Europe's highest court Facebook verdict hits a new low for technomagical thinking

In 2016, a Facebook user called the Austrian Green Party politician Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek "a corrupt oaf," a "traitor" and a member of a "fascist party." Glawischnig-Piesczek secured an Austrian court verdict that held these remarks to be libellous, and Facebook took them down for Austrian users.

But Glawischnig-Piesczek was upset that these remarks were still visible outside of Austria, so she asked the EU's highest court, the CJEU, to order Facebook to block the post throughout the world, and to use some kind of technology to prevent other Facebook users from making "equivalent comments."

This represented a new peak in extraterritorial theories of internet regulation. For years, we've had laws and rulings in which one jurisdiction orders the removal of content that is unlawful in its borders and insists that the material be removed everywhere in the world, even in places where the speech would be lawful (in the USA, the remarks directed at Glawischnig-Piesczek would be protected speech under the First Amendment).

These efforts have had disturbing potential for kicking off a race to the bottom, in which each territory's speech rules are combined into a set of global prohibitions: the world's longest copyrights would obtain in every country (so Mexico's life-plus-100 rule would trump the EU's life-plus-50 rule), the world's most hair-trigger libel rules would govern globally (no insulting the King of Thailand, or the Saudi royals, or Attaturk, or Putin), and so on.

But Glawischnig-Piesczek went further: she didn't just want Facebook to remove a libellous remark. She wanted Facebook to somehow screen every other remark, made by every other Facebook user, in every language, in every territory, and determine whether they were posting something "equivalent" to the remarks that offended her, and block those from being published. Read the rest