Facebook is ready to challenge the European Union’s ruling that countries can order the platform to remove illegal content globally.
In a company livestream on October 4th, the social media giant’s co-founder Mark Zuckerberg stated that Facebook could potentially take legal action against the ruling.
“This is something I expect us and other companies will be litigating,” he said.
Facebook currently complies with a process in which the company goes through legal requests to have content removed if it breaks a country’s laws. However, Facebook leaves the content visible for global viewers as long as it doesn’t go against its Community Standards.
This new ruling means that Facebook can be forced to search for content that a national court finds to be illegal, rather than have to go through actual requests, as previously reported by MobileSyrup.
This decision comes a week after the European top court ruled that Google doesn’t have to follow Europe’s “right to be forgotten” law worldwide. In Canada, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner said that the E.U. decision will not affect the work being done in the country.
Zuckerberg noted that in the past, Facebook has been successful in fighting broad takedown requests. He also stated that the implementation of the ruling depends on courts across the EU.
A spokesperson from Facebook told TechCrunch that the ruling “undermines the long-standing principle that one country does not have the right to impose its laws on speech on another country.”
The spokesperson also stated that it would be difficult to get companies like Facebook to monitor content, and then interpret whether it is illegal.
Facebook has stated that it wanted to avoid impeding on freedom of expression.
Source: TechCrunch
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