Facebook: Australian media companies can be held responsible for comments

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The Australian High Court on Wednesday rejected an argument put forward by three major news organizations, which claimed they could not be held responsible for the comments people posted in their Facebook (FB) news pages. The media had appealed a lower court ruling.
“The appellants’ attempt to represent themselves as passive and involuntary victims of Facebook functionality has an air of unreality, ”the court wrote. “After acting to ensure the commercial advantage of Facebook’s functionality, the appellants assume the legal consequences.”

The appellate court “correctly held that the appellants’ acts in facilitating, encouraging and therefore aiding the posting of comments by third-party Facebook users made them publishers of those comments, ”he wrote. the High Court.

Publications Fairfax Media, Nationwide News and the Australian News Channel filed their case in response to a lawsuit filed by Dylan Voller, a former detainee in the Australian juvenile detention system. Voller’s treatment at a detention center made him the center of a 2016 abuse scandal, and he later sued the three media companies for some of the public comments on his Facebook pages accusing him of horrible crimes that his lawyer says he did not commit.
“Media companies are usually known to encourage greater engagement with their publications so that their content is seen by a larger audience. This helps attract advertising revenue,” Voller’s lawyers, O’Brien, said in a statement. Criminal & Civil Solicitors. “With this strong business imperative that propelled them, there was no doubt that media companies lent their help in posting third-party comments. They did everything they could to encourage it and it’s selfless to say that they did not play any role in publishing it. “

Wednesday’s high court ruling does not resolve the underlying defamation case filed by Voller against the publishers, who is now returning to the New South Wales Supreme Court.

But it does change the media landscape in Australia. Nine Entertainment, one of the country’s leading media organizations and owner of Fairfax, said Thursday after the ruling it was “disappointed” by the outcome of the decision.

“It will have ramifications for what we can post on social media in the future,” a Nine Entertainment spokesman told CNN Business.

A spokesman for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Australia, owner of Nationwide News and Australian News Channel, did not immediately respond to a request from CNN Business to comment.

But one of the company’s newspapers, the Australian, published an editorial on Thursday condemning the decision as “suffocating free discussion.”

“This decision will hamper the exchange of ideas, encouraging Facebook users to turn off comment opportunities,” the publisher said. He also cited the executive chairman of News Corp. Australia’s Michael Miller, who called on Australian legal officials to “address this anomaly and adjust Australian legislation to comparable Western democracies”.

While the decision is likely to lead to more litigation against companies over third-party comments, there have been some recent changes to Australian law that will likely prevent a lawsuit like Voller’s from occurring in the same way, according to David Rolph, a professor at University of Sydney Law School specializing in media law.

Rolph noted that as of July, editors must have the opportunity to “make a proposal for amendments” before they can be sued.

“So in the future, publishers will have the opportunity to rule out comments to manage the risk of defamation,” he told CNN Business.

Media companies in Australia may also refrain from allowing comments on stories. A Nine Entertainment spokesman noted that Facebook allows publishers to turn off story comments.

Facebook declined to comment on the case, but the company began in March to allow publishers with Pages to disable comments on posts or otherwise limit the ability for users to comment on selected pages and profiles.

– Michelle Toh contributed to this report.

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