Facebook can be ordered to take down content deemed illegal by an individual EU country on a global basis following a landmark ruling handed down by the European Court of Justice. The continent’s top court ruled that “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,” before finding that “EU law does not preclude such an injunction from producing effects worldwide, within the framework of the relevant international law.”
A former head of the Austrian Green Party, Eva Glawischnig, filed the original complaint against Facebook back in 2016 to request that the social media platform delete disparaging comments about her on an individual’s personal page, together with “equivalent” messages posted by others. The post referred to Glawischnig, then spokeswoman for the parliamentary Greens but who resigned from that role in May 2017, as a "corrupt oaf" and "wretched traitor to her people."
The case ended up before Austria's Supreme Court of Justice, which subsequently sought guidance from the ECJ. In a statement, the European Commission clarified that the ECJ's ruling was limited to court orders and doesn’t apply to any other forms of notice by users claiming that certain content is illegal.
Facebook condemned the judgment, which cannot be appealed and comes just over a week after the ECJ ruled that Google is only required to delete links under “right to be forgotten” laws in Europe, not in the rest of the world. The ECJ’s ruling in the Eva Glawischnig case “undermines the long-standing principle that one country does not have the right to impose its laws on speech on another country,” said the social network platform, adding that “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.”
