Facebook Takes Fresh Legal Hit in EU Over Reposts of Illegal Content
October 03 2019 - 7:07AM
Dow Jones News
By Sam Schechner
The European Union's top court gave judges in the bloc broader
power to order the removal of Facebook posts, dealing a fresh blow
to the U.S. tech giant as it faces growing regulatory headwinds on
both sides of the Atlantic.
The EU's Court of Justice said Thursday that a judge in one of
the bloc's member states can order Facebook Inc. or other
social-media companies to scan for and remove posts that are
identical -- or in some cases merely "equivalent" -- to content
that has been ruled illegal. The court also said that nothing in EU
law stops judges from ordering social-media companies to apply such
orders globally, provided they do so "within the framework of the
relevant international law."
The decision is a new hit to tech companies and free-speech
activists in a continuing fight over how -- and where -- to
regulate free speech on the internet.
On one hand, policy makers in Europe and elsewhere have proposed
new laws that make hosting companies more responsible for what
their users post online, part of a growing backlash against the
power and influence of tech companies such as Facebook, including
complaints they don't do enough to stop the spread
disinformation.
On the other hand, tech companies and free-speech activists say
they worry that a thicket of overlapping defamation and
content-removal laws could lead companies to take down otherwise
legitimate content, curbing free expression on the internet. They
also have argued -- most recently in a case that Alphabet Inc.'s
Google won -- that forcing global removals of content ruled illegal
in one country could give tyrants and despots new tools for
censorship.
Thursday's decision "undermines the longstanding principle that
one country does not have the right to impose its laws on speech on
another country. It also opens the door to obligations being
imposed on internet companies to proactively monitor content and
then interpret if it is 'equivalent' to content that has been found
to be illegal," a Facebook representative said.
Facebook already removes content when specifically requested
under local law, but in many cases leaves it accessible in other
parts of the world. Between July and December 2018, the most recent
period for which Facebook has published data, the most content
restrictions came in India, Pakistan and Brazil. But three of the
top 15 countries were in Europe: In that period, Facebook
restricted 1,148 pieces of content in Germany, 571 in Italy and 227
in France, the figures show.
The push to force broader removal of content by social-media
companies is a shift from an older model, where companies have
often remained protected by generation-old rules that shield them
from liability for content their users disseminate until they are
specifically notified of it.
Those rules were what were at issue in Thursday's ruling, which
held that the EU's two-decade-old E-Commerce Directive didn't
forbid a court from ordering Facebook to remove content equivalent
to that it had already found to be illegal.
The court said that any monitoring for such equivalent posts
must only cover content that is "essentially unchanged," with the
court specifying that any differences in wording must be so minor
that they don't "require the host provider to carry out an
independent assessment of that content."
The shift has been coming for some time. In 2013, a French court
ruled that Google must automatically remove from its search results
reposts of nine specific images of a sexual escapade involving
former Formula One racing boss Max Moseley that a U.K. court had
previously ordered removed, without Mr. Moseley having to seek a
new court order each time.
Thursday's ruling originated from a case brought by a former
head of the Green Party bloc in Austria's Parliament who wanted
Facebook to remove a defamatory comment about her, as well as
reposts of it.
Write to Sam Schechner at sam.schechner@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 03, 2019 07:52 ET (11:52 GMT)
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