Jason Azzopardi wins €1000 in libel damages over Facebook post
Nationalist MP Jason Azzopardi has been awarded €1,000 in libel damages over allegations made on Facebook that the politician used to meet “a working girl at Portomaso.”
Azzopardi had filed a defamation suit following the Facebook post uploaded by Vincent Borg, known as Censu l-Iswed, last August at a time when rival PN factions regularly posted comments in the run-up to the party leadership race.
That post consisted of a set of 13 questions, one of which addressed to “the Honourable Jason Azzopardi,” implying that the politician, branded as one of the “rebel” anti-Delia group, used to meet a prostitute at the St Julian’s hotel.
Borg later edited the post, removing the reference to Azzopardi and he claimed that he was asking those questions “in the name of the members of PN.”
When testifying in court in February, the activist insisted that as a PN member at the time, he felt “entitled” to ask such questions, pointing out that other MPs had offered answers.
Azzopardi had not replied but had sued for libel instead.
When delivering judgment on Monday, Magistrate Rachel Montebello declared that it was “not at all convinced” by Borg’s argument that the reference to “working girl” was meant as “a woman working at the hotel.”
The respondent’s testimony lacked credibility and was intended to “fool the court,” said Magistrate Montebello, adding that the court “gravely detested such behaviour.”
An ordinary reader on social media would not likely delve into the linguistic definition of a word but would grasp its meaning within a particular context, noted the court.
And in this case, the clear message intended to be conveyed by Borg was that Azzopardi had met with a prostitute.
It was obvious that the post had been intended to spark “political controversy” by making allegations against those who, in Borg’s own words wanted “to destroy Delia.”
If proved right, those allegations would evidently place such “rebel” MPs in an uncomfortable position, observed the court.
Putting the allegations in question form rendered them more insidious and increased the “defamatory sting,” said the court, noting further that the concluding remark “Just to remind you,” thrown in by Borg for added emphasis, was intended to convey a clear and direct message.
Within a liberal society like modern Maltese society, in spite of the current debate to decriminalize prostitution, this activity is still looked upon as illegal and degrading, went on the court.
Moreover, society still looks down upon men who seek the services of prostitutes, with a sense of loathing, particularly nowadays when there is a greater awareness about the exploitation of vulnerable women.
Therefore, associating a person with such an activity is bound to negatively impinge upon the person’s reputation by attributing low moral standards.
In this case, the allegation was not linked to Azzopardi’s political or professional role and thus the question put by Borg did not contribute “absolutely anything” to a debate of general public interest.
The imputation could lower the public’s trust in Azzopardi and discredit him in his public function, said the court, adding that the respondent had “absolutely failed to prove that his imputation was somehow founded in truth.”
The court added that it was evident that the question had not been put in good faith and attributing the post to the crisis within the PN at the tim, could not serve in any way to make the question a legitimate one.
Borg had not put forward any proof to support his allegation and had not been willing to reach an amicable settlement nor had he tendered an apology to Azzopardi who was thus awarded €1000 in damages for the defamatory post.
Lawyers Joseph Zammit Maempel and Kris Busietta assisted Azzopardi.
In a Facebook post after the judgement, Azzopardi said he would be donating the proceeds to charity.
Independent journalism costs money. Support Times of Malta for the price of a coffee.
Every week over 1 billion people connect with businesses on our messaging apps. Many of these conversations are made possible by the thousands of developers who build innovative and engaging experiences on Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Since opening access to our Llama family of large language models, we’ve seen lots of momentum and innovation with more than 30 million downloads to date. As our messaging services continue to evolve, we believe the technology from Llama and other generative AI models have the potential to enhance business messaging through more natural, conversational experiences.
At Connect Meta announced that developers will be able to build third-party AIs – a term we use to refer to our generative AI-powered assistants – for our messaging services.
We’re making it easy for any developer to get started, so we’re simplifying the developer onboarding process and providing access to APIs for AIs that make it possible to build new conversational experiences within our messaging apps.
