I find court summaries of the Dutch courts to be quite readable. Google translate also seems to work quite well.
It should be noted that this is a "kort geding", which i believe translates to a "preliminary injunction" but I don't have the legal education to say what the differences between the two may be.
Some anonymous user claims that the person who started legal action committed gross sexual misconduct. The judge ruled that there's little evidence to back these claims and that the plaintiff is suffering an impact significant enough to warrant further action.
It should also be noted that Dutch law considers defamation to be a crime (as in, illegal under criminal law), not a civil law issue.
This isn't the first time a company has had to hand over subscriber information because of libel or slander either. I don't really see what the big deal is.
Dunno if this is the case in the Netherlands, but it's worth noting in some legal systems defamation is defined something like spreading harmful accusations as opposed to spreading harmful lies. The intent being that if you have an accusation that is true, you settle it in the courts rather than in the press, with an angry mob, on social media, or the like.
Since the whether or not the accusations are true doesn't factor into such a crime, it can be enforced on the presence of harmful accusations alone, which has fairly big implications for the sort of social media witch hunts that we've seen cropping up in the recent decade.
The Netherlands has both. "Laster" requires the accusation to be untrue. "Smaad" is the broader form that does not require the accusation to be untrue.
Justifications defined in the law are "necessary defense" and "common interest". The second one is specified as "believed in good faith that the charges were true and that the public interest required the charge." IANAL, but I think this can apply to social media witch hunts to at least some extent.
That makes the courts the sole deciders of truth, which is extremely bad in all ways.
The press can for example discover and publish evidence of corrupt dealings of a politician, while there is a minimal chance any prosecutor or court would be interested in the case.
"Kort geding" is more akin to a small claims court. A preliminary injunction afaict is more of a request to the court for the defendant/plaintiff to stop a certain action until full judgement has been made.
A kort geding is a civil court with the specific aim of solving cases that don't require a full blown legal investigation (which can take months).
Usually it's either for urgency reasons (ie. public and obvious defamation on public TV need a correction issued very quickly to prevent tarnishing someone's reputation) or because the matter simply isn't that huge (your neighbor cutting the tree on your property down doesn't and shouldn't take a full year to resolve).
A kort geding can be escalated into a full legal proceeding if either party is unhappy with the outcome however.
“Interlocutory proceedings (in Belgium often interim relief or référé) is a short-term civil procedure for urgent cases that by their nature must be decided quickly.
[…]
Matters that by their nature are urgent are, for example, the request to ban a strike or the request to prohibit a publication, because it is incorrect and harms the interests of a directly involved person.”
It is news to me that websites can so easily be coerced to fork over user data by private citizens prosecuting fairly petty civil actions. Is this about par for the course in European jurisprudence, or a high water mark for right to due process in the digital age?
The first order effects seem pretty benign, even salutary - but I’m not sure the court really thought through all the implications here.
Is the Dutch legal system inviting themselves to become a party to every single he said/she said drama on Facebook?
What will Facebook need to do to extricate themselves from such an odious entanglement?
Slander and libel are criminal offences in the Netherlands. If a crime had been committed against someone, they should have the means to seek justice.
Normally, you wouldn't need Facebook to disclose any names because Facebook isn't anonymous 99% of the time. There are plenty of anonymous and pseudonymous forums that would be at risk and yes they too have to follow warrants should the court decide against them.
If Facebook wants to stay out of such cases, they should either leave the jurisdictions where such warrants are possible (so planet earth, probably) or they should enforce non-anonymous posts so plaintiffs can sue each other without involving a court warrant first.
If you're the person having their reputation smeared by anonymous cowards it maybe doesn't seem so "petty" as you dismiss.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do; have the person slandering somebody anonymously brought into the light where there is a level playing field in which they can present their case.
This court ruling seems entirely reasonable. If a trillion dollar corporation is profiting from someone spreading malicious lies about you, it seems logical that the victim has some legal recourse against both entities.
Why is this surprising? If someone accuses of you a crime anonymously, you need to know their identity to sue them for damages. Otherwise, anonymity becomes a license to libel.
This position is a slippery slope to a world where true anonymity is made illegal. Your confusion is more subtle and arguably more dangerous: that anonymity can make certain illegal actions easier does not mean that anonymity should not exist.
