China isn’t the only country trying to stifle our free speech

A bunch of foreigners are deciding what we Americans can read online. Outrageous. Who do those Austrians think they are, anyway?

No, I didn’t get the country wrong. I’m talking about Austria, a liberal democracy and member of the European Union. Earlier this month, one of its politicians won a court case that ought to alarm all free-speaking Americans.

The ruling arose out of an incident in 2016, when someone on Facebook wrote that Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, head of the Austrian Green Party, was a “lousy traitor” and a “corrupt bumpkin” who belonged to a “fascist party.” That kind of babble happens in the United States every day and barely merits a shrug, or maybe just a holla-back — “I’m no traitor! You’re a traitor!” But in Austria, such words may be sanctioned as illegal defamation.

Glawischnig-Piesczek sued in an Austrian court and won an order that Facebook must take down the offending words. But the court wasn’t content with riding herd on the reading habits of people in Austria. It held that Facebook had to take the message down around the world, so that absolutely nobody could read it.

In 2016, France fined Google for refusing to delete disputed information beyond the EU. After all, someone in France could still access that information, simply by going to the American version at Google.com instead of the French edition at Google.fr. But in September, the EU’s supreme court disagreed, ruling that Europe’s “right to be forgotten” can be enforced only against Google’s European sites.

Case closed? Not so fast.

On Oct. 3, the same court, ruling in the Glawischnig-Piesczek case, said that if the message in question is defamatory, the ban can be enforced worldwide. Facebook has to delete the disputed insults against her from its entire network, or it could face sanctions in the European Union, where the company generated about $14 billion in revenue last year. Worse yet, the court ruled that Facebook must also take down “equivalent content” — in other words, posts that say essentially the same thing.

Now, how to enforce such a ruling? Automate the process, the EU court says. Surely Facebook’s computers can ferret out every instance of the insults in question. That might work for exact copies of the original post. But Facebook must also ban messages that say roughly the same thing. But what if the words are used in a message that supports Glawischnig-Piesczek, or a news story that merely describes the affair?

Facebook must sort it all out on a global scale, every time an EU court demands a new takedown. That will never work. Either insults will seep through, or the filters will be so strict that even modest criticisms are barred, and free speech is smothered.

It’s unlikely this ruling will lead to a torrent of censorship requests, as unhappy Europeans will have to first win a defamation case. And while the EU nations may impose more limits on free speech than the US, they at least recognize the principle.

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