A recent decision by the Court of Rome established that social media platforms such as Facebook have no duty to monitor the legitimacy of the contents published, but they are obliged to carry out a subsequent control in case a user's reports the posting of defamatory content. In its decision, the Court analyzed the possible obligation to remove content from a provider: one wonders, in essence, if, faced with a user's grievance asocial media must proceed without delay or any other investigations to the immediate removal of potential unlawful content. The answer according to the Court of Rome is negative. There is no duty of a preventive monitoring of published contents since the only duty that is burdened and a social media is a subsequent check on a certain content, following the reporting of an unlawful post.
In the opinion of the Court of Rome, therefore, a reported abuse of defamatory content gives rise to an immediate assessment of the reported contents, but an ex parte removal obligation arises only where a manifest and evident illegal nature of the contents appear.
All in all, it is a shareable decision, because on the one hand contemplates the need to make the online service operator responsible, but, on the other hand, it does not attribute a social media with the role of censor.