Facebook Users Liable For All Comments Under Their Posts, According To Australia High Court (gizmodo.com) 189
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Australia's High Court, roughly the equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court, has ruled that Facebook users are responsible for the content of complete strangers who post defamatory comments on their posts. The ruling upholds a June 2019 ruling by the Supreme Court of New South Wales, home to Australia's largest city of Sydney. And it runs counter to how virtually everyone thinks about liability on the internet.
The High Court's ruling on Wednesday is just a small part of a larger case brought against Australian news outlets, including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Australian, among others, by a man who said he was defamed in the Facebook comments of the newspapers' stories in 2016. The question before the High Court was the definition of "publisher," something that isn't easily defined in Australian law. From Australia's ABC News: "The court found that, by creating a public Facebook page and posting content, the outlets had facilitated, encouraged and thereby assisted the publication of comments from third-party Facebook users, and they were, therefore, publishers of those comments."
The High Court's ruling on Wednesday is just a small part of a larger case brought against Australian news outlets, including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Australian, among others, by a man who said he was defamed in the Facebook comments of the newspapers' stories in 2016. The question before the High Court was the definition of "publisher," something that isn't easily defined in Australian law. From Australia's ABC News: "The court found that, by creating a public Facebook page and posting content, the outlets had facilitated, encouraged and thereby assisted the publication of comments from third-party Facebook users, and they were, therefore, publishers of those comments."
Welcome to Australia v1.984 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to Australia v1.984 (Score:4, Insightful)
You're now liable for "this" post ozmartian... .. wait this isn't facebook, you're safe this time.
Overstated (Score:5, Informative)
A newspaper that created a Facebook page is responsible to some degree for the comments.
This is not the same as "every user is liable for comments on their posts"
Re:Overstated (Score:4, Insightful)
This doesn't make it better. It makes it worse. You can now target the fourth estate in Australia on any story and get them utterly economically fucked, because they're now liable for your posts on their stories.
Considering how Chinese trolls work, this means that Aussie publications will have to become CCP mouthpieces or be bankrupt if they want to keep comments on. Just to name one out of countless problems with this decision.
My guess, this will have to go to legislature and get fixed.
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This doesn't make it better. It makes it worse. You can now target the fourth estate in Australia on any story and get them utterly economically fucked, because they're now liable for your posts on their stories.
Maybe, it's hard to know what is even going on here. The law is complex and this is Australian law.
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The thing with Australia that most of us foreigners miss is that it's not just a "country of former prisoners". It's a former prison colony, true. But prisoners are only one of the two main groups of people present in a prison.
And Australian legislature, policing and court system tend to be manned by the people with the mindset of that other major group of people present in prisons. It's why they get those really fucked up things like the recent story on violently arresting and fining teenagers having a par
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Your post might be marked as +5, Interesting, but it should also be marked -5 Absolute bullshit. 90% of it is just made up, and then sprinkled with a little truth, all of which is irrelevant.
Re:Overstated (Score:4)
It's always funny how when people get emotional, they will openly produce gems like "even the truth that I admit to in your post that I am very emotionally rejecting isn't relevant!"
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>You use that to argue that the government is made up of gaolers.
Except that I didn't.
>Are you the same person as your ancestors from 200 years ago?
No, but general culture of my nation is very distinct because of how our ancestors 200 years ago, 100 years ago, 50 years ago and so on lived. Which is my actual argument. The reason why people across the world are not the "wonderful, homogenous, internationalist mass of interchangeable parts" as internationalist visionaries put it back in 1920s is because
Re:Overstated (Score:5, Interesting)
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"As long as everyone behaves, I have no problem with police" applies to US police as well. That's the whole point. The ability of police to handle tough situations is not measured by how well they handle stressless contacts with compliant people.
It's measured by how they handle conflict. And Aussie police is known for handling conflict in a way very close to US police. Aggressive abd confrontational. And there are many historic reasons for it, ranging from the fact that their culture comes from culture of p
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>That's not really true, there wouldn't be half the outrage there is if the police were only going after people who had obviously committed crimes and being proportionate in terms of handling cooperating people vs non-cooperating.
