Grant Raphael, a freelance photographer from UK who set up a false Facebook profile of his childhood friend has been sued for £22,000 (US $43,500).
He created a Facebook page in the name of former school friend Mathew Firsht and posted false information about his sexual and political preferences. He also set up another page for Firsht’s television company, the latter entitled “Has Mathew Firsht lied to you?”
The judge awarded Firsht £15,000 in damages and £2,000 for breach of privacy and gave his company £5,000 for libel.
He also dismissed Raphael’s claim as utterly far-fetched that the pages had been set up by gatecrashers at a party he had held.
The two men had been childhood friends but fell out six years ago.
A media lawyer, Jo Sanders, of Harbottle & Lewis said:
The significance of this case is that it shows that what you post is not harmless, but has consequences. Sat at home or school or in the office, it’s easy to think of social networking sites as harmless fun, that it’s like chatting with friends, and that things posted there are either a joke or just a mischievous way of causing embarrassment. This ruling puts an end to that.
The golden rule should be to only put up information or images you are happy for everyone to see and are happy to put your name to.
It is not know why Raphael acted like this but experts say it is probably due to jealousy or may be some rift between the two that resulted in fake Facebook profile.
0 responses so far
There are no comments yet...Kick things off by filling out the form below.
You must log in to post a comment.