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Name and Shame Groups in Spain, Who Is Actually Liable When a Post Is Defamatory
Facebook groups and pages built around exposing or criticising named individuals, landlords, business owners, community figures, expats, have become common in Spain’s international community. Less understood is that the group itself, and the person who administers it, can carry legal exposure of its own, separate from whoever wrote the original comment.
Spain’s Legal Starting Point, Hosting Is Not Automatically Shielded
Spain implements the EU’s e commerce framework through the Ley 34/2002, de Servicios de la Sociedad de la Información y de Comercio Electrónico, known as the LSSI. Article 16 gives hosting providers a conditional exemption from liability for content that third parties post, they are not responsible as long as they have no conocimiento efectivo, meaning effective knowledge, that the content is illicit or harms someone’s protected rights. Once they do have that knowledge, whether through a court or administrative order, a formal notice, or by other means, they must act with diligence to remove it or block access, or they lose the exemption entirely.
Crucially, the Spanish Supreme Court’s landmark Caso Ramoncín ruling, dated 10 February 2011, clarified that effective knowledge does not require a judge to have already ruled the content illegal. A host can be deemed to have had that knowledge through other means, for instance, a clear, credible complaint from the affected person that they failed to act on. That case involved a forum host who kept an inaccurate contact address, which prevented the complainant from reaching them to request removal, and this contributed to the finding against the host.
Where Facebook Group Admins Sit in This Picture
A group admin is not a neutral bystander in the way a hosting company, such as Meta itself, is. Spanish and comparable EU case law increasingly draws a distinction based on how actively someone moderates.
Passive hosting, meaning Facebook or Meta as the platform, is generally protected by the LSSI’s hosting exemption, provided they act on valid notifications.
Active moderation, meaning a group admin who approves posts, sets rules, deletes some comments but not others, or personally engages with the disputed content, is treated differently. The more actively someone curates what stays up, the harder it becomes to argue they did not know, or could not reasonably have known, that specific content was defamatory. Comparable common law rulings, most notably Australia’s High Court decision in Fairfax Media v Voller, 2021, have gone further, treating page administrators who facilitate a comment space as publishers of what appears there, independent of whether they had actual knowledge of any single post. Spanish courts have not gone quite that far, but the direction of travel across the EU, especially after the Ramoncín ruling, points the same way, the less an admin does to check facts and moderate, the weaker their claim to ignorance.
The Three Legal Fronts That Apply, Together
One, Derecho al honor, under Organic Law 1/1982, protection of reputation and honor, which can be invoked civilly regardless of any criminal case.
Two, Calumnia and injuria, under the Penal Code, criminal offenses for falsely attributing a crime, or attacking someone’s dignity, respectively.
Three, Data protection, under GDPR and the LOPDGDD, publishing someone’s name, photo, or professional details alongside accusations, without a lawful basis, can be a violation in its own right, even where the underlying claim turns out to be true.
A group or page can be pulled into any of these three, not just defamation, depending on what was posted and how.
What This Means in Practice for Someone Being Targeted
Document immediately. Screenshot posts, comments, dates, URLs, before deletion or edits.
Notify the admin directly and formally, ideally in writing, for example a message plus a follow up email, clearly identifying the post and why it is false or harmful. This notice is what can trigger effective knowledge under LSSI Article 16, from that point, the clock starts on the admin’s obligation to act.
Report to Facebook under its harassment and misinformation policies in parallel, a platform level takedown is often faster than any legal route.
A burofax, a formal, timestamped cease and desist, sent to the page admin, if identifiable, creates strong evidence that they were notified and had the chance to act.
AEPD complaint, if personal data is used inaccurately or without a legal basis.
Civil or criminal action, for honor violations or injuria and calumnia, is best pursued with a Spanish abogado experienced in derecho al honor cases, since remedies, such as damages, right of reply, removal orders, run through the ordinary courts, not a preliminary verdict requirement.
A Recent Case in Point
This is not a hypothetical. The post that prompted this article was authored by Richard Kingston on the Facebook page Named And Shamed. It made two claims about a nonprofit citizens’ advice organisation, first, that the organisation gives incorrect legal advice and has no legal standing, and that nearly all of its queries are funnelled toward a paid section of its website rather than answered for free, second, it named me personally as the person behind a separate Spain Info page, framing my connection to it as an undisclosed business interest.
Neither claim holds up. The organisation has never claimed formal legal standing, and has never represented otherwise. The substantial majority of questions are answered for free in the organisation’s own Facebook group, not funnelled into a paid channel, donations, as the word implies, are voluntary. And my connection to Spain info is not hidden at all, it is stated plainly on that page’s own information section, for anyone who looks. It is common knowledge among our members, and it is something I am proud of. Spain info exists to help people with questions that fall outside the remit of Citizens Advice Spain, and it charges a flat, low annual fee, at a time when other online Q&A services can charge as much as €65 for a single answer. For our members, that is a genuine bonus, not a hidden business interest.
There is also a separate claim worth addressing directly, that the organisation is pretending to be Citizens Advice UK, or falsely claiming to be part of it. It is not, and has never claimed to be. The organisation is not under Citizens Advice UK’s official umbrella. What is true is that Citizens Advice UK invites the organisation to attend its annual gathering, a two or three day event, though not the formal AGM itself, which is a distinct, separate part of the proceedings. The organisation is also named, alongside other citizens advice bodies operating outside the UK, on Wikipedia’s page covering Citizens Advice, which sets out clearly who these separate organisations are and how they relate to the UK body. Being named there, and being invited to an annual gathering, is not the same as claiming UK affiliation, and the organisation has never suggested otherwise.
This is a useful real world illustration of the point made above about honor rights and false factual claims. A claim that an identifiable person is concealing a business interest, when the connection is in fact publicly disclosed, is precisely the kind of false factual statement, as opposed to a value judgment, that Spanish honor rights law is designed to address.
A Note From the Author
I run the citizens advice service referred to above. I want to be direct about where I stand. If we have ever given incorrect information, I put my hands up to that, nobody gets everything right all the time, and I have never claimed we have any formal legal standing as an organisation, because we do not, and we have never represented otherwise. I am a paralegal by training, with thirty years working in this field, and the professionals we bring in for paid legal work are qualified to do it. Donations to our organisation are, as the word says, voluntary, and the vast majority of the questions we handle are answered for free in our Facebook group, not funnelled into a paid channel. I wrote this article because I believe people posting serious, damaging claims about an organisation, without checking the facts first, should understand that doing so is not consequence free, either for the poster or for the platform that lets it stand unchallenged.
We do not need anybody to hand us credibility. Our Facebook group stands at 96,000 members and growing daily, alongside 258,000 followers on our page, not counting the thousands who visit our website on a daily basis. That is the credibility that matters, built by the people we have actually helped, not by anything said about us in a comment thread.
En fin.
The idea that nothing is illegal until a court says so gets the sequence backwards. In Spanish law, liability can attach to a host or admin at the moment they are notified and fail to act, not only after a conviction. For anyone running a group where members post allegations about identifiable people, that means active moderation, fact checking before publication, and a fast, documented response to complaints are not just good practice, they are the difference between staying inside the LSSI’s protection and losing it.
This article is for general information and does not constitute legal advice. Anyone facing a specific situation should consult a Spanish lawyer specialising in derecho al honor or data protection law.
