Austrian Court Forcing Facebook To Remove Hate Speech

Even though it has been making a lot of effort to show the world that it is at least doing a few things about fake news and hate speech, Facebook has been notorious for leaving its users alone whenever they put up hateful materials on its platform. A court in Austria is just not having any of this as it just ruled that the social network needs to remove hate speech.

The court’s decision started with the kerfuffle involving a fake Facebook account posting offensive comments with regards to one of the country’s leaders, Tech Crunch reports. The Green Party of Austria brought the case to the court because of how its leader, Eva Glawischnig was being attacked on the social media site.

According to the party’s claims, it already brought the matter to Facebook’s attention on numerous occasions involving multiple posts, but the social network simply refused to take them down. Seeing no other recourse, the party turned to the Commercial Court of Vienna, which granted a preliminary injunction for Facebook to take down the hateful posts, as classified under Austrian law.

The social network tried to file an appeal, which turned out to be a mistake since the court only added more stipulations to the order, saying that verbatim re-posts of the hate speech need to be taken down along with the original. What’s more, instead of just implementing this order locally, Facebook is being forced to do so globally.

Mark Zuckerberg and his company’s troubles are only starting as well. While there was no mention from the court to indicate that Facebook needs to remove similarly offensive posts, the country’s Green Party has no such reservations.

As Reuters reports, the party intends to take the matter to the nation’s highest court in order to force the social media company to weed out hate speech of the same vein. If successful, Facebook will need to comply or face consequences such as being blocked or having its presence significantly reduced in the country.