In 2016, a television program aired footage of Voller shackled in a restraining chair. The coverage led to a national outrage about the mistreatment of youth in Australian detention systems. Voller then sued some of the media outlets that covered him—not because the news reports defamed him, but because other people writing on the outlets' Facebook pages were accusing him of having committed various crimes.
Australian courts have not yet ruled on whether these comments defamed Voller. This fight is about whether media outlets could even be sued for Facebook comments.
The outlets argue that they're not the "publishers" of what people say on Facebook and, in fact, that Facebook does not let them preemptively stop individual readers from posting comments on their page. They do have the option to delete, hide, or report individual comments, but only after they've been posted. Facebook comments are not like letters to the editor that they can choose whether or not to run.
But the fact that these outlets have the ability to delete comments after the fact was enough for Judge John Basten to declare them publishers: "They facilitated the posting of comments on articles published in their newspapers and had sufficient control over the platform to be able to delete postings when they became aware that they were defamatory." Based on that logic, the media outlets "facilitated" the posting of comments simply by sharing the articles on Facebook.
https://reason.com/2020/06/01/austr...-are-responsible-for-facebook-users-comments/
Australian courts have not yet ruled on whether these comments defamed Voller. This fight is about whether media outlets could even be sued for Facebook comments.
The outlets argue that they're not the "publishers" of what people say on Facebook and, in fact, that Facebook does not let them preemptively stop individual readers from posting comments on their page. They do have the option to delete, hide, or report individual comments, but only after they've been posted. Facebook comments are not like letters to the editor that they can choose whether or not to run.
But the fact that these outlets have the ability to delete comments after the fact was enough for Judge John Basten to declare them publishers: "They facilitated the posting of comments on articles published in their newspapers and had sufficient control over the platform to be able to delete postings when they became aware that they were defamatory." Based on that logic, the media outlets "facilitated" the posting of comments simply by sharing the articles on Facebook.
https://reason.com/2020/06/01/austr...-are-responsible-for-facebook-users-comments/
