Facebook can be forced to delete hate postings worldwide. This is the ruling of the European Court of Justice in the Glawischnig-Piesczek v Facebook Ireland Limited (C-18/18) case. Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, former spokeswoman for the Austrian Green Party, had sued the US company after it refused to remove insults against her from the platform.
Dr. Matthias Kettemann and Anna Sophia Tiedeke assess this decision in their article on the constitutional blog.
The judgment is contradictory in the sense that the ECJ itself does not lay down clear guidelines on the circumstances under which filters or global deletions of statements may be ordered by national courts. The judgment is contradictory in the sense that the ECJ itself does not lay down clear guidelines on the circumstances under which filters or global deletions of statements may be ordered by national courts. It also becomes clear that the judges at the ECJ apparently assume that automated systems and filters can be trained to detect violations of personal rights. On the one hand, the ECJ partially rejects the provider privilege and imposes extensive obligations on the platforms to detect and delete "similar expressions". It justifies this with the fact that it is not a "general obligation [...] to monitor" (the platforms should not be imposed), but rather "specific cases" (recital 34). On the other hand, it states that the platform operator would nevertheless not be expected to fulfil an excessive obligation, since "differences in the wording of [the] identical content in comparison with the content declared unlawful [...] must not be of such a nature that they force the hosting provider to carry out an autonomous assessment of this content" (recital 45), which is why the hosting provider can then also "resort to automated techniques and means of investigation" (recital 46).
Kettemann, M. C.; Tiedeke, A. S. (2019): Welche Regeln, welches Recht?: Glawischnig-Piesczek und die Gefahren nationaler Jurisdiktionskonflikte im Internet [Which Rules, Which Law? Glawischnig-Piesczek and the Dangers of National Jurisdiction Conflicts on the Internet], VerfBlog, 10.10.2019, https://verfassungsblog.de/welche-regeln-welches-recht/.