Overwhelming majority of the outrage is manufactured by sensationalist media in the first place. For every actual "police decided to LARP as CIA torture squad" criminality, there are tens of stories that when you dig below the surface come out as a "gang banger tried to shoot hi
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I've had quite a few run ins with the Australian police, and I've found them to be exceptionally tolerant and reasonable, so long as you don't punch them in the face. Most of the time they are good humored people often willing to help out people in their community and are quite approachable. Twice in my lifetime I've had them help me push my car off the road when it's broken down. A cop gave my sister bus fare home when she lost her wallet. I've seen someone verbally abuse them and they spent the effort to calm that person down and discuss with them their problems. I don't know where you are getting your info from but it seems you are misinformed.
Clearly you've never dealt with WAPOL. Utterly useless, will threaten you for reporting when they haven't done their job, only useful for handing out speeding or drink driving tickets and will ignore obviously dangerous drivers otherwise.
Moving to the UK was a breath of fresh air. Haven't been RBT'd since I got here over 5 years ago (although I agree the local area could do with a few more random traffic stops, but clearly the Roz have better things to do). 1 run in with the MET (London police) for going
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RBT is random breath test?
I've only ever been breath tested once. It was in New South Wales.
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Reality. You won't find this stuff on internet because internet media didn't really exist in 1980s, but if you go to your nearest library and ask for newspapers from the era in Australia, you'll find that specific scandal among many similar ones. It makes for some pretty good reality check for those who think Australian police looking like British police means they behave like British police.
And it's far from the only one. It's just the way Australian policing culture is, as a result of long history of shit
Re: Overstated (Score:2)
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Do you live the way you preach, assuming that nothing that you did in the past has any impact on the future, or are you just being angry at having no viable counter arguments other than "causality is not a thing, and history is irrelevant"?
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Coming from Cultural Revolution, it's completely understandable that for a Chinese troll like yourself, history is irrelevant. After all, your kind genuinely thinks that Communists fought the Japanese in WW2, or that covid came from a US military base.
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You seem to be lost in some fantasy land, man. Maybe go take a walk and try to find reality before posting more bullshit. We need less concocted tripe posted online, not more.
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The funny part in this thread is, it's the exact opposite of what you're assuming. People who never looked into history do a google search online, can't find the result and assume it isn't real.
To folks like you, "if I can't find it on first page of google, it doesn't exist".
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No, the funny thing is your concocted bullshit spewing. I've lived long enough I know how to find historical information, and carry a ton of it around in my head. You seem to have an axe to grind, but it doesn't appear to be the axe you think it is.
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And what do you think this axe I have to grind is?
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Yes. I'm also drunk, stoned, beaten and stirred.
But one thing I'm not is ignorant of history.
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This is the most Australian thing I've read, because like a true Australian you probably downed an entire bottle of Bundy before deciding to write all that absolute drivel.
Dude, stick to letting people believe every animal here will kill you, don't try and claim the coppers are somehow worse than the USA, because that shit is verifiably laughably bullshit.
The secret to being a good Aussie is to say just enough bullshit so that people take you seriously. Like when they google Dropbear and end up at the Austr
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I'm sure that from the point of view of a Chinese troll, Aussie police are really nice. I mean, they don't vanish people for political reasons, and they don't weld people into their homes upon suspicion of catching WuFlu.
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I love it when I hit a nerve with you by just comparing your domestic problems for reference, and showing just how horrible they are compared to subject being discussed.
It always triggers you, as Chinese nationalists are some of the most thin-skinned, glass-hearted people in the world.
Re:Overstated (Score:5, Informative)
If I recall correctly, the original judgement was based on the fact the companies had hired professional moderators and there was clear evidence that they were removing hundreds of other offensive posts. If they had been doing no moderation at all they might not have lost the case. By engaging in active moderation of other posts, it looked like leaving the defamatory posts up was a deliberate decision for which they were legally responsible.
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It wouldn't surprise me if the initiator of the lawsuit tried to contact them to take down the offensive post as well.
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Under this law as you stated, your lawyer would highly recommend that you better have a good reason before removing lots of posts. You can remove a few individual ones but when you remove bucketfulls of posts you better make sure that all the legally actionalble ones were among those removed, because you just arent common carrier anymore, by thine own hand.
