18 MAGYAR TARTALOMSZOLGÁLTATÓK EGYESÜLETE AND INDEX.HU ZRT v. HUNGARY JUDGMENT been tricked by the company. Indeed, the remarks can be considered as an ill-considered reaction (compare and contrast Palomo Sánchez and Others cited above, § 73). They were posted in the context of a dispute over the business policy of the plaintiff company perceived as being harmful to a number of clients. 76. Furthermore, the expressions used in the comments were offensive, one of them being outright vulgar. As the Court has previously held, offence may fall outside the protection of freedom of expression if it amounts to wanton denigration, for example where the sole intent of the offensive statement is to insult (see Skałka v. Poland, no. 43425/98, § 34, 27 May 2003); but the use of vulgar phrases in itself is not decisive in the assessment of an offensive expression. For the Court, style constitutes part of the communication as the form of expression and is as such protected together with the content of the expression (see Uj, cited above, § 23). 77. Without losing sight of the effects of defamation on the Internet, especially given the ease, scope and speed of the dissemination of information (see Delfi AS, cited above,§ 147), the Court also considers that regard must be had to the specificities of the style of communication on certain Internet portals. For the Court, the expressions used in the comments, albeit belonging to a low register of style, are common in communication on many Internet portals – a consideration that reduces the impact that can be attributed to those expressions. (iii) Liability of the authors of the comments 78. As regards the establishment, in the civil proceedings, of the commentators’ identities, the Court notes that the domestic authorities did not at all address its feasibility or the lack of it. The Constitutional Court restricted its analysis to stating that the injured party was unlikely to receive any compensation without the liability of the operator of the Internet portal. At this juncture, the Court notes that there is no appearance that the domestic courts enquired into the conditions of commenting as such or into the system of registration enabling readers to make comments on the applicants’ websites. 79. The national courts were satisfied that it was the applicants that bore a certain level of liability for the comments, since they had “disseminated” defamatory statements (see paragraph 42 above), however without embarking on a proportionality analysis of the liability of the actual authors of the comments and that of the applicants. For the Court, the conduct of the applicants providing platform for third-parties to exercise their freedom of expression by posting comments is a journalistic activity of a particular nature (see Delfi AS, cited above, §§ 112-13). Even accepting the domestic courts’ qualification of the applicants’ conduct as “disseminating” defamatory statements, the applicant’s liability is difficult to reconcile with the existing case-law according to which “punishment of a journalist for