There is no right to anonymity. The government requires every citizen to identify themselves in various ways for paying taxes, voting, receiving benefits, registering for the draft, etc.
Speaking of "not understanding free speech", in America (where Meta is) free speech exclusively refers to our Bill of Rights and the limitation on government to unfairly suppress your speech, specifically your political speech.
It is completely unrelated to a private citizen interacting with a private business in the eyes of American law, American business and Americans ourselves. The only free speech issue here from our perspective is "Is the government illegally restricting Meta's corporate right to free speech?" And no, making Meta identify a user is not a violation of their 1A free speech rights to us.
If you're speaking of a totally different European legal concept, it might be helpful for you to identify that.
This is absolutely routine and not news. Companies are required to abide by the legal system in countries they operate in.
Like other companies, Meta routinely comply with subpoenas for user identity, post history etc in the US too. In fact they give their requirements here[1] so law enforcement know what sort of order to bring and how to serve it on them. This has even been abused by bad actors forging court orders etc to obtain user data[2]
Subpoenas are for criminal cases. It looks like this was a civil matter.
A better comparison would be the Twitter user that was tweeting Elon Musk's jet flights. This was before twitter was purchased, and Elon Musk was not able to get the court to order Twitter to hand over that information.
Subpoenas are not a legal instrument in Europe. Europe also uses civil law, not common law, so there's no criminal, civil divide like there is in the US.
In Europe, police usually have a right to request information from companies and people. This is codifed into law, there's not necessarily any legal procedure for how it needs to happen.
There are some standards on how inter-country information is requested.
The Twitter user is pseudonymous at best, and was posting objectively true data, publicly available, regarding a notable, public person in these United States.
The FB user in TFA was anonymized by group membership, and posting allegedly defamatory and untrue information about a private person.
I understand the fears people are raising here, the potential for abuse.
But on the other hand, what should someone do if they are truly wronged by something like this? They lost their job, their spouse left them, all because someone decided to slander them under the veil of anonymity. Should they have any recourse?
It goes both ways. If you are not anonymous, then every your action can be taken against you. I remember a post where music companies searched reddit against user comments posted on 2011.
What if you are pro trans people? In 10 years you can be prosecuted by it, if a new party is elected. It can have new 'standards'. You will not be able to contradict mainstream narrative. You will not be able to say anything against corporations and governments.
If you will do anything outside of 'boundaries' set by companies, governments you will lost your job, spouse will leave you, all because you wanted 'a better world'.
On one side of scales is a place of total invigilation, on the other is a place with internet trolls. Companies like meta and twitter are quite good in rooting our trolls. So the current situation is inconvenient, but we can live with it.
If we opt out anonymity then the overall result will be a lot worse than the current situation is.
The huge title banner with the redundant snippet and the Meta logo of the unnecessary margins could use some dieting—the black-on-white body of the article cuts of at "identifying data of an anonymous Facebook user" for me, incongruously even earlier than the dark-gray-on-black snippet above it. Otherwise it's pretty nice, yes. (Is it weird that I think text.npr.org mostly looks better than the main npr.org?)
There's a feature where you can post to groups anonymously, still using your real account, rather than creating a new account with fake data to make you appear anonymous.
There's a dead comment sibling to this one talking about how group admins can see through the anominity. I don't understand why it is dead. It wasn't even rudely stated. Is it just flat wrong, or did it cross some unknown social boundary by pointing out a fact? Was it edited posthumously?
Edit: And, when I refresh it's not dead... I don't understand this system apparently.
Just to add to this. If the anonymous post was made on a group, the group administrators could still see it. So it's only anonymous for the rest of the (non-admin) group members.
I had a similar reaction as well: Isn't that just a little disingenuous - or misplaced surprise? My impression was Facebook shouldn't rank high on privacy or free speech security ("free speech" is not defined by the US constitution, and this is a european case anyway).
On the bright side, the article is full of interesting detail.
Good motivation to build or support platforms where this can't even be a possibility, i.e. without phone number authentication or other identity revealing steps as part of authentication.
I'm having trouble seeing this being a major thing in a decade or two. To me it looks more like we're running towards more control in the name of stopping hate. ID verification to access internet and social media seem more likely. Sell it as a way to stop pedophiles on social media, kids from accessing violent/nude content, and people from posting hate. We don't have anything to hide, right?
