The paper analyses the judgment of 14 January 2020 released by the European Court on Human Rights in the Beizaras and Levickas case. The decision, indeed, represents a further step in the process of development of the ECtHR’s case law as to the scope of the guarantees applicable to the protection of individuals from the hate speech and as to the criteria of effectiveness of the remedies that States must ensure for this purpose. The analysis highlights the need to strike a ‘balance’ between the freedoms enshrined in the Convention in the subject matter and the limits to be applied to combat the spread of messages of hate speech in internet. Fixing this balance is a task that poses for Member States complex challenges due to the inadequacy of traditional conceptual categories when moving into the immaterial dimension of the internet and of social networks.