EU Court Just Gave Go-Ahead to Global Censorship, ‘WaPo’ Reports

In the United States, thanks to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, calling a politician a “corrupt oaf,” a “lousy traitor” or a “fascist”—even to a potential audience of millions on social media platforms—is pretty much an everyday occurrence that hardly seems noteworthy anymore. But in Europe things are different, as AVN.com has reported. In June, a leading advisor to the European Union’s top Court of Justice issued an opinion stating that such commentary must be censored from Facebook, and other social media. And last week, the Court of Justice codified that opinion in an official ruling that was both stunning and sweeping in its scope, holding that social media platforms that are ordered by courts to remove such supposedly offending posts must do so not only in Europe—but in every country in the world, the Washington Post reported. The ruling came in a lawsuit by Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek a Green Party politician in Austria, who in 2016 noticed that a Facebook user had commented on a news story about her by calling her a “lousy traitor of the people,” and the aforementioned “corrupt oaf,” also condemning the Greens as a “fascist party.” But Glawischnig-Piesczek sued Facebook not in her home country, but in Ireland. In the ruling the court not only said that Facebook must remove the derogatory comments worldwide, but must also block any other content that could be considered “equivalent” to the original post. Facebook had already removed the post in Austria, but must now do so worldwide—and has no way of appealing the ruling. The only recourse, according to the Post report, would be for other countries such as the United States to use such forms of pressure as international trade agreements to persuade any European country that orders a post removed to keep its decision local, not global. In the United States, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is considered the backbone of free expression on the internet as it shields internet services such as Facebook from legal responsibility for third-party posts. But even in the U.S. Section 230 is under attack from such legislation as last year’s FOSTA/SESTA bill, which removes Section 230 protections for online platforms in cases of “sex trafficking,” as AVN.com has reported.  Photo By Cédric Puisney / Wikimedia Commons