Even if a platform wanted, the laws will prohibit it by requiring user knowledge.
"Furthermore, Meta's conditions permit data from users to be shared with third parties."
...I don't know if it has any legal implications, but it sure does undercut Meta's ethical high ground, that they will tell people all about their users for money in order for them to serve up advertisements. The case in question would on the surface appear at least as valid a reason.
> it sure does undercut Meta's ethical high ground, that they will tell people all about their users for money
I'm sorry, where do you infer that? Meta literally refused to do exactly that, and went to court to defend the practice. They're only doing so now because they lost.
I don't think you understand. The complaint isn't that FaceBook sells data; it's that it gives it freely away.
To literally quote from the Privacy Policy [1]
> We share information about you with marketing vendors. For example, we share your device identifier or other identifiers
---
But this is all irrelvant.
Meta's Privacy Policy makes it extremely clear that they will share your data when there is a court order.
> We access, preserve, use and share your information:
> In response to legal requests, like search warrants, court orders, production orders or subpoenas. These requests come from such as civil litigants, law enforcement and other government authorities. about when we respond to legal requests.
> However, Meta initially responded stating that it did not find the posts defamatory and hence would not accede to his request
Oh, that’s so very Meta and Twitter and Reddit. I believe they return a delayed response only to maintain appearances of some human being having had a look at the reports.
What I don’t understand is how come a user was anonymous in a Facebook group.
Readit News
I find court summaries of the Dutch courts to be quite readable. Google translate also seems to work quite well.
It should be noted that this is a "kort geding", which i believe translates to a "preliminary injunction" but I don't have the legal education to say what the differences between the two may be.
Some anonymous user claims that the person who started legal action committed gross sexual misconduct. The judge ruled that there's little evidence to back these claims and that the plaintiff is suffering an impact significant enough to warrant further action.
It should also be noted that Dutch law considers defamation to be a crime (as in, illegal under criminal law), not a civil law issue.
This isn't the first time a company has had to hand over subscriber information because of libel or slander either. I don't really see what the big deal is.
Since the whether or not the accusations are true doesn't factor into such a crime, it can be enforced on the presence of harmful accusations alone, which has fairly big implications for the sort of social media witch hunts that we've seen cropping up in the recent decade.
Justifications defined in the law are "necessary defense" and "common interest". The second one is specified as "believed in good faith that the charges were true and that the public interest required the charge." IANAL, but I think this can apply to social media witch hunts to at least some extent.
The press can for example discover and publish evidence of corrupt dealings of a politician, while there is a minimal chance any prosecutor or court would be interested in the case.
A kort geding is a civil court with the specific aim of solving cases that don't require a full blown legal investigation (which can take months).
Usually it's either for urgency reasons (ie. public and obvious defamation on public TV need a correction issued very quickly to prevent tarnishing someone's reputation) or because the matter simply isn't that huge (your neighbor cutting the tree on your property down doesn't and shouldn't take a full year to resolve).
A kort geding can be escalated into a full legal proceeding if either party is unhappy with the outcome however.
FWIW (probably not much; legal terms rarely match 1:1 between jurisdictions), Wikipedia thinks a “kort geding” is a preliminary injunction.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kort_geding disagrees with the “don't require a full blown legal investigation” claim, saying that the primary reason is urgency:
“Interlocutory proceedings (in Belgium often interim relief or référé) is a short-term civil procedure for urgent cases that by their nature must be decided quickly. […]
Matters that by their nature are urgent are, for example, the request to ban a strike or the request to prohibit a publication, because it is incorrect and harms the interests of a directly involved person.”
I think that’s more likely to be true.
(iOS Translation)
I was under the impression that this is routine.
The first order effects seem pretty benign, even salutary - but I’m not sure the court really thought through all the implications here.
Is the Dutch legal system inviting themselves to become a party to every single he said/she said drama on Facebook?
What will Facebook need to do to extricate themselves from such an odious entanglement?
Normally, you wouldn't need Facebook to disclose any names because Facebook isn't anonymous 99% of the time. There are plenty of anonymous and pseudonymous forums that would be at risk and yes they too have to follow warrants should the court decide against them.
If Facebook wants to stay out of such cases, they should either leave the jurisdictions where such warrants are possible (so planet earth, probably) or they should enforce non-anonymous posts so plaintiffs can sue each other without involving a court warrant first.
