EU ruling lets single nations strike global Facebook posts

BRUSSELS — The European Union’s highest court ruled Thursday that individual member countries can force Facebook to remove what they regard as unlawful material from the social network all over the world — a ruling that has implications for how countries can expand content bans beyond their borders.

The European Court of Justice ruling, which cannot be appealed, is seen as a defeat for Facebook and other online platforms and widens the divide over how heavily Europe and the U.S. seek to regulate technology giants.

The decision is a blow to big Internet platforms like Facebook, placing more responsibility on them to patrol their sites for content ruled illegal.

“It really unleashes a whole new gamut of risk and worries for Facebook in the EU,” said Wedbush Securities managing director Daniel Ives.

The court’s decision came after a former Austrian politician sought to have Facebook remove disparaging comments about her that had been posted on a personal page, as well as “equivalent” messages posted by others. The politician, Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, a former leader of Austria’s Green Party, argued that Facebook needed to delete the material in the country and limit worldwide access.

Facebook said that the decision “undermines the longstanding principle that one country does not have the right to impose its laws on speech on another country.”

Supporters of such bans have argued that defamation laws have not been enforced appropriately in the Internet age and are needed to force platforms like Facebook to do more to combat Internet trolls, hate speech and other personal attacks that spread on the Web.

The case has been closely watched because of its potential ripple effects for regulating Internet content. The enforcement of defamation, libel and privacy laws varies from country to country, with language and behavior that is allowed in one nation prohibited in another. The court’s decision highlights the difficulty of creating uniform standards to govern an inherently borderless Web and then enforcing them.

Facebook and other critics had warned, before the decision, that letting a single nation force an Internet platform to delete material elsewhere would limit free speech. Implementing such a global ban would likely require the use of automated content filters, which civil-society groups and others have cautioned could lead to the take-down of legitimate material because filters cannot detect nuances used in satire and some political commentary.

Opponents had also argued that allowing the removal of an original post and then expanding that ban to posts considered “equivalent” added some potential for unintended consequences.

Facebook already removes or otherwise restricts photos and other posts in any given country if the material violates that nation’s laws, such as anti-government comments in countries where that is illegal. But the new ruling means Facebook would have to make such material inaccessible globally.

While lawmakers in the U.S. are considering tighter regulation of Facebook and other tech giants, politicians in Europe have gone much further on a variety of fronts, including passing stricter data-privacy laws in 2018.

“This shows a sharpening divide between the way the EU is handling privacy and data content versus the U.S.,” Wedbush’s Ives said. “It poses broader risks for the likes of Google and other big tech companies as the ‘Brussels versus tech’ battle continues to take hold.”

The same EU court ruled last month that the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” rules — which allow people to ask search engines such as Google to remove outdated or embarrassing links about themselves, even if they are true — do not apply outside the 28-nation bloc.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association, a lobbying group that includes Amazon, Facebook and Google, said the ruling could infringe on the right to free speech.

“The ruling essentially allows one country or region to decide what Internet users around the world can say and what information they can access,” said Victoria de Posson, the association’s Europe senior manager.

“What might be considered defamatory comments about someone in one country will likely be considered constitutional free speech in another,” she said. “Few hosting platforms, especially startups, will have the resources to implement elaborate monitoring systems.”

David Carroll, a professor at Parsons School of Design in New York and a longtime critic of Facebook’s handling of data, said the social network could apply a content “fingerprint” for banned material in the same way it has automated the detection of pornography, child exploitation, terror groups and other things that violate its policies.

“It has plenty of money to spend on infrastructure to comply with international laws,” he said.

The decision should not be expected to lead to a flood of orders against Facebook to take down content globally, said David Erdos, deputy director of the Center for Intellectual Property and Information Law at Cambridge University. The opinion was narrowly crafted, he said, and urged national courts to weigh any bans carefully against international laws.

“Courts will be feeling their way for years to come,” he said. Information for this article was contributed by Samuel Petrequin and Mae Anderson of The Associated Press and by Adam Satariano of The New York Times.