Two recent rulings have come out of Europe that have one Tech giant (Google) happy and another (Facebook) with potentially a lot of extra work to do to comply with European law.
Facebook has now been told that EU courts can now force them to remove ‘illegal comments’ worldwide.
“EU law does not preclude a host provider like Facebook from being ordered to remove identical and, in certain circumstances, equivalent comments previously declared to be illegal,” the EU’s top court declared.
Europe’s top court, the CJEU, has ruled that Facebook must now remove any comments EU courts deem illegal worldwide (such as hate speech), making sure they’re completely removed from its platform, Reuters reports.
Now of course everyone should be against hate speech but others have also warned this could lead to a slippery slope and get involved with copyright.
Philip James, a technology lawyer with Sheridans in London, told Bloomberg
“Whilst the current case focuses on hateful content, rather than copyright, there is a growing trend for the courts to fall favorably towards rights holders and those affected by hate speech,”
Google got a victory with regards to the right to be forgotten legislation in Europe. Google argued if the right to be forgotten was applied globally, it would risk abuse by authoritarian governments.
Google just won a case in Europe’s top court (CJEU) over the EU‘s right to be forgotten. The court confirmed that the search engine giant would only need to remove reported links from search results in Europe — not globally — the BBC reports.
Már Másson Maack covered both of these stories for TheNextWeb.com.
Google just removed the URL from its search-results today. They must be crazy.
I can not use Google anymore. Now Bing is better.
Sounds like Facebook just needs to argue the Authoritarian government angle
If Facebook serves/hosts info into the EU, then by all means, that info should be governed by EU law.
But info hosted/served outside the EU should not be subject to EU law.
The internet is a problematic beast, but enforcing one jurisdictions laws upon another is declaring the laws of the jurisdiction affected invalid…
…so North Korea/Russia/China should in turn be able to order Facebook to delete “illegal comments” worldwide if the EU ruling stands.