All developers will be able to access the new onboarding experience and features on Messenger in the coming weeks. For WhatsApp, we’ll be opening a Beta program in November – if you’re interested in participating please sign up to the waitlist here to learn more.
We’ll keep everyone updated as we make these tools available to more developers later this year. We look forward to your feedback and seeing what you create.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Today, we are releasing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0. As part of this release, we are highlighting changes below that we believe are relevant to parts of our developer community. These changes include announcements, product updates, and notifications on deprecations that we believe are relevant to your application(s)’ integration with our platform.
For a complete list of all changes and their details, please visit our changelog.
General Updates
Consolidation of Audience Location Status Options for Location Targeting
As previously announced in May 2023, we have consolidated Audience Location Status to our current default option of “People living in or recently in this location” when choosing the type of audience to reach within their Location Targeting selections. This update reflects a consolidation of other previously available options and removal of our “People traveling in this location” option.
We are making this change as part of our ongoing efforts to deliver more value to businesses, simplify our ads system, and streamline our targeting options in order to increase performance efficiency and remove options that have low usage.
This update will apply to new or duplicated campaigns. Existing campaigns created prior to launch will not be entered in this new experience unless they are in draft mode or duplicated.
Add “add_security_recommendation” and “code_expiration_minutes” to WA Message Templates API
Earlier this year, we released WhatsApp’s authentication solution which enabled creating and sending authentication templates with native buttons and preset authentication messages. With the release of Graph API v18, we’re making improvements to the retrieval of authentication templates, making the end-to-end authentication template process easier for BSPs and businesses.
With Graph API v18, BSPs and businesses can have better visibility into preset authentication message template content after creation. Specifically, payloads will return preset content configuration options, in addition to the text used by WhatsApp. This improvement can enable BSPs and businesses to build “edit” UIs for authentication templates that can be constructed on top of the API.
Note that errors may occur when upgrading to Graph API v18 if BSPs or businesses are taking the entire response from the GET request and providing it back to the POST request to update templates. To resolve, the body/header/footer text fields should be dropped before passing back into the API.
Re-launching dev docs and changelogs for creating Call Ads
- Facebook Reels Placement for Call Ads
Meta is releasing the ability to deliver Call Ads through the Facebook Reels platform. Call ads allow users to call businesses in the moment of consideration when they view an ad, and help businesses drive more complex discussions with interested users. This is an opportunity for businesses to advertise with call ads based on peoples’ real-time behavior on Facebook. Under the Ad set Level within Ads Manager, businesses can choose to add “Facebook Reels” Under the Placements section. - Re-Launching Call Ads via API
On September 12, 2023, we’re providing updated guidance on how to create Call Ads via the API. We are introducing documentation solely for Call Ads, so that 3P developers can more easily create Call Ads’ campaigns and know how to view insights about their ongoing call ad campaigns, including call-related metrics. In the future, we also plan to support Call Add-ons via our API platform. Developers should have access to the general permissions necessary to create general ads in order to create Call Ads via the API platform.Please refer to developer documentation for additional information.
Deprecations & Breaking Changes
Graph API changes for user granular permission feature
We are updating two graph API endpoints for WhatsAppBusinessAccount. These endpoints are as follows:
- Retrieve message templates associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
- Retrieve phone numbers associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
With v18, we are rolling out a new feature “user granular permission”. All existing users who are already added to WhatsAppBusinessAccount will be backfilled and will continue to have access (no impact).
The admin has the flexibility to change these permissions. If the admin changes the permission and removes access to view message templates or phone numbers for one of their users, that specific user will start getting an error message saying you do not have permission to view message templates or phone numbers on all versions v18 and older.
Deprecate legacy metrics naming for IG Media and User Insights
Starting on September 12, Instagram will remove duplicative and legacy, insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API in order to share a single source of metrics to our developers.
This new upgrade reduces any confusion as well as increases the reliability and quality of our reporting.
After 90 days of this launch (i.e. December 11, 2023), we will remove all these duplicative and legacy insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API on all versions in order to be more consistent with the Instagram app.
