Companies Are Now Liable for Facebook Comments in Australia
Australia has ruled that media companies can be held liable for defamatory comments by readers on their social media posts.
This is a big development for anyone with a Facebook presence, so even if you’re not in Australia, it’ll pay to keep up to date on this latest development.
This ruling is a result of the court case involving Dylan Voller, who was mistreated in the Northern Territory’s Don Dale youth detention center, with the case being investigated by a royal commission in Australia.
Unfortunately, Facebook users posted defamatory comments about him on Fairfax and News Corp’s Facebook pages. In a landmark ruling, Voller successfully sued those media companies back in 2017 for causing him extreme emotional and mental distress.
Obviously, we hope your Facebook page is never involved in anything this extreme – but in the ever-shifting Facebook landscape, cases like these tend to foretell the shape of things to come.
“The decision is significant for anyone who maintains a public social media page by finding they can be liable for comments posted by others on that page even when they are unaware of those comments. We need urgent legislative reform.” – Michael Miller, executive chairman of News Corp Australia.
This case is currently in the news cycle because Fairfax and News Corp appealed in May 2021 and argued they should not be liable because they did not have “knowledge and control” over comments on Facebook posts. In their words, they had not “intentionally lent assistance” to the publication of defamatory material.
The judges, however, disagreed.
So, how could this landmark ruling affect you?
Facebook do have a feature which allows comments to be disabled on posts: in the future, in Australia and everywhere else, it may be safer for certain pages to disallow comments across the board.
Many think the ruling might discourage Australian media companies from posting stories to social media, with obvious ramifications for what they could post on social media in the future.
Meanwhile, the case has already led to consequences for other Australian publishers. Media behemoth CNN has become the first major news organisation to disable its Facebook page in Australia as a direct result of the high court decision. A Perth law firm has cited the Australian high court decision in the Voller case in a letter calling on an administrator of a local council’s Facebook community group to delete allegedly defamatory comments hosted on its page.
What might surprise you is that that local Facebook group only had around 200 members.
It’s clearly not only the big publishers who are feeling the ramifications of the new defamation rulings – it’s everyone.
What you need to do
If you have a Facebook page with an audience smaller than CNN or NewsCorp, and your audience is fairly well behaved, and you’re outside Australia – don’t worry. You’re safe, for now.
But it’s better for your reputation, your brand, and the happiness of your users (which should be number one priority) that you moderate nasty comments and prevent anything happening in the first place.
While Facebook allows publishers to control who can comment on public posts, it does not give publishers the ability to delete comments en masse, meaning it has to be done post by post. This means constant vigilance, especially as your audience grows. That’s why it’s so important to make sure, if you have particularly high engagement, to foster a healthy culture and make sure everyone feels safe.
If you’re still worried, it might be a better idea to turn off comments altogether, and focus on increasing engagement elsewhere in your social media presence.