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> This doesn't make it better. It makes it worse. You can now target the fourth estate in Australia on any story and get them utterly economically fucked, because they're now liable for your posts on their stories.
A certain "extreme political wing" doesn't like comments anyways. So having you turn off comments was their goal anyways... that and upvote/downvote ratios.
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In Australia today, the bigger problem is their Chinese problem. As the Chinese trolls like to say, "Australia belongs to China". Most people forget that things like US being actually worried about Chinese spying and "elite capture"... came from Australian intelligence. They are the ones who kept sounding the alarm until US had an admin that actually decided to listen.
And their problem is so advanced, that it's utterly pervasive.
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How effective a 'targeting' do you really think that will be? If anything it will stop them from posting stories on facecrack and twatter; because as you say there will be to much liability in it.
What decisions like this mean, if they could helpfully be replicated in the US for example by repealing 230, would be that serious news agencies regardless of their political leanings would stop posting anything to these platforms beyond utterly non controversial check out new morning program at "7a weekdays."
The o
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That's an interesting take, but here it would be better to simply stop people from commenting entirely. I.e. sink even deeper into "priesthood of journalists dispensing truth to the masses" rather than an interaction between the two, so that blatant lies actually get a chance to get debunked.
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See I think there are enough 'news' organizations by which would include the 'infotainment' folks that manage to offer diverse viewpoints and counter takes without going as far as libeling or slandering anyone. You might not agree with much of what your read or the slant its presented with at Slate or Breitbart for example but most of it is clearly 'opinion' or factually correct even if the facts are highly cherry picked.
I don't know how libel and slander work in Oz, I would say the US versions where if you
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How does this make it worse? It's fucking awesome.
Now media organisations won't have a presence on Facebook. This is the start of killing Facebook.
How can that be a bad thing?
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You mean the start of killing of the media organisations?
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And Chinese trolls work by saturating attacks. Which means you'll need comparable cadre of people doing nothing but responding to their complaints about "insult to the feelings of Chinese people", which would bankrupt any media outlet in short order.
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Any kind of media actually if I understood it correctly - not only newspapers.
Why not? (Score:2)
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If I post something that goes viral and has a ton of defamatory comments on it would it matter?
The subtleties of Australian copyright law are beyond me.
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> If I post something that goes viral and has a ton of defamatory comments on it would it matter?
> www.fark.com/politics
Re-thinking fark's business model are you? Heheh.
Re:Overstated (Score:5, Interesting)
And furthermore because they use the Facebook page as part of their business they have a responsibility to moderate it, just as they do with comments on their own website.
seriously, what?? (Score:2)
How can people with such high authority be so stupid?
Unless the whole bench is stacked with codgers that ride their horse and buggy to work and are expecting that "electricity fad" to blow over any day now?
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Murdoch == cancer (Score:2)
+1 ----^ Murdoch's brigade of fascists are a cancer. And are also directly responsible [youtu.be] for 6 Jan
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What?! A media company that alters facts to drum up outrage? I've never heard of such a thing.
Seriously, I would love to see places like Gizmodo get hit with some form of legal hammer when they pull shit like this. But apparently we're well past giving a fuck about lies in media. If we did Fox News would have been torn down years ago. And CNN and MSNBC would probably be as well. It's terrible, but this is the world we've made.
Facebook page for members Australia's High Court? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there a Facebook page for the members of Australia's High Court?
I'd like to create a bot that makes racist and defamatory posts to their Facebook page every minute to help them realize how stupid their ruling is.
The ruling is correct. (Score:4, Interesting)
If the platform does not allow you to block/moderate thirdparty from posting on your account, you should not use that platform.
The thirdparty is also responsible. But thirdparty is responsible for posting objectionable content. User is only responsible for re-transmission.
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Re:The ruling is correct. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's hundreds of years of case law that says the author and the publisher are both responsible for libel.
In this case the court had to decide if the news organisations were considered "publishers" of comments posted on their boards. The paintiffs argued that since the media organisations had professional moderators who were actively deleting other posts on their boards they were exercising an editorial function. The courted decided they were were liable as publishers in this case.