We appreciate all the feedback that we’ve received from our developer community, and look forward to continuing to work together.
Please review the media insights and user insights developer documentation to learn more.
Deprecate all Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 endpoints
Facebook Wi-Fi was designed to improve the experience of connecting to Wi-Fi hotspots at businesses. It allowed a merchant’s customers to get free Wi-Fi simply by checking in on Facebook. It also allowed merchants to control who could use their Wi-Fi and for how long, and integrated with ads to enable targeting to customers who had used the merchant’s Wi-Fi. This product was deprecated on June 12, 2023. As the partner notice period has ended, all endpoints used by Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 have been deprecated and removed.
API Version Deprecations:
As part of Facebook’s versioning schedule for Graph API and Marketing API, please note the upcoming deprecations:
Graph API
- September 14, 2023: Graph API v11.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 8, 2024: Graph API v12.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- May 28, 2024: Graph API v13.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
Marketing API
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v14.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v15.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 06, 2024: Marketing API v16.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
To avoid disruption to your business, we recommend migrating all calls to the latest API version that launched today.
Facebook Platform SDK
As part of our 2-year deprecation schedule for Platform SDKs, please note the upcoming deprecations and sunsets:
- October 2023: Facebook Platform SDK v11.0 or below will be sunset
- February 2024: Facebook Platform SDK v12.0 or below will be sunset
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Before today (August 28, 2023), advertisers could not promote images and/or videos used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API. This process created unwanted friction for our partners and their customers.
After consistently hearing about this pain point from our developer community, we have removed this unwanted friction for advertisers and now allow users to seamlessly promote their image and/or video media used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API as of August 28, 2023.
We appreciate all the feedback received from our developer community, and hope to continue improving your experience.
Please review the developer documentation to learn more.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Meta Proposes Monthly Fee of Up to EUR 13 for Ad-Free Access to Instagram and Facebook: Report
Career stories: The math-music connection in data science
Enabling developers to create innovative AIs on Messenger and WhatsApp
Meta Used Public Instagram, Facebook Posts to Train Its New AI Assistant
WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger to Get AI Assistants; Meta Shows Off Image Generation Tool Emu
Meta Smart Glasses in Collaboration With Ray-Ban Launched, Allows Hands-Free Livestreaming
![top-social-media-manager-interview-questions-and-answers-[2023]](https://www.social-ping.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/130190-top-social-media-manager-interview-questions-and-answers-2023-80x80.png)
Top Social Media Manager Interview Questions and Answers [2023]
What Is FedRAMP, and Why Is It So Important?
Introducing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0
Solving Espresso’s scalability and performance challenges to support our member base
WhatsApp Rolls Out New Instant Video Message Toggle for Android, iOS: Here’s How It Works
Social Media for Business: A Practical Guide
-
Uncategorized2 weeks agoVanity Metrics: Definition & Examples for Marketing
-
LINKEDIN2 weeks agoCareer stories: Influencing engineering growth at LinkedIn
-
Uncategorized7 days ago5 B2B Social Media Marketing Tactics That Actually Work
-
OTHER2 weeks agoYouTube Announces AI-Enabled Editing Products for Video Creators
-
![2023-average-engagement-rates-for-13-industries-[stats]](https://www.social-ping.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/134947-2023-average-engagement-rates-for-13-industries-stats-400x240.png)
![2023-average-engagement-rates-for-13-industries-[stats]](https://www.social-ping.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/134947-2023-average-engagement-rates-for-13-industries-stats-80x80.png)
Uncategorized1 week ago2023 Average Engagement Rates for 13 Industries [STATS]
-
OTHER2 weeks agoCCI Said to Have Appointed Former WhatsApp Executive, Government Officials as New Members
-
Uncategorized2 weeks agoInstagram Emoji Guide: Meanings, Reactions, Ideas
-
OTHER2 weeks agoWhatsApp Passkey Support Reportedly Rolling Out to Beta Testers on Android: How It Works