Defamation Act 1996 c. 31

Section 1 of the Defamation Act sets out a defence against liability in defamation, on which online intermediaries might try to rely on. Section 1 states that a defendant in defamation proceedings is protected from liability, provided that “he was not the author, editor or publisher of the statement complained of, he took reasonable care in relation to its publication, and he did not know, and had no reason to believe, that what he did caused or contributed to the publication of a defamatory statement.” It’s worth to add that the term publisher is further defined in section 1(2) as “a commercial publisher, that is, a person whose business is issuing material to the public, or a section of the public, who issues material containing the statement in the course of that business.”