SPECIAL COLLECTION OF THE CASE LAW ON FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION to his lack of vigilance and responsiveness in monitoring his page for comments that could violate community standards or be unlawful. In an obiter dictum, the Court even stated that “a minimum degree of […] automatic filtering would be desirable” for the moderation of Facebook pages. Given the complex contextual assessment necessary to determine the legality of speech, such a call for Artificial-Intelligence-driven filter systems by a Human Rights Court is rather surprising. However, the ECtHR has also acknowledged that a legal system does not necessarily, under all circumstances, have to hold a provider liable for defamatory comments published on its platform. The Court pointed out in Tamiz (2017) that the liability accepted in Delfi concerned a news portal run on a commercial basis, which are circumstances not comparable to a social media platform where the platform provider does not offer any content, and where the content provider may be a private person running a website or blog as a hobby. Taking into consideration the fact that information society service providers (ISSPs), such as blogging platforms, play an important role in facilitating access to information and debate on a myriad of political, social and cultural topics, the state’s margin of appreciation is a wide one. The question of a State’s margin for appreciation also arose in the European Union: In Glawischnig-Piesczek (2019) the ECJ ruled that EU law, specifically the eCommerce Directive, does not preclude a Member State from ordering a social media platform to remove or block content that has been declared unlawful, or content that is identical or equivalent to such unlawful information. The monitoring of identical content or “equivalent content” qualifies as a form of specific monitoring: “monitoring in a specific case”. Thus, it does not violate the prohibition of general monitoring obligations under EU law. Recognizing “equivalent content”, for the ECJ, is not an unreasonable burden for hosting services, as long as it is not required to “carry out an independent assessment of that content”. The Court also held that a removal order could apply globally, and left it to the Member States to determine the geographic scope of restrictions within the framework of the relevant national and international laws. Accordingly, the Austrian Supreme Court ruled that Facebook must cease and desist from publishing all hate postings —verbatim re-postings or re-postings using words having an equivalent meaning—against Austria’s Green party leader, Dr. Eva Glawischnig (2020), and delete them not just in Austria but worldwide. The Tribunal found that the cease and desist injunction imposed on Facebook was sufficiently specific in regard to the required conduct and did not impose a disproportionate or excessive duty on Facebook to monitor its content. Similarly, the District Court of Frankfurt, Germany (2022), ordered Twitter to cease and desist from disseminating specific defamatory statements concerning the Anti-Semitism Commissioner of the state of Baden-Württemberg. The Court held that a social media platform must remove unlawful content as soon as it obtains knowledge of it, deriving this obligation from the platform’s duty of care. This was also extended to equivalent statements which are substantially the same. Moreover, the platform must not only act upon notification, but also prevent the publication of predefined illegal content. While general monitoring obligations are precluded by European Union law, such specific monitoring obligations are possible (see Glawischnig-Piesczek). In the Künast case (2022), the District Court of Frankfurt awarded damages to Renate Künast, a German politician, for the continuous publication of misquotations on Facebook that, according to the Court, violated her rights. The Court also ordered Facebook to prevent the publication of new memes that include similar unlawful content by monitoring the users’ uploads. Before the Glawischnig-Piesczek case was decided by the ECJ, German courts had been more reluctant to issue removal orders, as demonstrated by the judgment of the District Court of Würzburg in Anas M (2017). There, the Court refused to grant an injunction forcing Facebook to take down a selfie showing the claimant, a Syrian refugee, with the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, falsely accusing him of taking part in several terrorist attacks in Berlin in 2016. It held that Facebook was not liable for illegal content on its platform, unless the content was reported and clearly illegal. Unlike the District Court of Frankfurt in later decisions, the Court concluded that service providers don’t have a general duty to examine its users’ con15