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You purposefully crafted an example (rifles) that is meant to distort the situation and equate the damage a rifle can inflict with damage someone's however defamatory words can inflict. But I'll bite.
Firstly, it's not clear if you're equating the rifles with my post, or the site which allowed person X and Y to post. You can't equate the rifle to my post on a site, since the harm is coming from person Y's post, not my person X's post. My rifles (post) remains cleanly where I placed them. So that leave yo
Re:The ruling is correct. (Score:4, Insightful)
User A has a facebook account, that re-transmits postings with user A's permission to all the people following/reading user A. So user A is responsible for it.
If the platform does not allow you to block/moderate thirdparty from posting on your account, you should not use that platform.
The problem is people coming back later to edit their innocent comments into something that can get User A in trouble. From what I understand, there's no time limit for making edits.
If User A has a large group of followers, User A is going to be spending a lot of time reading, reviewing, and blocking/deleting objectionable posts, or will have to hire someone to do it. That's not realistic.
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You're not liable for it unless you refuse to delete it when you find out about it.
An important technical detail is that the person who owns the post can click "delete" on the comments.
It is really that simple; when you find out about a defamatory post, do you delete it, or not?
People are searching hard for terrible edge cases that don't exist in the first place.
Re: The ruling is correct. (Score:2)
I usually don't bother to read replies after a day or two. Also, replies can be edited. What happens in either of these cases? Does constantly watching my posts become a job now?
Re:The ruling is correct. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have an interesting proposal, which I believe is much simpler to understand and enforce. People should be responsible for their own posts.
If User A posts a comment, and User B posts a reply that threatens violence or some other illegal speech (wtf). Then the cops should track down User B and not even bother speaking to User A, who has no practical involvement in the matter.
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User A may have "permitted" nothing of the sort beyond having used whatever service the post was made on in the first place.
Even at best, such reasoning amounts to victim blaming.
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User has no interest in picking a service that does the expensive content tracking and troll stopping services.
This is how race to the bottom is facilitated. Hold the user responsible, users will leave platforms where the user can not prohibit effectively malicious side postings. That will force platforms to reduce spamming, scamming and malicious posts.
The use
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The ends does not justify the means. Punishing an innocent person in order to discourage actual offenders is what is known as injustice.
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But guilty of aiding abetting disseminating that content, at some level, gross negligence, simple negligence. Need to prove there is no collusion between the third party and the person providing the platform.
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Similar to the reality that gun and ammunition manufacturers (of any type) should not be held accountable for the injuries or deaths caused by a shooter. The shooter is responsible.
Similar to the reailty that alcohol distillers and bar owners should not be held responsible for the injuries or deaths caused by a drunk driver. The driver is responsible.
User A has posted a comment. User B posts an offensive reply. There is no duty for user A to police everything written in response to their comment for all e
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People should be responsible for their own posts.
If User A posts a comment, and User B posts a reply
You're conflating "posts" and "comments."
When you create a "post," you can delete any "comments" attached to it. When you make a comment and another user replies to it, you cannot delete that reply. Only the owner of the "post" can delete it.
So when you say, "People should be responsible for their own posts," that's exactly what the Australian court said. The owner of the "post" is responsible for the content.
Re: The ruling is correct. (Score:2)
Your proposal would potentially make the internet a more civil place, but it fails to achieve the goal of ensuring the powers that be get more control, in this case over newspapers. And like with packs of dope, it's easy to plant something...
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Everyone complaining about Section 230 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Everyone complaining about Section 230 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Everyone complaining about Section 230 (Score:2)
Usually, when both parties hate something, it is a good thing. Like encryption.
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But no one wants a web without those protections where a site owner is liable for all user content.
The gubmint don't control the skies (Score:2)
What if you troll from a balloon?
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All governments claim legal control of their airspace. Maybe move to a backwater and then do it on the moon, only countries with space programs bother to assert anything about the moon.
As they should be. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with riding the Tiger, is getting off with out getting eaten.
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They censor, edit and take down user generated content as it suits them. So that which they have approved of by their actions should make them liable. The problem with riding the Tiger, is getting off with out getting eaten.
