“By adjusting your commenting audience,you can further control how you want to invite conversation onto your public posts and limit potentially unwanted interactions,” Facebook said in a blog post.
“And if you’re a public figure,creator,or brand,you too can choose to limit your commenting audience on your public posts to help you feel safe and engage in more meaningful conversations with your community.”
For news outlets such asThe Sydney Morning Herald andThe Age,the new function offers a way to restrict readers on Facebook from commenting on legally sensitive articles.
Media outlets including Nine Entertainment Co,the publisher of this masthead,and News Corpare preparing a High Court challenge to a NSW court ruling that they are “publishers” of allegedly defamatory comments made by readers under posts on the news outlets’ official Facebook pages.
It has long been the case in defamation law that a person can become legally responsible for the “continued publication” of defamatory comments by others on their physical noticeboards or walls once they are aware of the comments and fail to remove them.
In a case involving former Northern Territory youth detainee Dylan Voller,the NSW Court of Appeal said in June last year that media outlets includingThe Sydney Morning Herald andThe Australian were publishers of readers’ comments on Facebook posts “from the outset” because they “encouraged and facilitated” the comments.