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Twitter Sued For $50M For Refusing To Identify Anti-Semitic Users

Posted by Soulskill on from the feeding-the-trolls dept.

redletterdave writes "After a French civil court ruled on Jan. 24 that Twitter must identify anyone who broke France's hate speech laws, Twitter has since refused to identify the users behind a handful of hateful and anti-Semitic messages, resulting in a $50 million lawsuit. Twitter argues it only needs to comply with U.S. laws and is thus protected by the full scope of the First Amendment and its free speech privileges, but France believes its Internet users should be subject to the country's tighter laws against racist and hateful forms of expression."

4 of 335 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I've been waiting for this... by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Informative

    Is an internet company responsible to the country that it operates from, or is it responsible to every country that they can be reached from?

    Likely, it will come down to if they have a regional variant of their service or local servers.

    If there's only a single twitter.com, and it lives in the US, and everybody hits then likely not.

    But if there is a twitter.fr, and they have a presence in France and promote their service there -- well, then you really are going to be compelled to adhere to local laws. You can't have it both ways. One would hope that reasonably, if I do something in the country I live in, and it's legal, no other country should have any jurisdiction. That way you don't get someone being sued in France for something which is legal where they live. Because half of the internet would be getting sued in countries where saying certain things is illegal, even if they've never been there.

    Twitter can't promote their products in other countries, install infrastructure there, regionalize their product, but claim everything else is covered under US laws.

    Of course, that's great in theory -- who knows what a court would decide in reality.

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  2. Re:Do TV Broadcasters Have to Put Up With This? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Anti-Israeli is not at all the same thing as anti-Semitic.
    Anti-Israeli material is directed against the policies of a nation or its government.
    Anti-Semitic material (despite the broad name) is racist stuff directed at Jews in general.

    No. Arabs and many other people belong to Semitic people too. Anti-Semitic term is widely misused and it should stop.

    The correct term would be Anti-Sionistic when its against Jews and Israel (state).

  3. Re:I've been waiting for this... by KZigurs · · Score: 5, Informative

    USA has been doing this for decades... Especially with online gaming companies that might not even serve US customers.

  4. Re:I've been waiting for this... by girlinatrainingbra · · Score: 5, Informative
    Hey, it's already happened here in the USA for Dmitry Sklyarov when he came to the USA to give a presentation. Look at the details at U.S. v. ElcomSoft and Skylarov The case raised some concerns particularly since it involved an individual being prosecuted for activities that were fully legal in the country where they occurred.

    So Twitteronians doing twiittery things that are all legal in teh USA could get stopped, frisked, arrested, and jailed for having done things that are deemed to be illegal elsewhere in this great wide world. :>(