If you're the person having their reputation smeared by anonymous cowards it maybe doesn't seem so "petty" as you dismiss.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do; have the person slandering somebody anonymously brought into the light where there is a level playing field in which they can present their case.
It's a court order!
Legal action is very expensive. While vexatious litigants exist, the total volume of legal proceedings being commenced is not particularly large.
I like how websites are special. Like no-one ever says "I am shocked that a hotel provided information to the police about a guest wanted for murder"
Just because this would be a civil matter in your jurisdiction does not mean it is a civil matter under Dutch law where this lawsuit is from.
It is completely unrelated to a private citizen interacting with a private business in the eyes of American law, American business and Americans ourselves. The only free speech issue here from our perspective is "Is the government illegally restricting Meta's corporate right to free speech?" And no, making Meta identify a user is not a violation of their 1A free speech rights to us.
If you're speaking of a totally different European legal concept, it might be helpful for you to identify that.
Like other companies, Meta routinely comply with subpoenas for user identity, post history etc in the US too. In fact they give their requirements here[1] so law enforcement know what sort of order to bring and how to serve it on them. This has even been abused by bad actors forging court orders etc to obtain user data[2]
[1] https://about.meta.com/actions/safety/audiences/law/guidelin... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/apr/04/us-law-en...
> Meta faces a penalty of one thousand euros per day, up to a maximum of one hundred thousand euros, if it fails to comply with the court's decision
Only 100K to completely ignore the court's ruling... Easy.
A better comparison would be the Twitter user that was tweeting Elon Musk's jet flights. This was before twitter was purchased, and Elon Musk was not able to get the court to order Twitter to hand over that information.
In Europe, police usually have a right to request information from companies and people. This is codifed into law, there's not necessarily any legal procedure for how it needs to happen.
There are some standards on how inter-country information is requested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)
The Twitter user is pseudonymous at best, and was posting objectively true data, publicly available, regarding a notable, public person in these United States.
The FB user in TFA was anonymized by group membership, and posting allegedly defamatory and untrue information about a private person.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
But on the other hand, what should someone do if they are truly wronged by something like this? They lost their job, their spouse left them, all because someone decided to slander them under the veil of anonymity. Should they have any recourse?
What if you are pro trans people? In 10 years you can be prosecuted by it, if a new party is elected. It can have new 'standards'. You will not be able to contradict mainstream narrative. You will not be able to say anything against corporations and governments.
If you will do anything outside of 'boundaries' set by companies, governments you will lost your job, spouse will leave you, all because you wanted 'a better world'.
On one side of scales is a place of total invigilation, on the other is a place with internet trolls. Companies like meta and twitter are quite good in rooting our trolls. So the current situation is inconvenient, but we can live with it.
If we opt out anonymity then the overall result will be a lot worse than the current situation is.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Edit: And, when I refresh it's not dead... I don't understand this system apparently.
On the bright side, the article is full of interesting detail.
Even if a platform wanted, the laws will prohibit it by requiring user knowledge.
Privacy and anonymity are not the same thing.
You would need a warrant to extract the messages/identity directly from a person's computer as there is nothing otherwise to obtain.
...I don't know if it has any legal implications, but it sure does undercut Meta's ethical high ground, that they will tell people all about their users for money in order for them to serve up advertisements. The case in question would on the surface appear at least as valid a reason.
I'm sorry, where do you infer that? Meta literally refused to do exactly that, and went to court to defend the practice. They're only doing so now because they lost.
You won't be able to. Facebook doesn't sell emails or identifying data.
To literally quote from the Privacy Policy [1]
> We share information about you with marketing vendors. For example, we share your device identifier or other identifiers
---
But this is all irrelvant.
Meta's Privacy Policy makes it extremely clear that they will share your data when there is a court order.
> We access, preserve, use and share your information:
> In response to legal requests, like search warrants, court orders, production orders or subpoenas. These requests come from such as civil litigants, law enforcement and other government authorities. about when we respond to legal requests.
[1]: https://www.facebook.com/privacy/policy?subpage=4.subpage.11...
Oh, that’s so very Meta and Twitter and Reddit. I believe they return a delayed response only to maintain appearances of some human being having had a look at the reports.
What I don’t understand is how come a user was anonymous in a Facebook group.
Of course, you're not anonymous on the back end, just publicly.