; Violation of the law may result in large fines (up to 12,500 euros). Moreover, the refutation, according to the same law, should look exactly like the original defamatory statement ("the same graphic characteristics, the same access methodology to the site and the same visibility of the news which they refer").

    The authors of the Italian Wikipedia realized that they can’t work and remain neutral under such a law, and decidedgo on strike. Therefore, all pages of the Italian Wikipedia are currently redirected to the page with a protest . When the section in Italian will become available to visitors again, it is not clear.

    It is worth noting that in Italy, one of the most stringent laws on the protection of reputation, since it provides for punishment for defamation, that is, the dissemination of defamatory information, regardless of whether they are true or not. In Russia and the USA, punishment is only provided for libel, that is, for the dissemination of knowingly false defamatory information, while the burden of proof lies with the plaintiff (in theory).

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