The question isn't about what has been approved by their actions but to what degree people can be held accountable for inaction.
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Until we get an actual law covering this, there's no framework on how that moderation happens. That's the real sticking point. Would a "report defamatory posts at this address: " type thing in the comments do the trick, or will it require active monitoring to be doing your due diligence in moderating the public forum?
The Supreme Court literally pulled the pin out of a grenade and then stepped back without a word.
Newspapers are responsible for their comments (Score:5, Insightful)
What company isn't a publisher these days? (Score:2)
Have a website or facebook page? Are you posting content to those pages? Then guess what, you're a publisher.
This is just the inability of the law to keep pace with technology.
dodgy story. (Score:5, Informative)
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It makes sense. Here in the US, if a newspaper publishes a "letter to the editor" they're liable for the content.
That that we have much in the way of "liability" for printed words. But still, to whatever extent there is liability, an equal share of it lands on the publisher.
A lot of commenters don't seem to comprehend how normal, obvious, and mundane this decision is. What they're really mad about is the range of published words that can carry liability, not who the liable parties are or should be.
Karma is a b!tch (Score:2)
Media outlets were instrumental to this shakedown [reuters.com]. Now they get paid by social media for their "content" so rightly so they should be responsible for it, including the comments.
Irony is a wonderful thing.
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Finally, their chickens are coming home to roost.
Those aren't chickens. Those are emus [wikipedia.org].
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Surely they would be Bin chickens [wikipedia.org] if they were coming home and roosting.
Why wouldn't the person who posted be responsible? (Score:2)
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Perhaps the person who posted the comment doesn't have any economic presence in Australia? I suppose if they had a plane transfer there they could be arrested, but for most people that's rather unlikely.
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The author and the publisher can both be responsible for libel. When suing for monetary damages, it's usual to sue the party with the most money.
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I would imagine that if you write a letter to the editor of an Australian newspaper and they go ahead and publish it, you'd both be liable for the content.
Same as here.
This is why the US has section 230 (Score:3)
Job Killing Decision (Score:2)
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Heck, in the UK, the absolute truth can be deemed defamatory. The US has some weird protections, such as the public figure thing, but being charged with libel of defamation for saying the truth is pretty messed up.
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I've often wondered how the internet got to be the raging dumpster fire that it is today. I've concluded that one of the many contributions has been the fact that ordinary citizens are permitted to publish filth without consequence.
Anonymity. Humans have a deep dark core of white hot hatred, and many are really stupid.
As well, Governments can take advantage of that anonymity as well, operating troll farms or bots.
Compounding the problem is the people who we would be better off if they were tossed into that dumpster fire win because they scream the loudest, have absolutely no concerns about lying, and are happy to spout their weird Bullshit. all over.
It isn't as though we didn't have kooks back in the day, we surely did. but
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there were these things called newspapers and magazines. If they published on their cover that the local MP was a wanker, they could get sued.
Exclusive Extra! Batboy calls local MP a wanker!
Those laws the exact reason the US decided on freedom of the press; protecting "broadsides" that published lies and crude hyperbole about local politicians!
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The Taliban started as almost exclusively students.
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Talib means student, specifically religious students.
Taliban means, roughly, people of the students, or the people who were students. Of religion.
If you teach them engineering they will use it to tear down your cultural monuments, or hide bombs under your roads. Because you're a heathen.
If you teach them about comparative religions, you'll be giving them a new list of people they want to kill.
If you teach them about women's studies, it will result in new slates of rules to burden the women under their gover
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Aussies used to be Tough Men, but then they get arrested by some fop with a skinny-ass little sword and a wig and shipped off to Australia!
To practice matilda-dancing.
And I hope you like sheep!
shearing sheep as big as whales
with leather necks and daggy tails
And hides as tough as rusty nails
When shearing comes lay down your drums
step to the boards you brand new chums
with the rah-dum rah-dum rub-a-dub-dub
we'll send you back in the lime juice tub
The brand new chums and cocky
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Get a blog, dork. You're part of the reason the internet sucks now. Posting your screeds to every story is pointless. Nobody reads it, and even if they do it's just out of morbid curiosity over just how hard you're trying to work to keep yourself miserable.