And later on (section 25 of the judgment):
"The court before which a defamation claim is being investigated is obligated to examine, in appropriate cases, whether the publication in dispute is a publication that a person from the community understands must be removed from the plain meaning of its words and their dictionary meaning. In doing so, the court must consider the question of what message will be absorbed from the publication; And to take into account that it is not desirable that defamation laws exclude from the discourse pictorial forms of expression, even those that are done by way of exaggeration, when they are devoid of pretension to present facts. This examination, in certain cases, may lead to the conclusion that even though it is a publication with an external factual appearance ('it is the hands of a certain person who spilled the blood,' in one of the above examples), it would be correct to view the matter as a departure from the world of hard facts, towards the expression of an opinion about the object of the publication and its functioning."
It seems that these words express the aversion to impolite insults, on the one hand, including those that relate to a person's lineage and his mother's profession, and the degree of seriousness that should be attributed to these insults in relation to the laws of defamation, on the other.
The words of Rabbi Ilai are known in the Babylonian Talmud: "In three things a person is recognizable: in his cup, in his pocket, and in his anger" (Eruvin 65b), but this relates to one who fills his mouth with curses when he is angry. It is said that this person is evident in his anger. This does not apply to the object of the publication, to the person about whom the remarks were made. Therefore, hurling derogatory epithets at another person in a time of anger does not mean that the object of the publication is indeed worthy of those things, and that there is some flaw in it. In any case, if someone can be humiliated, it is actually the advertiser and not the object of the publication.
- Before we proceed to address the case at hand, the question of publications on the Internet and on social networks has been discussed extensively in recent years in court rulings, and it has already been decided that the existing laws in relation to any publication should be applied to these publications. In this regard, see Civil Appeal Authority 4447/07, Mor v. Barak ATC. [1995] Bezeq International Services Company Ltd., PD 66(3) 664.
- The plaintiff's claim:
The plaintiff bases his claim on a post published by the defendant on the Facebook page "Tweet Statuses". The same passage was also published on the Facebook page of reporter Sivan Cohen, after he underwent an edit and the various insults were removed from him.